The Quiet Girl

by S. F. Kosa

  “I’m not sure of anything. Except that if she did, it wasn’t last Monday. Her car didn’t show up at Beech Forest until Saturday or Sunday. So where the fuck was she? Where is she?”

  “No ideas?”

  The manuscript swims in my memory. “There are things she didn’t tell me.” I lower my head and look at him. “Things she was hiding.”

  “Fuck,” he says. “Was she cheating?”

  I shrug. “No clue. Maybe.”

  He chuckles. “How can you sound so calm? If it were me—”

  “You’d be throwing furniture. Kind of like you’re doing with this Pinewell thing.”

  His eyes narrow. “Fuck you. We have thirty employees and five board members and—”

  “I know the balance sheet better than you do. I also know that without Series A, we’re done. You’re scraping the bottom of a dry well with individual investors, Drew. We need more than a few million.”

  “Pinewell’s trying to control us.”

  “Of course they are! They’re not a charity!”

  “They’re fucking leeches!”

  “They don’t exist to feed your feelings,” I say.

  “You’re such a cold bastard.”

  “You sound like my ex-wife.”

  “Which one?” When he sees the look on my face, he waves his hand. “Sorry. That was a dick move.”

  I arch one eyebrow. “You think you’re in any state to negotiate when the stakes are this high? You’re name-calling like an eight-year-old and lashing out like a wounded bear. This isn’t personal. It’s business. And it doesn’t just affect you.”

  Drew’s face is flushed. “I never said it did. I’m looking out for Biostar.”

  “Are you? CaX429 needs to be in clinic in the spring. We want results by the ASCO conference. To do that, we have to exist for that long.”

  “We wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for me.”

  I nod. “And that counts for a lot. But your goal then, and I assume now, was to establish CaX429 and bring it to market so that people who needed this treatment could get it. Pinewell is the only road available to us right now.”

  “I bet they’re gonna oust me,” he says. “That’s how they roll. I did a little research on the last few companies they brought to IPO.”

  His eyes meet mine, and I know what he wants, because I’ve known him all my life. He wants me to tell him that his girlfriend didn’t send a nude selfie to a mutual acquaintance of ours, that she’d never do a thing like that. He wants me to tell him that he’s good enough to play lacrosse at Brown, that I believe he’ll get the scholarship. In the past, that’s what I’ve done.

  Today, I can’t. And he sees that.

  “You knew,” he says slowly. “You fucking bastard. You went off behind my back.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all.”

  “Jesus Christ. Get out of my office.”

  “Drew.”

  “I don’t blame Mina for taking off,” he sneers. “It’s amazing she stuck it out as long as she did.”

  I rise from my chair. Unhurried. Steady. “As CFO of this company, I strongly advise you to take the Pinewell offer,” I say to him. My voice is dead level. “You will not get a better one. Nor can you raise enough capital without them. In the absence of a significant cash infusion, Biostar will be financially swamped by January. But I’m going to give you a little more runway, a few more thousand to work with. Enough to throw a nice pity party for yourself.” I turn toward the door. “You’ll have my letter of resignation on your desk by the end of the day.”

  “Alex…”

  I don’t slam the door as I walk out. I close it softly. Raj’s eyes are saucers as I walk past him and out the door. Drew was right.

  I am a cold bastard.

  I am a cold, unemployed bastard.

  I am a cold, unemployed bastard whose wife has disappeared.

  I stand in the parking lot and laugh. I completely sank the last two years of my life into this company. For Drew, for my mom. And yeah, for myself. I left my stable job and walked this high wire, took this leap. I should have known better.

  Maybe I should have known better with Mina, too.

  I am on Commonwealth, headed back to Brookline, when Willa calls me. Her voice pipes through the car’s speakers, loud enough to make me wince. “How did you find out?” she asks me.

  I lean my head on the headrest. “Hello, Willa. Nice to hear from you,” I say wearily.

  “She was so afraid you wouldn’t take it well.”

