Little Secrets(96)

Marin pulls her phone out and taps on the Shadow app. She slides it across the cold granite so Derek can see the photo of McKenzie’s beaten face displayed on the screen. He nearly crumples.

“So?” Marin asks. “Are you going to pay it?”

“Oh god,” he chokes. “Oh my god, I never wanted you to know. Marin, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She ignores him, impervious to his obvious pain. “They want two hundred and fifty grand. I know we have it, so that’s not the issue. What are you going to do? Pay it? Or do you think this photo is fake, and she’s extorting you, the way she did her other rich boyfriends? I heard the last one gave her fifty thousand. She’s clearly leveled up with you.”

He stares at the photo again, then looks at Marin, blank. “What are you talking about? What other boyfriends?”

“Oh,” Marin says, and for the first time all day, she smiles. It’s not a kind smile at all. It’s vicious, which is exactly how she feels right now. “You didn’t know. Allow me the pleasure of telling you. Your little sugar baby is a pro. She dates married rich guys and then demands payment when they try to end it. What, did you think she actually loved you?”

Derek doesn’t answer, which is probably wise.

“But the bruises, the whole being-tied-up thing, the ransom demand, that’s all new,” Marin says. “So, what do you think? Real or staged?”

Her husband looks as pale and sick as she’s ever seen him. “I told them I’d pay it. I have the money. It’s in a bag in the car. I’m waiting for a text.”

“Is that the same thing you did when they reached out about Sebastian?”

He freezes. And in that moment, she knows.

“You goddamned sonofabitch! How could you not tell me?!” Marin’s voice thunders in the oversize kitchen, the sound echoing off their designer cabinets.

At the sound of her voice, Derek, at six foot four, cringes into a person who appears even smaller than she is.

“I’m sorry,” he cries, sobs racking every part of his body. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”



* * *



It was a month to the day that Sebastian was taken. One month exactly; thirty-one days of the waking nightmare they could scarcely believe had become their life.

The investigation into Sebastian’s disappearance—despite his photo and the video from the market being all over the national news—had dried up. There were no leads, no ransom demands, no witnesses coming forward after suddenly remembering something they hadn’t a month ago when he first went missing. When Derek called the FBI and demanded to know what else could be done, the agent assigned to them told him that while Sebastian’s case would always be considered “open and ongoing,” they had to redirect their immediate resources to the hundreds of missing children cases that were occurring every week across the country.

It sent Marin into a spiral. She was already in a terrible place, her mind filled with the horrors of pedophiles and sex trafficking and whatever else her imagination tortured her with. But after Derek called to tell her what the FBI had said, she sank all the way to the bottom.

Derek was the one who found her. He returned home from an urgent meeting at the office, a meeting he didn’t trust anyone else to handle, and there was his wife, lying in the bathtub, unconscious. He’d only been gone three hours. He called 911 and performed CPR until the paramedics arrived. They managed to revive her and keep her conscious until she could be properly cared for at the hospital.

“You nearly died.” Derek speaks in a monotone, but the tears are flowing freely down his face. “I thought you were dead when I opened the bathroom door and saw you.”

Marin doesn’t say anything. She’s already apologized a hundred times for scaring him, and Sal, and Sadie, and everybody else in her life who cared about her. She can’t apologize anymore.

“When you were discharged from psychiatric hold five days later, I was afraid to leave you alone. About a week after that, I got an email from an address I didn’t recognize. It came through my work account. There was no subject line. When I clicked on the email, there was a picture of Sebastian. He looked fine; scared, but fine. He was holding up a copy of the New York Times with the date on it. The photo had been taken that day. The email warned me not to call the police; said that if I did, I would never see my son again. They told me someone would call in exactly thirty minutes. If I didn’t pick up, or if they thought the call was bugged, they would kill him.”

Marin closes her eyes. It’s the most excruciating thing to hear, and her mind can’t help but conjure up a hundred different ways it could have been handled.

“I should have called the FBI. But I just … I couldn’t. I was so angry. The investigation had totally stalled, and it felt like everyone had abandoned us. And you had just…” He shakes his head. “I didn’t call them. All I could think about was that it had been five weeks since I’d seen my kid. Five weeks. And if thirty minutes and a phone call could tell me whether or not he was really okay, I wanted to know. I needed to know.”

Yes. She understands that. But she doesn’t want to give Derek the satisfaction of validating his feelings, so she says nothing.

“I went and sat in the car, inside the garage. The phone rang exactly when they said it would. When I answered, it was Bash.”