While I waited in the padded chair outside the imaging room with Audrey, I turned my attention back to the text I had received from whoever had Sam’s phone.
Sorry about Leo.
I typed: Who are you?
I’m Sam.
Who ARE you?
Why don’t you believe me?
Because you aren’t Sam.
Of course I am.
Stop.
If I weren’t Sam, how would I know about the fight Leo and I had the night before I disappeared?
This stopped me. What fight? I hadn’t heard about any fight.
“Sam” typed over my silence: I’m sure Leo didn’t mean the things he said that night.
Then the realization hit like a slap. You’ve been eavesdropping on us.
You sleep on the left side of the bed. Your bathrobe is dark green, the same shade as your eyes. The same shade as my favorite bra.
My blood froze, and I pulled Audrey closer to me. You’re watching us too.
Of course I’m watching. I’m your husband.
I thought of my son, his battered head and body being scanned in the next room. Did you hurt Leo?
How would I hurt Leo? I wasn’t there.
What did you do?
Really, Cassie.
Though I knew he wouldn’t say anything to incriminate himself, I asked anyway: What do you want?
I want you to be happy, Cassie.
I’m going to the police.
They didn’t seem to believe you the last time.
So he had listened to me, even there, in the police station. Unless he knew someone who had passed along this information? Both choices left me chilled.
You’re not my husband.
Not anymore.
Why are you doing this?
We all make choices. Like you did, that night on the trail.
Carver?
I told you I’m Sam.
Hannah?
You’re being tedious.
Did you hurt my husband?
I’m fine, Cassie. Great, actually. I’ve found someone who doesn’t work all the time.
The words brought back an argument about my long hours at the clinic. More than a month before.
A woman who’s not holding on to that extra fifteen pounds six years after childbirth.
I had voiced this insecurity a week earlier when Sam and I had been alone in our bedroom—though apparently not alone at all.
I’m not sure if this new relationship will work out, so I hope you can leave us alone. I know how you can be when you’re jealous.
With these words, I could suddenly see Brooklyn, or the young woman in the photo, brutalized and left in some public space for the police to discover. With evidence on her that would lead back to me. Rico already had reason to be suspicious of me.
But I was more afraid for Sam. My hands trembled as I typed: If you hurt Sam, I’ll end you.
The taunt came quickly, and I sensed the sick joy in it: And how exactly will you do that? I mean, if I weren’t Sam. Which I am.
I haven’t decided yet. But I went to medical school. I’ll come up with something creative.
I think I should go to the police.
If he did, this conversation would cast as much doubt on me as it did him.
Then he typed: Especially after what happened with Lester. I heard you actually poisoned him. Poor dog.
A familiar anger flooded me, but this time, I didn’t fight it. On my virtual keypad, I stabbed out a threat: I’ve decided whatever I do to you will involve scalpels. Retractors and clamps too.
I know you’re hurting, but at least you have the kids. I pulled Audrey closer still, so she sat more in my chair than hers. I hope to see them soon.
Is that a threat?
I could see that “Sam” was typing, and each of the seconds spent waiting raked at my nerves. Finally, the text popped on the screen: Why would I threaten my own children?
23
As a teenager, I plowed my car into the neighbor’s living room. On purpose. It wasn’t without cause—I’d caught the creep staring in my bedroom window on several occasions—but I concede there were more practical steps I should have taken.
Another time, I throat-punched a bully who had stolen a smaller kid’s backpack. Again, that probably shouldn’t have been my first course of action. Especially since it was less about protecting that smaller kid than the fact that I hadn’t punched anyone in months.
So I was angry, a lot and often with little provocation. But as an adult, I had realized most problems were better solved with diplomacy and intellect and empathy.
This was not one of those problems.
Thus far, I had done everything right: on the trail that night, it was clumsiness, not recklessness, that had sent me careening down that hill. I had called 911. Later, I had cooperated with the police and updated them at every step. I had even been civil to the woman who claimed to be screwing my husband. True, over the past couple of days, there had been moments I’d gotten angry. But I’d fought it.
I didn’t fight it now. With the texts threatening my children and Leo in the next room getting another MRI, for his knee this time, I was well and truly pissed.
I spotted Zoe walking down the corridor and waved her over. She handed me my laptop bag. “How’s Leo?”
“Mild concussion, and they’re worried about his knee. Perla’s on her way?”
“Right behind me.” She returned my house key. “She found something at the house, but I’ll let her show you.”
When Perla Anderson arrived five minutes later, Zoe took Audrey to another set of chairs halfway down the corridor.
Years before, I had treated Perla’s Rottweiler for hip dysplasia. It had been a while since I had seen her, but she was nevertheless who I’d thought of after the latest string of texts.
Perla wore her usual uniform: jeans, a messenger bag, and a novelty T-shirt, this one proclaiming: I’m not lazy. Just buffering. Last time she had been in my clinic, she had been finishing her master’s in computer science. Like then, she smelled of clove cigarettes and the coffee she sipped from her travel mug.
