The Last to See Her

by Courtney Evan Tate

  Maybe Thad appealed to Meg’s ambitious side. He had worked his way up the ladder in his profession, and that attracted her. Joe, however, did well as a contractor. Perhaps it just wasn’t white-collar enough for her physician sister.

  Gen didn’t know.

  “Well, thanks, honey,” Joe said, graceful as always when Meg gushed about him. If he thought his wife looked down on him, he didn’t show it.

  “What time is Thad getting here?” Meg asked. “The food will get cold.”

  “You want to text him and ask?” Gen suggested, standing up. “I’ll go bring the food.”

  “I’ll help,” Joe said, jumping up to help. Gen smiled at him.

  “Thanks.”

  Meg was already texting Thad. She didn’t stop and think that it might look odd that Gen had asked her to do it instead of simply doing it herself.

  He answered her immediately.

  “He’ll be here in ten minutes,” Meg called from the table.

  Gen handed Joe the manicotti while she grabbed the salad, and then walked back into the dining room.

  “Good,” Gen said, sitting down. “Let’s just go ahead and start.”

  Meg served up the manicotti and chatted about the tumor she’d removed that afternoon.

  “Yum,” Gen answered, grimacing a little.

  “Baby,” Meg answered. “You couldn’t deal with half the stuff I see on a daily basis.”

  “I’m sure I couldn’t,” Gen answered, but she was thinking of seeing Thad’s penis. She wouldn’t want to see it now, and Meg saw it every damn day. “I’ll just do my thing, you do your thing.”

  Thad chose just that moment to enter. The thing Meg was doing.

  “Hey, all,” he greeted everyone at once, and dropped into the seat at the end of the table. He looked at his wife first. “How was your day, honey?”

  Smart. He was playing the husband role perfectly.

  “It was fine.” She shrugged. “Worked out, got some words in. How about you?”

  “Worked out?” Meg laughed, scooping salad delicately onto a piece of bread to eat. “Since when?”

  “A while back,” Gen answered. “Living my best life, and all that.”

  “God, I wish I had time to work out,” Meg sighed. “It seems like a luxury at this point.”

  She and Thad laughed, the two “professionals” in the room, while the writer and the contractor shrugged. Gen had the ass of a twenty-year-old at this point, so she figured they could laugh all they wanted.

  “Tell us about your day,” Gen urged her husband. “Where did you have lunch?”

  She was pretty sure Meg froze at that question.

  “A deli by the office,” Thad answered. “How about you?”

  “I grabbed a yogurt at the gym.”

  “And I had a salad in the cafeteria,” Meg piped up. “Moving on from the mundane, Sherry said she saw you buying a beautiful painting last week. Can I see? Where did you hang it? She went on and on about how pretty it was.”

  “Sherry, your neighbor?” Gen asked. “She didn’t come up and say anything to me.”

  “No, she said you were filling out paperwork and didn’t want to interrupt. But she raved and raved about the art. Where did you hang it?”

  “I didn’t know we got anything new,” Thad said, twisting to look around.

  “It isn’t delivered yet,” Gen scrambled to say.

  “From last week?” Meg lifted an eyebrow. “Good Lord, you could’ve walked it home faster.”

  “I know,” Gen answered. “I don’t know what’s taking so long. I’d better check on it.”

  “Well, just show me when it gets here,” Meg told her.

  “Me, too,” Thad said dryly, and Joe laughed.

  “Oh, the things our wives drag in, right?” Joe quipped. Gen almost choked.

  You have no idea, she thought, and sipped at her wine.

  After dinner, she and Meg cleaned up, while the men had a beer in the living room. After, Gen curled up on the couch and read a book with Joey, while Joe excused himself to make a call, and Thad stood on the balcony.

  She glanced up from the book after a few minutes and saw that Meg had joined Thad out there. They didn’t know she’d noticed, and their heads were bent together. They were whispering. For one scant moment, Thad’s hand brushed her back in an intimate way and the way they looked at each other...if she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now.

  She felt the pulse pound in her head, and she tried to keep reading to Joey.

  How long had this been going on without her even knowing about it?

  She felt like such a fool.

  After everyone had left, and she and Thad were climbing into bed, he reached for her for the first time in a long time.

  She was stiff.

  “Tonight was a good idea,” he told her, kissing her forehead. “It was fun.”

  “If only I’d known long ago that to get you home at a decent hour, all I had to do was call my sister,” she joked, only she wasn’t really joking.

  He laughed, however, because he had no idea she knew.

  He didn’t know the joke was really on him.

  Something had to be done.

  41

  Meg, Now

  Meg sat in her home, her son, Joey, on her lap.

  It had taken her a while to compose herself outside of Gen’s apartment, but once she did, she had Ubered right home to Joey.

  He chattered about his day at day care, and she hugged and held him tight. His smell would fuel her all of her days...that little-boy-outdoorsy smell.

  “I miss you, Mommy,” he told her, his eyes large.

  “I miss you, too, baby,” she answered. “We’re just looking for Aunt Nini. I’ll be home as soon as we find her.”