  So that was it, and my bluff paid off. Stefan is the secret that Mina was so terrified to share. And connected to him—the fugue. The pregnancy. Maybe even the manuscript in my bag.

  I just want to keep driving. Veer onto 95 South, head for Florida. The Keys. The ocean beyond it. “Because I’m obviously a monster, right? Controlling and abusive?”

  She groans. “I overreacted. I’m worried about her.”

  I clench my teeth to keep from shouting at Willa. She’s worried about Mina? Jesus fucking Christ. “Apology accepted,” I say dryly.

  “Do you have time to grab coffee?” she asks. “If we put our heads together, I bet we could figure out a lead or two. I’ve been frustrated as hell by what I’ve seen on the news. There’s no way she committed suicide. No way.”

  “Surprised you haven’t decided that I killed her.”

  “Did you?”

  “Hanging up now.” And I do. But she calls back a second later.

  “I guess we’ll be meeting in a public place,” she says.

  “Right. So you have nothing to fear.”

  “How can you be so calm?”

  “Just tell me where you want to meet, Willa. I have to get back to the Cape.” I’m supposed to be meeting with Mina’s parents for lunch, but it’s clear I’m going to have to push it to dinner.

  We agree to meet at the Caffè Nero in Washington Square. The place from which Mina made her last Facebook post. Drew calls me three times on the drive there, but I don’t answer. He needs time to marinate before we get somewhere productive.

  Besides, I’m about to get confirmation of all my suspicions. I bluffed my way into this, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t carry me all the way.

  Willa breezes into the coffeehouse and joins me in line. She’s got her hair in a messy topknot and looks like a bespectacled vagrant. “Sorry,” she says, tugging at her baggy T-shirt. “I’m on deadline.”

  “What are you having?”

  She softens as I offer to pay for her drink, recites all her preferences, and goes off to find us a table. Five minutes later, I bring her large cortado—almond milk and stevia, slight dusting of chocolate powder—over to the booth she’s staked out. I slide in across from her with my espresso. “How long have you known about Stefan?” I ask.

  She tastes her drink and makes a face. “They used soy instead of almond. Ugh.” She glances up at me. “Sorry. They do this all the time. I know you probably ordered it right.”

  Of course I did. I take a sip of my espresso and don’t break eye contact.

  She blinks. “She told me about him a year or so ago.”

  “When she was writing her book.”

  “I didn’t think she told you about that. She said she was going to wait.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “I was her beta reader. That’s why she told me about Stefan.” She takes off her glasses and rubs at her eyes. “God. I couldn’t believe any one woman had been through that much.”

  More confirmation. So much of the manuscript is true, even with the details she changed. Too much of it is real. And I didn’t know or suspect a single damn thing. Deep in my chest, I feel it, beneath layers of permafrost. Like magma, the pressure building. “Maybe she told me more than you thought.”

  “I’m gl
ad. She was so scared you’d…I don’t know.” She’s wearing a rueful smile as she blots at her eyes with a napkin. “She didn’t want to mess things up with you.”

  Instead, she hid so many things that I’m not even sure what’s real anymore or who I was actually married to. “Did she tell you she contacted Stefan?”

  She nods. “She felt like she had to. And you know what? She was right. She needed to. She owed it to him.”

  “Because of their past.”

  “Duh?” She wipes her hand over her mouth. “I mean, yeah, obviously. But she was definitely afraid of how he would react.”

  I pause. This doesn’t sound like she was having an affair, but if that’s the case, then why did she leave her rings behind? “Do you think he did something to her, Willa?”

  “I don’t know, but I called the Provincetown detective and told her.”

  “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  So the detective knew about this, and she didn’t keep me in the loop. “Did she take it seriously?”

  “I couldn’t tell. But it seems to me like a motive, you know? If he was angry enough?”

