by D. J. Palmer
“Where do you think it could be?” Nina asked, referencing the missing lab report. “Did you retrace your steps?”
Maggie made daggers with her eyes. “I put it in my backpack, and then when I went to hand it in to my teacher, it wasn’t there. Where would it be?”
“Um, your room,” Connor said. “Have you been in there? It’s like a hurricane went through it.”
“Yeah, because I’ve been looking for my stupid lab report.”
“Well, how about printing off another copy.”
“It’s late so we already got a zero.”
“Then why do you even need to find it?”
“Because I want to make sure I didn’t misplace it, which I didn’t, dummy.”
“Maggie, that’s enough!” Nina snapped.
Maggie shook off the rebuke like a boxer who had taken a jab to the chin.
“Whatever,” she said, sliding off the couch. “It doesn’t even matter now.” Off she went, storming upstairs to her room, slamming the door.
Nina followed, and nearly had a heart attack when she entered Maggie’s bedroom. “Hurricane” wasn’t quite the right description—it was more like a hurricane had detonated a bomb. Drawers were open, papers were everywhere, and clothes from the closet now carpeted the floor.
“Oh, Maggie,” Nina said, bending down to start the cleanup. Usually she’d have made it her daughter’s responsibility, but not tonight, poor thing. She was obviously a wreck.
Maggie rested on her bed, facedown, head under a pillow, while Nina gathered up loose papers from the floor. If she hadn’t had her head turned to the wall, Nina might not have seen the flash of white showing at the bottom of Maggie’s desk. Pulling the desk away from the wall, Nina watched as a stack of stapled papers fell to the floor. She examined the cover page with widening eyes:
The Effects of Stress on Body Temperature
Lab Report by Maggie Garrity and Benjamin Odell
D-Block, Ms. Davis
“Is this what you’ve been looking for?” Nina asked, holding up the report for Maggie to see. Bolting from her bed like she’d been electrocuted, Maggie snatched the report from Nina’s hands.
“Where did you find this?” she demanded.
“It was behind your desk,” said Nina.
“No. No, it was not. I looked.”
“Behind your desk? Really? You checked there?”
Maggie seemed suddenly unsure.
“Well, that’s where it was,” Nina said.
“I don’t believe it!” Maggie spat out the words. “He must have put it there.”
“Maggie!” Nina didn’t mean to raise her voice, and felt even worse when her daughter flinched. Simon appeared in the doorway, drawn to Maggie’s room by the commotion.
“What’s going on?” he asked, the worry still lingering in his eyes.
“This is what’s going on.” Maggie, red-faced, her jaw tight and teeth clenched, snatched the paper from Nina’s hand and held it up for Simon to read the front page. Nina had not seen her daughter on the verge of a complete meltdown since her toddler years, but felt certain one was coming.
Simon read the cover page, nonplussed. “What’s this?” he asked. “Is it the missing lab report?”
“It was behind her desk,” Nina explained. “It must have fallen there.”
“It didn’t fall there, Mother,” Maggie said with a growl in her voice. “He put it there.”
“Enough!” Nina’s booming voice bounced off the bedroom walls. Now she, not Maggie, was the one about to have a meltdown. It was everything—Glen, Wendy Cooper, Teresa, Simon, Maggie, Hugh, all of it, bubbling up into one volcanic eruption. “That is enough! Enough with these accusations! Maggie, what in heaven has gotten into you?”
“I put the report in my backpack,” Maggie said, tears in her eyes, her voice cracking with emotion. “I remember doing it.”
“Well, you must have thought you did. Again, I’m asking: Did you specifically look behind your desk while you were tearing your room apart?”
The place Maggie looked was at her feet.
“I think so . . . I don’t remember.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Nina said. “Maggie, I understand that you miss your dad. I get it. I really do. But I’m running out of patience with you. I don’t know how to help you get over the fact that Simon is a part of our lives now. Do you need a new therapist? Go see mine if you want. I’ll call in the morning. I’m at a loss here, but we have to do something.”
