Little Secrets(73)
Derek has never punished her for grieving the way she grieves. Maybe she shouldn’t punish him for grieving the way he grieves.
The thoughts never leave her, though. But they’re only thoughts, and she’s better at keeping them to herself; otherwise, people become concerned and feel the need to intervene for fear that she might self-harm due to her fragile emotional health.
After her hospital stay, she promised Derek she would never try it again. And at her last appointment with Dr. Chen, she promised her therapist she would no longer visit these sites.
She’s going to break one of those promises now.
She starts scrolling, searching for the birthmark, the crescent. Searching for her son. She doesn’t know these children, but she cries for them, she cries for their mothers, and later, she’ll cry herself to sleep.
Sometimes, in her dreams, Sebastian is with a new family. Some poor woman who was desperate to have children took him from the market and is raising him with all the love that Marin and Derek would have given him. And with every passing day, Sebastian forgets about them, about Marin, and he grows to love his new mother. He is fine, he is safe, he is whole.
And sometimes, in her dreams, Sebastian is screaming for her. And no matter what Marin does, she can never get to him in time. Her little boy simply vanishes, like a puff of air, there one moment, gone the next, snatched by a face she can’t see and brought to a dark place where the monsters hide.
“See? There are no monsters in Mommy’s house,” she had once said reassuringly to her son when she finished reading him The Monster at the End of This Book. It was one of her favorites as a child, and it stars lovable Grover from Sesame Street, who’s terrified about a monster he’s certain will appear at the end of the book, only to discover that the monster is actually himself. “And just because someone looks like a monster doesn’t mean he is.”
And just because someone doesn’t, doesn’t mean he isn’t.
If Marin ever gets the call that Frances got, she will kill herself. She’s made a lot of promises to a lot of people.
This is the one she’s made to herself.
Chapter 23
When she gets to work the next morning, there’s a voice mail on her phone from Vanessa Castro.
Marin’s first instinct is to drop everything and call Derek at work, so they can find out the horrible news together, but then she remembers. Derek still doesn’t know about the private investigator. In hindsight, the distance in their marriage might not all be coming from him. Marin is full of secrets, too.
She needs a minute to gather herself before calling the PI back, and she shuts the door to her office so nobody will disturb her. She thinks about dinner the night before. When Derek got home after work, there were no steaks on the counter ready for grilling, no Brussels sprouts roasting in the oven. He came upstairs to find her sitting on the bed staring at her laptop, and he watched without comment when she slammed it shut. He didn’t ask what she was looking at. He took one look at her hollow, tearstained face and seemed to understand instantly that his wife was having a rough evening. He didn’t ask why, because he knew why, even if he didn’t know the details.
Instead, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Indian, Greek, or Thai?”
“You pick,” she said. She was about to apologize for forgetting the steaks, but he was on the phone calling for takeout before she got the chance.
Vanessa Castro never just calls. The PI always emails first so they can agree on a time to speak. These days, nobody likes it when the phone rings out of the blue; it feels intrusive, which is why nobody bothers with a landline anymore. A landline can do only one thing—ring.
The PI only spoke five words in her voice mail: “It’s Vanessa. Call me. Thanks.”
She thinks of Frances. Oh god. Taking a deep breath, she makes the call.
“It’s Marin,” she says, when the PI picks up.
“Hi,” Castro says. “Sorry to call out of the blue.”
“Just tell me.”
“It’s not about Sebastian,” the other woman says, and every part of Marin’s body sags with relief at those four words. “Oh, shit. I should have explained that in my message. I’m sorry, Marin, I was distracted. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay.” It isn’t really, but it will be, once Marin’s heart returns to its normal rhythm and she can breathe again. “What’s going on?”
“McKenzie Li,” Castro says. Hearing the name makes Marin sit up straighter. “Are you aware that she’s missing?”
Missing? Sharp inhale. Her heart rate picks up again.
“Missing?” Marin repeats, trying to inject the right note of confusion into her voice, trying to react as if she didn’t potentially have something to do with it. But she couldn’t have—she’d changed her mind about Julian, so why the hell would the younger woman be missing? “What … what do you mean?”
“I’ve been keeping loose tabs on her…” Castro does sound distracted, like she’s following a train of thought that’s much further along than what they’re currently discussing, and maybe reading through something on her computer at the same time. “I know you said you were handling it, but I’d already started digging and I just wanted to keep going for a little bit…”