  “It all happened a long time ago, though.” This is what’s been nagging at me. I get why Stefan would have been angry; if Mina acted like her character Maggie did, if she physically attacked him and destroyed his phone and nearly got him arrested again just for trying to help her, then hell yeah, I’d be pissed off, too. I’m betting his arrest all those years ago on suspicion of assault had everything to do with Mina. But it’s been years. “It’s not easy to stay enraged for that long, right?”

  Willa is looking at me as if I’m slow. “I would think the more years, the more rage when he finally found out.”

  This time, I’m the one who blinks.

  She sits back like I’ve kicked her. “Oh God. You don’t actually know.”

  I put my hands up. “I know enough. I found the manuscript. I’ve read most of it.”

  “And you think that’s what actually happened.”

  “I know she changed some of the details. Her age when it happened. Her hometown. The college she went to. Her dad being dead and this stepdad character—”

  “You don’t know all of it,” she murmurs. “I mean, I’m not even sure I know. Some things I didn’t ask. And she assured me it wasn’t all true. I mean, how could it be? Especially that ending, right? But…” She gives me a helpless, pitying look that sets my teeth on edge.

  “I know she went through a dissociative fugue. And she came out of it pregnant, right?”

  Willa nods warily.

  “And Stefan helped her get an abortion. She let him think he was the father.”

  Willa’s mouth drops open. “Alex,” she whispers. “I’m certain he was.”

  “Okay, fine. Another detail she changed in the story.” And a confirmation of the reality I suspected. The intense heat inside my chest is shifting things. Cracking them. “So why did she need to talk to him now? Why did she search him out? Just to apologize before the book got published? It’s not even under her name. He might never have known she’d written about him. He doesn’t exactly seem like a bookworm.” I might never have known either if not for Hannah.

  Willa has her face in her hands. She’s shaking her head. “I’m so sorry, Alex. I’m so sorry. She knew you wanted to have babies. She knew you didn’t understand how difficult that would be…”

  “Because she had an abortion? That doesn’t make it hard to conceive again, does it?” Unless she ended up with complications. I haven’t read far enough to know, but the way Willa’s looking at me guarantees that I’m not going to ask her about it. There’s something volcanic inside me, bubbling up from the deep. “Stop looking at me like that,” I bark. Loud enough to turn heads.

  Willa reaches out. Puts her hand on mine. “She should have told you. You shouldn’t be hearing this from me.”

  I look down at her fingers, stubby, bitten fingernails, no rings. The tip of her index finger slides over my wedding ring. I withdraw my hand into my lap. “About the abortion? Why would I judge her for that? Why would she even hide it? It’s not a big deal in the scheme of things.”

  “Alex,” Willa says. “Mina never had an abortion.”

  Chapter Ten

  She helped Ivy set the table, country proper, casual but neat, dinner plate, salad plate on top, no bread plate this time; cassoulet was always served without accompaniments. It stood on its own. Except for the wine, and apparently Lawrence was bringing that. Maggie set the glasses, one for him, one for Ivy.

  Maggie wouldn’t be twenty-one until December, so she didn’t set one for herself. She knew how all this went; they’d danced this waltz before. She could already taste the wine, acid-sour, secondhand, but that wouldn’t be until later, when Ivy wasn’t looking.

  Her mother was in fine form, bustling about with determined efficiency, pretending as if she hadn’t screamed at Maggie a few hours ago. Ivy Wallace-Gainer was so good at pretending. Maggie could only aspire. While Ivy infused honey with rose water and rinsed the fresh figs, humming the tune for “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” Maggie had crept into the house, into the shower, the demon in her abdomen gnawing away, the demon in her mind purring and dancing. It rubbed up relentlessly against the walls of her skull, a cat with barbed fur, loosening all the connections.

  She thought she’d done a pretty good job covering the bruise on her cheek, and she wore a long-sleeved shirt to conceal the bruises on her wrists and arms, each in the shape of his fingers, encircling her with all that rage. He hated her now, and it felt good.

  It made outside match inside. It made sense in a way that would make sense to no one else.