She put down her bag and motioned to the one Zoe had just given me. “Is that it?” she asked.
I pulled out the laptop, logged in, and handed it to her. I did the same with my phone.
She balanced her coffee between her legs as she tapped at the keyboard, her nails jagged nubs.
“Zoe said you found something at our house?”
She paused in her typing to reach into her pocket, then opened her palm. There rested three circles, all white and about the size of a penny.
“You were right to think someone has been eavesdropping on you. I found these on your ceiling in the living room, kitchen, and master bedroom.”
Perla took a sip of coffee, then reached into her other pocket. This time, she hesitated. “I found this too.” She pressed a small, hard object in my hand. It was a USB wall charger, also white, the kind everyone in our family used to charge our cell phones.
I wrinkled my nose as I studied it, not understanding at first. I opened my mouth to ask why she had given it to me, but then I noticed it: a small hole that shouldn’t have been there.
“A camera?” When she nodded, I shivered. “Where’d you find it?”
“Your bedroom.”
In my head played all the camera could have witnessed. Sure, there was the sex, infrequent as it had become, but there were other moments when Sam and I had shared tenderness or insecurities that seemed even greater violations. All the moments we thought we were alone but someone else listened, and watched.
My stomach roiled. I might never go home again.
“You’re sure that’s all of them?”
“I swept for other devices, but that’s it, at least as far as bugs.” I didn’t like the way she said that last part, or the way she scowled at the screen of my laptop.
“Is there a way to tell who’s texting with Sam’s phone?”
She shrugged. “It may not even be Sam’s phone. With caller ID spoofing, it would be easy enough for the texts to appear to come from anywhere.”
“Can they be traced?”
“It’s possible, but it’s not easy. Plus, you have other issues.”
Perla tapped the screen, clicking through a series of social media posts, leaving me only a few seconds to read each.
JL’s team sucks almost as hard as his girl.
JL’s so fat and stupid the only letters of the alphabet he knows are KFC.
JL’s bitch opens her legs for everyone except him.
One post had a photo of a drooling bulldog and a girl’s name. I assumed the name belonged to “JL’s” girlfriend.
Another showed a badly edited photo of a guy in a football jersey doing obscene things to a pig, with the caption: The closest JL gets to the pigskin.
“What’s this?”
“I pulled those from Leo’s social media.”
Teenagers have lives and secrets and bad choices they hide from their parents. Of course they do. Still, it was with unshakable confidence that I said, “Leo wouldn’t do this.”
“I figured. Obviously, your security’s been compromised.”
My anger flared. I felt naked, exposed, almost as much as I had when Perla had shown me the camera. “Why would someone target a child?”
I corrected myself: Children. Leo, and the boy being taunted.
“People are assholes.”
In this case, true enough. “So someone has our passwords.”
“Which is why you should change them.”
“But how could this happen?”
Perla chewed on a hangnail. “Someone could’ve physically accessed one of your phones, or your computer, or gotten in some other way. Phishing emails, for instance.”
“I wouldn’t have opened an email like that.”
She smiled, in the same way I did when Audrey mentioned unicorns. “There are other ways to steal passwords too. Someone could’ve planted a keylogger, for instance. It could be integrated into your keyboard, and how’re you going to catch that?” I knew she meant I wouldn’t catch it, because I had no doubt Perla would. “Any software you have scanning for an intrusion would miss hardware. And you probably have other computers, right?”
“Sam has one he uses for work, and Leo has a laptop.”
“Then there’s a chance one of them has been compromised,” she said. “Whoever’s targeting you could also have gotten your passwords by looking over your shoulder while you’re on your laptop at a coffee shop.”
Coffee shop. I thought of Brooklyn, then Hannah. If Carver had been stalking Brooklyn, then it could’ve been him too. Really, it could have been anyone.
“Or say you find a USB drive you think contains patient files. Plug it in, and the malware does the rest.”
I opened my mouth to say I wouldn’t plug an unknown USB drive into my computer, but she stopped me. “Before you say that’s not possible, remember this: a shared computer is only as safe as its least diligent user. The scary part is, most of this isn’t advanced stuff. Anyone with access to a search engine could pull it off.”
“So, anyone.”
“Pretty much.”
The door from Imaging swung open, and the radiology tech pushed Leo’s wheelchair through it. Slumped in his seat, hands folded in his lap, my boy looked so much like a younger version of himself that my heart ached.
Perla took this as her cue to leave. Before she did, she downed the last of her coffee and stowed her travel mug in her messenger bag. When she pulled her hand from the bag, she held two plastic-wrapped packages.
“After searching your home, I figured you might need these,” she said.
I took the packages from her. They contained two prepaid cell phones. When Perla tried to hand me my laptop, I pushed it away.
“I don’t want that.”
She stowed it in my bag and slung it with hers over her shoulder. “I’ll check it out further and get it back to you.”
I moved toward my son, but Perla touched my arm. Her eyes flashed with an intensity I suspected mirrored mine.