Nina felt utterly defeated. Just as her life was finally coming together after so much heartbreak, Maggie seemed determined to tear it apart. When she agreed to these new living arrangements, Nina never considered her relationship with her daughter would hit such a nadir.
“Whatever. You’re never going to believe me anyway,” Maggie said, stomping out of the room like she was putting out little fires beneath her feet.
When her daughter was gone, Nina slumped onto the edge of the bed and sighed deeply, feeling on the verge of tears. Simon sat next to her and placed his arm lovingly around her shoulders.
“Well, at least you found the lab report,” he said encouragingly. “I’ll talk to her teacher. We’ll get the grade fixed.”
“Thank you,” Nina said appreciatively.
“But Nina—”
Simon seemed hesitant. Panic flooded her. Did Hugh call?
“I didn’t know you were seeing a therapist,” he said.
Nina’s blood froze. She realized she had let it slip in the heat of the moment.
“Oh yeah . . . I know. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”
That’s when Nina explained how she got Dr. Wilcox’s name from Ginny.
“I had a bit of a breakdown after we moved in.”
She reassured Simon she was perfectly ready to move into a new phase in her life, but still needed to sort through her feelings about Glen. She also confessed to wanting something for herself, a little part of her life that she didn’t have to share with anybody.
Nina didn’t mention Hugh, of course, or how she and Dr. Wilcox had talked about Simon and his insecurities, but now at least that topic could be broached without it being too awkward. She worried Simon would be wounded or upset, but his face was brimming with sympathy.
“We can’t keep secrets from each other, Nina,” Simon said in a sweet, understanding tone of voice. “It’s not healthy for a marriage.”
Chapter 36
Hours after everyone had gone to sleep, Nina was wide awake. She gazed up at the blackness of the bedroom ceiling, wondering if she had reason to doubt the man lying next to her. The cadence and rhythm of Simon’s breathing while he slept wasn’t as strange to her as it once had been, but she wasn’t fully accustomed to it either. Years of marriage to Glen had carved a familiarity that was impossible to duplicate.
The contrasts between Simon and Glen were both subtle and profound. Simon slept on his right side; Glen his left. Simon’s calf muscles were more developed than Glen’s, but his arms were less so. Simon folded his tees and polo shirts with the precision of a clothing retailer, rinsed with mouthwash before using toothpaste, and so on. In so many ways he wasn’t Glen, and yet there were similarities too: the way he smelled no matter what cologne she bought, the things he said, the truck he drove, gifts he purchased—all reminded Nina of the last man to share her bed.
Was it because she missed Glen, couldn’t get him out of her mind? Or was she looking for patterns instead of seeing simple coincidences? More important, were there darker connections between her two great loves, reasons to doubt, signs she was missing just as she had missed them before?
When Nina closed her eyes, it was Hugh’s face she saw, the one from the mug shot—a disheveled, broken man, who could have been minutes from his last fix when his picture was taken. How on earth could she trust that person—a drug addict extorting her for money—over the man sleeping beside her?
You’re not safe.
Hugh’s word
s, like Maggie’s warnings, hissed at her from the dark. So what to do?
Nina listened to Simon’s breathing, felt his arm, which was warm to the touch. Warm because he was warm. He was warm, kind, and good to them. They were safe, she thought. Safe in a new home, in their new life together, safe from the betrayals and heartaches she’d suffered, and safe financially too. It wasn’t like he was a stranger. They’d been together for almost two years, not a few weeks. This wasn’t some random hookup, Nina reminded herself. They were in a committed relationship. They owned a place together. If something were direly wrong with him, surely the questionable behavior would have surfaced by now.
But there were changes, she realized. Not with Simon, but with her. Her appearance had changed, with a new hairstyle. Her relationship with her daughter had changed. The frequency with which she saw her friends had changed.
You’re not safe.