  She was sweating in the kitchen; the thick scent of confit duck legs and garlic sausage worked her stomach like a butter churn. The windows were open, but the warm evening breeze did little to dissipate the heat. Seriously, who served cassoulet in August?

  Maggie didn’t bother to ask, though. She already knew: a woman determined to lure back the man she depended on. The man who could do no wrong.

  “Maggie, a bouquet would be lovely for the table,” Ivy said from her position at the cutting board, figs lined up for the slaughter. “Some peonies and a foxglove, the beach roses, and a few of those yellow tea roses, along with some of the fern fronds. Can you please bring them to me?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Maggie replied.

  Ivy paused, knife in hand hanging guillotine-like over a helpless fig. “Tone,” she said quietly. She opened the utility drawer and drew out a pair of shears.

  Maggie cleared her throat and took the shears from her mother’s outstretched hand. “I’ll be right back.”

  She was in the backyard, decapitating a pink peony, when she heard the doorbell ring. Her mouth filled with the taste of metal. She leaned over and spat in the hedge.

  “Maggie,” her mother trilled. “Finish up and come inside! Guess who’s here!”

  She owed this to them, didn’t she? After all she had done. “Coming,” she called, tone perfect. She reentered the kitchen with an armful of flowers and greenery and a smile that sent hot shocks of pain along her jaw and temple.

  Lawrence released Ivy from an embrace and turned to his stepdaughter, already grinning. “Welcome home,” he said, coming toward her with his arms open. “I don’t need to tell you how worried I’ve been, do I?” When he saw Maggie hesitate, he tilted his head. “I’m not angry, sweetheart. Not even a little.”

  She put down the flowers and stood there as his arms closed around her, demons dancing through her insides. His hand stroked along the length of her hair. She put her arms around him and squeezed.

  He hissed. Tensed. “You’re stronger than you look!” he said with a chuckle.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Ah, just some back trouble. I threw it out in May, and I guess…well.” He sm
oothed his hand over his thinning brown hair. “When you’re old like me, even small things can trigger a cascade of other problems.”

  “I think that can happen when you’re young, too,” she murmured as she pulled away from him. He smelled of salt and whisky, hard work and the reward that came after. “Are you okay?”

  “Sciatica and three smashed discs. I take the pills, but…” He sighed and turned to Ivy. “Want to open that Marcillac? I splurged.”

  She smiled and nodded. “Would you like to sit down? I thought we could eat inside, fewer bugs, but if you prefer the patio—”

  He waved his hand. “You’ve set a beautiful table, Ivy.”

  Her smile grew. Then her eyes fell on Maggie, and the happiness faded fast. “The flowers are already wilting.”

  Maggie pulled herself into action again, wishing the buzzing between her ears would fade. She assembled a bouquet, passable but of course not quite what her mother could have done. Apparently, there was only one thing she could do that her mother couldn’t manage quite as well.

  She figured that was why Ivy hated her.

  She knew it was why she hated herself.

  Chills rolled through her as they sat down for dinner. As Ivy presented the salad, pomegranate seeds tumbling and sparkling like blood cells, Lawrence turned to Maggie and took her hand. “Ivy updated me on how you came back to us,” he said. “But she also said she received your grades in the mail.”

  Maggie’s head swiveled to look at her mother.

  Ivy nodded. “I opened it while you were away. Straight As again!”

  “Really impressive, sweetheart,” said Lawrence. He squeezed her hand. “You stayed focused, just like I told you.”

  Maggie pulled her hand away as Ivy’s gaze lasered over to it. “Thanks.”

  “I’d love to come visit you on campus again. Wasn’t that fun?” Lawrence turned to Ivy. “We had a lovely walk on some of the trails near the Quabbin. And then a nice dinner at—what was that place?”

  “30Boltwood,” Maggie mumbled. And then he’d taken her for a drive.

  “You didn’t tell me,” Ivy said. Her lips barely moved, like she was practicing to be a ventriloquist. She glared at Maggie as if she wanted her to be the dummy.