“Remember: sometimes people are assholes,” she said. “If someone’s messing with your kid, it’s okay for you to be one too.”
24
Audrey rested in the chair beside Leo’s hospital bed, curled into an impossibly small ball, head propped on my folded sweatshirt. With Audrey asleep, Zoe headed home, leaving me alone with Leo.
The MRI had shown Leo had torn his meniscus. No surgery was needed, but he would be off football for the season. While we waited for the doctor to release him, Leo shifted in his bed, restless and sullen. “Where’s Dad?” he asked.
I could have stalled, or fallen back on the excuse I had given the kids earlier about Sam attending a teachers’ conference. But there had been enough lies.
Instead, I told him I didn’t know where his dad was. Then I took a breath and told Leo the parts I felt he could handle. But, really, what kid could be expected to handle any of it? I hardened the edge of my voice whenever I felt it wavering.
I ended with, “I’m sure he’s okay,” although I was not at all sure he was.
Even before I told Leo his dad was missing, every glance in his direction had wounded: his face was a younger version of Sam’s, the flesh surrounding his swollen eye shifting in color over the past few hours from pomegranate to plum. But the signs of physical suffering were shadows of the pain Leo displayed now. At fifteen, he usually showed signs of the man he would one day become, but in that moment, he was 100 percent kid. I read the question in his expression as clearly as if he had shouted it: Why?
I rested my hand over his, letting it linger a moment longer than he normally would have allowed, before pulling it back. “I’ve filed a report with the police, so they’ll be looking for him.”
When Leo’s eyes widened at my mention of police, I backtracked, reciting the line given to me earlier by Officer Torres: “Don’t worry. Odds are your dad chose to leave and that he’ll be back.”
Was it any better for Leo to think his dad’s absence was voluntary? Judging by my son’s face, not by much. I got it. Torres’s words hadn’t given me much comfort either.
Audrey adjusted in the chair but remained asleep. At least one of my children was at peace.
I turned back to Leo to find he too was staring in the direction of his sister and to the window beyond. Who knew which of the two drew his attention more.
“Does she know?” Leo asked. In profile, he looked even more like his father.
I shook my head.
“I don’t think he’d leave us forever,” I said. “When you were a baby, if he ran out to the car, the mailbox, the backyard, wherever—he took you with him.” I allowed myself a brief smile at the memory of an infant Leo swaddled to Sam’s chest, chubby appendages jutting like overfilled balloons from his sling. “He loves you, and he would never leave you. Maybe he just needed to do something alone, something important.”
“What’s more important than us?”
“Nothing.” It was the truest answer. “But maybe there’s something he needs to do before coming back to us.”
Leo didn’t ask what that might be, and I didn’t know how I would have replied if he had. The question he asked, though, was worse.
“Do you think something . . . bad . . . happened to him?”
I lied as easily as I had ever done anything. “Of course not.”
Leo’s face relaxed, and I let him have his moment. Then I steeled myself and asked, “Have you seen your dad around school the past couple of weeks?”
My son’s jaw tensed, and his eyes darted away. “I don’t know.”
I tried to keep my voice soft, reassuring. “You don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me?”
“I don’t always see Dad.”
He was lying, but I decided not to push. I knew Sam hadn’t been at school the past couple of weeks, and judging by the way Leo squirmed in
his bed, he did too.
The second question was more difficult. “Do you know a girl named Hannah?”
Leo smirked at that. It was Sam’s smirk, reaching all the way to his eyes. “Come on, Mom.”
“Come on what?”
“There are, like, a couple of thousand kids at my school, and half the girls are named Hannah. I know ten at least.”
“Any of them students of your dad’s?”
I had picked my words carefully, but it didn’t matter. Any hope I’d had that the rumors hadn’t reached Leo disappeared with his smirk.
“Is that her name?” he asked, his voice suddenly small and a little angry.
I didn’t want to assume we were talking about the same thing, so I asked, “Whose name?”
“No one’s.” It seemed my son had the same idea.
The sigh that slipped out rattled my chest. I was so freaking exhausted. “I know it’s hard, Leo, but you’ve got to tell me.”
“It’s nothing, Mom. Kids say stupid sh—stuff all the time.”
I rose from my chair and sat on the edge of his hospital bed. This close, I felt the heat radiating off him. Sam and I used to joke that our son was part terrier because he always ran a little hot.
Used to. Without realizing it, I had settled into thinking of my marriage as belonging to the past. That wasn’t acceptable. None of this was.
I realized suddenly how hard it must be for Leo, attending the school where his father taught. In the best of times, there would be the expectation of good grades and even better behavior. And in times like this, when rumors suggested his dad was sleeping with a student . . .
I took Leo’s hand and squeezed. I could have encouraged him to share details of the rumors he had obviously heard, but did I really need to know more? Did I need to know the color of her hair, or if they had been spotted together outside class, or what acts my husband had allegedly asked her to perform, especially if the price for knowing was my son’s pain? He couldn’t give me a name, and anything else he could give me would just hurt us both.
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