In the quiet dark, Nina’s subconscious began to guide her, urging her out of bed and downstairs to do a little more digging on her own. She still had not fixed up the first-floor office in the way she had envisioned on move-in day. Pictures she had planned to hang on the walls remained on the floor, sitting next to the unopened cans of the Manchester Tan paint she had yet to apply to the walls. The room held a desk, a chair, and not much else. But at least it was a private space where she could conduct her inquiry away from prying eyes—not that any of those eyes were open at the moment.
Nina powered up her laptop. It’s natural curiosity, she told herself while navigating to the Google homepage. She typed the name “Hugh Dolan” into the search field, thinking perhaps there’d be a link to some exculpatory evidence that would make it possible to trust him, but no such luck. It was the same information as before: links to his arrest records and mug shots that the police routinely put online as a public service.
She thought again about Simon’s parents—what were their names? Strange how she didn’t know off the top of her head, but then again, they weren’t coming over every Thanksgiving to carve the turkey. Still, it was something she thought she should know.
Nina heard a creak and froze. She listened for the sound of footsteps but heard none. Probably it was the house settling, whatever that meant. It was something Glen would tell Maggie whenever she heard noises in the night. The tender memory put a little crimp in Nina’s heart. Why did Glen have to blow up all their lives? What awful thing had he done to make it necessary for him to kill himself or run away?
Nina compartmentalized those thoughts to focus on the names of Simon’s parents. Eventually, she remembered: David and Elizabeth Fitch. She searched for the father’s name first. After David’s military career he went to work for a defense contractor, but his background wasn’t distinguished enough to earn him permanent archiving on the Web. Thinking about Simon’s parents made Nina think of hers as well. Maybe she should book a trip to Nebraska, go visit Nonni and Papa for a while, head there for Thanksgiving. Her mother couldn’t travel because of a hip problem that was going to be fixed with a full replacement, but Nina could go to them.
Maggie would love it, and Connor had a break between football and basketball seasons. It was disconcerting to realize the plan she’d formed in her head did not immediately include Simon. Because it would be hard on Maggie, Nina told herself, and because her father, who had adored Glen, hadn’t yet warmed to the new man in her life.
Because you’re not safe, Hugh’s voice told Nina. Your dad knows it. Parents have an instinct for this sort of thing.
Pictures, if I only had pictures of Emma, thought Nina.
Whatever photographs there’d been of Allison had been turned to ash. Perhaps photos of Emma and Simon together would reveal something hidden about him.
But there were no photographs, nothing from Simon’s past to ground her, nothing to give shape to his history. All Nina had to go on was the life they had made together. Nina reflected briefly on her time with Simon—his courtship that had begun with his finding Daisy, which had led to dinner out, and then to a moonlight beach walk, a kiss at the lake, and eventually his touching proposal, which she had declined, but with a promise that it wouldn’t be long—a promise she fully intended to keep. That’s how life worked, Nina believed. That’s how things happened. It was random. She recognized that most moments were out of her control. She didn’t know that she’d fall for the teacher when he brought Daisy home, just as she didn’t know the father of her children would turn out to be a complete stranger.
And in the world of random happenings, how likely was it that lightning had struck her twice? What was the possibility that she’d realized her greatest fear and made another terrible choice in a man? It was inconceivable, that’s what it was. Statistically, it would have to have about the same probability as winning Powerball.
But people win Powerball, Nina.
The little voice in her head was speaking up again.
Nobody is guaranteed a happily ever after. Nobody.
“Shut up,” Nina said to the voice, and returned to her search.
Nina typed Emma Dolan’s name into the Google search field. She’d done this before, but for some reason she hoped there’d be a picture of her in one of the online obituaries. Again, no such luck.
Nina opened a new browser window and popped over to LinkedIn, which had nothing to offer her, before checking Hugh Dolan’s Facebook page again. She thought maybe he’d been friends with Emma and her profile existed in memoriam, but Emma was a ghost in this world and online. Nina’s gaze traveled upward, where she noticed her Facebook Messenger icon indicated a new message.
