Ink and Bone(38)

They’re just being polite, Merri, Wolf would surely say. No one says what they’re really thinking.

Maybe so. But the world could do with a few more kind, polite people—even if it was fake.

Her phone pinged, and she drew it out of her pocket to see a text from Wolf.

Arrived safely?

He knew she had. They each had a Find My Friends app on their phone, so he could have easily seen that she was in The Hollows. Although service up here was spotty.

Yes.

She slid her wedding ring up and down her finger. She didn’t wear it all the time anymore, had grown quite careless with it, leaving it on the edge of the sink, the kitchen counter, the dresser in the bedroom. Wolf was forever returning it to her, looking injured. As if he had any right to look injured about anything.

What now?

That was Wolf. What now? What’s next? What should we do? A man in perpetual motion, always on to the next thing.

I don’t know. I see Jones Cooper in an hour.

Sure you don’t want me to come up?

She did want Wolf to come up. She wanted the man she had first loved. The Wolf who was strong but kind, funny but sensible. The world traveler—his work as a travel writer had taken him to places of which she’d never even heard. She’d found that so exotic. She loved how he could just pack a bag and go anywhere without a hint of stress. He was so calm in every circumstance, always seemed in control. To Merri who was scattered, a worrier, the one who got lost and showed up late, he was a steady hand to hold on to. She followed him places that she never would have dared to go on her own, homebody that she was—trekking on the Inca Trail, scuba diving in Belize, an eco lodge in the Amazon. When she was with Wolf, at first at least, she was less afraid of the world. Of course, that was before the children came. And before he had all that trouble with work. Before she discovered that in their fifteen years together, he had never been faithful to her for more than a year at a time.

No, I’m okay, she typed. I’ll keep you posted.

I love you.

She didn’t doubt his love for her, odd as that was to say of a faithless husband. But she didn’t say it back anymore, though she did still love him. More than she wanted to.

She flipped open her laptop and logged on to the free wireless offered by the guesthouse. On the ride up, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what Jackson told her, about the missing man. It was nothing, of course. Jackson was a worrier, a ruminator like Merri. Still.

She found a small item in the Times. Real estate developer missing. Gerald Healy, forty-four, left his Manhattan office for a meeting with a construction company in The Hollows. He never arrived. His car hadn’t been found, cell phone signal lost. Family—wife and two small children—were pleading for any information. There was a picture of a handsome man with dark hair and glasses, wearing a bright smile and a green-and-white checked shirt. She felt a rush of impotent urgency.

The wallpaper on her laptop screen was an image of Abbey. She was the wild child, the kook. When you first got to know her, you might think she was cautious, even fearful. But in her heart, she was an adventurer like her father, a warrior. After she’d hung back a bit and assessed the situation, she dove right in. The image was a shot from above with Abbey looking up at the camera, her mouth wide open in laughter, her purple skirt twirling. She was unabashed joy, raw energy in that captured moment. How could she not be here with them—all that wild love, all the crazy little kid energy? How could her Abbey, those other two children, this man, just disappear and not be found? It just didn’t seem right. Was the world that big, that dark, like a maw that could swallow you whole?

She scrolled through the few articles, which were all similarly lacking information. It was less of a news story when adult men went missing, probably more likely that he’d just abandoned his family than come to any harm. But he didn’t look like the type to run off. He had a goofy smile, was cute in a geeky sort of way. In fact, he reminded Merri of their friend Blake. Blake, who was the consummate good father, a loving and faithful husband, always honest and upright. In all their years of knowing him, Merri had never seen his eyes stray in the direction of a pretty waitress when Claire was around. It wasn’t even that he was not staring; it was that he did not notice. Not in the way that Wolf noticed every tight piece of ass within a certain radius, the way he was always browsing.

It was actually Blake whom Merri had met first on the night she met Wolf. She’d been getting her MFA at Columbia. Blake was studying law. And Wolf was at the journalism school. She was at some sports bar that she’d gone to with a guy she thought she liked. But he’d quickly revealed himself to be an arrogant *—like most male MFA students who invariably thought that they were going to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“No offense, but your date is a jerk.”

Her date—What had his name been? So long ago—had left her at the bar to go to the bathroom, and Blake had slipped in beside her.

“I couldn’t help but overhear,” Blake said apologetically. “His voice was booming.”

“Really?” she said. “Because I stopped listening an hour ago.”

Blake asked her what she was drinking and ordered her another vodka soda. Then they just started talking, and he felt strangely familiar, one of those people who feel like an old friend before you’ve even exchanged names.

“Don’t look now,” Blake had said. He nodded in the direction behind her with a mischievous grin. “But I think your friend has found a more enthusiastic audience.”