  “Is she playing hide-and-seek?” he asked, because that was his favorite game.

  “Yeah, kind of,” she said. “But as soon as we find her, I’ll be home. And I’ll tuck you in every night.”

  “Except for when Daddy does it,” he answered.

  “Yeah.”

  She tucked him in and pulled the sheets up to his chin. “I’ll be here when you wake up,” she told him, kissing him on the nose. “So sleep deep, little one.”

  She turned off his light, left the door open a crack and walked down to the living room, then stepped outside for some air. She called Thad.

  “They know,” she said quietly. “Detective Hawkins knows.”

  “About?”

  “That night.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since earlier. They’re going to think that we did this, Thad. We have to tell them everything.”

  “No.” His answer was abrupt. “I’m not going to risk my career, and you certainly aren’t going to, either.”

  “They’re going to figure it out,” Meg said firmly. “He’s not stupid.”

  “No, he’s not. A one-night stand is one thing. An abduction is another. They can’t prove something that isn’t true.”

  Meg hesitated, and there was a pregnant pause.

  “You don’t believe that I had something to do with this, do you?” Thad asked, incredulous. “I know I’ve been short lately, and even a bit of an ass, but there’s a lot going on, and I can hardly deal with the fact that you didn’t choose me. In spite of that, you know me better than to think I could hurt anyone. You know I have to separate myself from her. We made the decision to divorce, and I can’t open that door again with her.”

  “You can’t pretend to care, you mean,” Meg said, and she felt so damn guilty about everything.

  “I do care,” he said sharply. “You know that. But she and I are over. She made her choices, and I made mine.”

  “I know,” she answered limply. “You know there were
a million reasons why I couldn’t choose you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’ve said. It would be too complicated.”

  Meg stayed silent.

  “Anyway. Whatever the detective thinks he knows is fine, but since we didn’t have anything to do with this, then I don’t see why we have to share information that only makes us look worse.”

  Meg sighed, and spun slowly around, eyeing the landscape around her house. It felt like she was always looking over her shoulder now, and she didn’t like it.

  “My gut says otherwise,” she finally answered.

  “Your gut is mistaken with this,” Thad said. “Trust me.”

  Meg was starting to feel that she couldn’t trust anybody, and that wasn’t a way to live.

  “We’ve made ourselves look guilty by not telling him.”

  “We can’t change that now,” Thad said. “But we don’t have to make things worse.”

  “I’m not promising anything,” she finally agreed. “But I’ll leave it, for now.”

  “You’ll see that I’m right,” he answered. “When all of this is done.”

  “You mean, when Gen is found?”

  “Yes.”

  But the way he’d said it hadn’t felt like that. Did he know where she was?

  Damn it. She didn’t like anything about this.

  “When are you coming back?” he asked her.

  “Tomorrow, I think. Unless Hawk tells me otherwise. Joey misses me. I hope it doesn’t take long. I just want this to be over. I want Gen home where she belongs, and I want everything to be fine.”

  “We all want that,” Thad told her. “Just tell Hawkins that we had a fling. That it was nothing. That’s what you want to believe anyway. I’ll tell him the same thing.”

  She hung up, and her heart felt so heavy. So many things had weighed it down. How long would it stay afloat?

  “Things aren’t well?” Joe asked from behind her.

  She turned, and he was leaning on the house. It annoyed her for a second. After all these many months, he still hovered. Like she hadn’t recommitted to him back then, like she hadn’t spilled her sins, like he hadn’t forgiven her, like she still had some penance to do.

  His ever-watchful eyes studied her.

  “The detective found out about Thad and me,” she said simply.

  Joe nodded slowly.

  “So, soon, everyone will know,” he answered.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know who he can tell.”

  “I don’t know, either.”

  “Thad doesn’t want us to say more than we have to.”

  “Of course he doesn’t.” Joe was derisive. “He has a lot to lose.”

  “His career is built on his reputation,” Meg pointed out, and it sounded like she was defending him. Joe didn’t miss that.

  “So is yours,” he answered. “Thad is an ambulance chaser. He’ll survive. He’s like a cockroach after an atomic bomb.”

  Meg was smart enough not to point out that Thad made a lot of money doing what he did, and that he still had a law degree from Cornell hanging on his wall.

  “If it gets out, everyone will look at us differently. They’ll look at us like we’re monsters, like I’m a monster for what I did, and like you’re stupid because you forgave me... They’ll look at us all like...” Her voice trailed off, and Joe took a step and then another.

  He stood in front her and looked into her eyes.

  “What they think shouldn’t matter,” he told her, kinder than she knew she deserved. “No one knows us. They don’t know the situation. They don’t know what happened. If they want to judge us, let them.”

  “But what about Gen?”

  “What about her? What happened to her in New York isn’t related to you and Thad.”

  She didn’t tell him how her gut twinged when she was talking to Thad, how she was starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, it was related. Somehow.

  “Listen, in spite of everything, you love your sister. You know it, I know it, everyone who knows the two of you knows it.”

  Meg nodded. It was true.