She was about to click it when she heard a sound, a soft creak on the stairs. Her hand hovered over the icon. It could be Maggie or Connor, coming down for some reason, but it could also be Simon.
Why are you afraid? Nina asked herself.
But she knew the answer: she was looking into Simon’s life without his knowledge.
Simon’s words came back to her: “We can’t keep secrets from each other, Nina. It’s not healthy for a marriage.”
Still, her curiosity won out, and she clicked the icon, not caring that those footsteps were growing louder. She held her breath, her hands shaking, pulse quickening, as she read the message from Hugh.
Are you ready to talk yet? The offer stands at $500. You’re not safe.
The footsteps were getting closer.
“Nina?”
It was Simon’s voice. He appeared in the doorway, holding the phone he was using as a flashlight.
“What are you doing sitting down here in the dark?”
But it wasn’t dark. Her laptop was on, her face alight with a bluish glow. Nina felt his eyes on her, taking in what he saw, assessing her, or so it seemed.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Nina said groggily, hoping she wasn’t overacting. She was more alert than if she’d downed an espresso with a Red Bull chaser. She closed the browser window containing her Facebook page as Hugh’s message flashed in her mind: The offer stands at $500 . . .
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
As Simon walked over and put his arms around Nina, she realized there was a second browser window still open with Emma Dolan’s name all over the search results. She closed that window quickly and turned to look up at Simon, hoping to distract him.
“It’s late,” Simon said. “What are you looking at?” His voice was cold and measured.
“Just . . . stuff . . . nothing . . .”
“That’s strange, you’ve never done that before,” he said.
“Like I said, I couldn’t sleep, with Maggie and all.” The words tumbled from Nina’s lips as a believable explanation came to her. She had to crane her neck to look up at him as Simon loomed over her. As she turned her head some more, she could see he was gripping the back of her chair with force. His face shifted, hardening, realigning into the shape she’d seen that day with the tree branches, an unsettling dark anger—maybe the same face he had shown Maggie.
Stop it, Nina! she scold
ed herself. It’s all in your head. It’s Hugh getting to you. This is Simon. This is the man you love and who loves you. Stop freaking yourself out.
Nina closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them, it was the old Simon she saw. The look was gone. He knelt down beside her, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“Let it all go,” he said sweetly.
Nina felt foolish, and angry with herself. If there was anyone to be suspicious about, it was Hugh. She had to make a decision. One way or another, she had to let all this nonsense go. There was simply no reason to suspect that this beautiful man who had come into her life when she needed him most was anything but wonderful.
Tension left her body as she powered down the computer.
“Come back to bed, babe,” Simon said as he led Nina upstairs.
His warm voice made her relax. He’d drawn down the covers, and Nina climbed underneath. Gently he rubbed her back until her eyelids grew heavy.
“You have nothing to worry about,” he whispered in her ear, then kissed the back of her head. “We have everything we need.” As he continued to rub her back, it was as if he were erasing her doubts. Soon her limbs felt heavy, and before she knew it, Nina was fast asleep.
She awoke with a start to find it was still dark outside. The clock on the cable box read 5:30, thirty minutes before her alarm would sound. She leaned over to see Simon sleeping peacefully beside her. But why had she awoken so suddenly, pained by a gnawing anxiousness? Then it came to her: Simon was asleep, but had he been the whole night? Was there any chance he might have snuck downstairs, opened the laptop, and launched a browser window? If he did, he might have been in for quite the surprise. In her distracted state, Nina had forgotten the one thing she had meant to do before returning to bed.
She’d forgotten to clear the browser history.
Chapter 37
Don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t cooperate, and watch your children die.
That was the message drilled into Glen’s head time and time again. But it wasn’t only threats that had made Glen obedient. There were the beatings. Though they had lessened over time, the irregularity of them had Glen always on edge.