  “So everyone else can go to hell,” Joe said emphatically. He pulled her close, and rested his chin on the top of her head. They stood still for several minutes, before he pulled away.

  “Now, you ready for bed?”

  Meg nodded, and they got ready for bed and then climbed in together. It was early enough to watch TV for a while, so Joe clicked through and found something suitable. Meg rested in the crook of his arm easily—he was so familiar, so good. She was asleep before the end of the program—the first good sleep she’d had in days.

  In the morning, Joe propped up on an elbow and stared at her.

  “I know that things haven’t been the same,” he said. “But we’re a family, Meg. I’ll get past what happened, because I know it was a mistake. I know you and he were drunk, and you were both frustrated. I’ll get past it because I love you. And you love me. I don’t know, though, what Gen will say when she finds out. I wish I could say that she’ll forgive you, but I just don’t know.”

  “She’ll think that I’m the one he was having an ongoing affair with,” Meg said quietly.

  “And you swear to God that’s not the truth?” Joe asked, his breath catching a bit.

  “I swear to God. He and I... We were one night. That was it. It was nothing. Literally nothing.”

  “It was something,” Joe answered. “It almost tore us apart, Meg. I’m only here because you swore to me it would never happen again, and because you came to me and told me. You didn’t have to do that, but you did.”

  “Because I love you,” she said simply. “Because I didn’t want to lie to you. Because I hated myself for what happened.”

  “Don’t hate yourself,” he said softly. “No matter what happens, don’t do that.”

  She pressed a kiss to his lips. “Why are you so good to me?” she asked. “Don’t you get weary of this? Of the drama? Of the fact that I hurt you? Of the fact that we’re growing apart?”

  “Don’t say that,” he answered. “You’re my wife. The past is the past.”

  With that, he got up and walked down the hall.

  42

  Meg, Now

  Meg stared down at the buckle on her seat belt. The airplane seat was rigid, and Hawk being next to her didn’t make it any less awkward.

  The flight attendant did her spiel, and then they were up in the air. Meg settled down into her seat, and Hawk cleared his throat.

  She looked up at him. His gunmetal eyes were steely.

  “So you never told your sister it was you,” he said, and he was judging her with each word. Meg shook her head.

  “It would’ve made things a million times worse.”

  “For you,” he pointed out. She swallowed.

  “You can’t understand what happened unless you’ve been in my shoes.”

  He nodded at that. “No, I can’t imagine what it would be like to do something like that to my sister.”

  Meg looked away. He couldn’t help but note that she’d been biting her nails to the quick.

  “Does your husband know?”

  “I don’t think that’s your business. But yes, he does.”

  “So you told him, and Thad was in on it, of course. The three of you knew and you kept Genevieve in the dark? That seems cruel, not protective. At any given moment, one of you could’ve slipped and revealed something, and she would’ve found out in a heartless way. Did that ever happen?”

  He stared at her, and she returned his gaze. She felt terrible about what she did, but she didn’t answer to him about that.

  “No,” she said firmly. “No one slipped.”

  “Did you ever plan on telling her?”

  Meg paused. “No. I don’t think so.”
>
  “That’s pretty cold.”

  “Your judgment isn’t necessary.”

  He shrugged. “People just rarely surprise me anymore. You did.”

  “Glad to be of service.” Her voice was cold, and she turned to stare out the window.

  “How is your relationship with Joe now?” he asked, apparently not reading her body language.

  Her back was turned to him now—she was done talking.

  He ignored that. “Strained?”

  “Why does this matter?” Meg asked, without looking at him. “Do you think Joe is a suspect now, too?”

  “Should I? What would be his motive?”

  “You’re crazy,” she muttered. “Joe wouldn’t hurt a soul. He loves Gen.”

  “You guys just keep it in the family, huh?”

  Meg’s cheeks flushed red. “I didn’t mean like that.”

  “Listen. We’re stuck next to each other for another hour and a half. You might as well talk to me. Tell me all of the details, and don’t leave anything out. Any little thing could be something important.”

  Meg stared at the window. She blinked once, then twice.

  “How did it start?”

  “Sleeping with Thad?” She half turned toward him, gazing over her shoulder. He nodded.

  She sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “I’m sure,” he agreed. “Interfamilial romance always is.”

  Meg glared at him. “If you want me to talk, you might want to stop with the snide remarks.”

  “Fine.” He sat back in his seat and waited.

  “I’ve known Thad a long time. I watched him go through law school, and mature and get more ambitious. Gen has always been wrapped up in her own worlds...all the fictional ones she creates. As her sister, it never bothered me. It was entertaining. But for her husband, it got old, I guess.”

  “So that is Thad’s reasoning. What is yours?” Hawk kept his face impassive. He didn’t look away from Meg, even when the flight attendant handed him a soda and he thanked her.

  “I don’t have a good one,” she said. Red mottled her chest, the bit of skin that showed above the neck of her shirt. She was nervous, uncomfortable. “My husband is a good man. I’ve known him since high school. When I married him, I needed someone stable and secure. I was in med school, and everything was in chaos. Now...everything is stable, and...”