Little Secrets(97)

“What?” Marin’s knees buckle, and it’s her turn to grab the edge of the island to keep herself from sinking to the floor. “You talked to him?”

Derek nods, his face a mask of anguish and exquisite pain. “He said, ‘Hi Daddy, it’s Bash. I miss you and Mommy. When are you coming to get me?’”

“Oh god.” Marin can’t breathe. “Oh god…”

“And I said, ‘Soon, my honey bear. Soon.’ And I asked him if he was okay, and he said, ‘I’m okay. There’s TV here and lots of pizza and snacks.’ And then he asked me again when I was coming.”

Marin is crying so hard she can’t speak, but she nods.

“Then someone took the phone. A man. I didn’t recognize his voice. He said, ‘If you want your son, we want the million tonight. We’ll text you with an account number.’”

Marin looks at him. “We had just upped the reward money to a million.”

He nods. “Yes, we had. And I told him I could get it, but that it would take at least three days. The money was tied to the reward and being tracked, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to move it without alerting the FBI. But I said I had two hundred and fifty thousand accessible immediately, in my personal account, and that I could get it in a matter of hours. To my surprise, he agreed.”

“Why didn’t you call the FBI then?”

“Would you have?” Derek isn’t being snarky. He really wants to know what she would have done, and he looks terrified of what she’ll say.

She considers her answer. “No.” As soon as she says the word, she knows it’s the truth. “No, I wouldn’t have. Not at that point, not after five weeks. Not if I thought I could buy back my son.”

Derek exhales. “I pulled the money together. Got it all into a bag, waited. All day I waited. And then finally, another email. With an address. A house in North Bend. They said Sebastian would be waiting alone inside. I was to let myself in, leave the money, take him, and go. Someone would be watching. If they saw anything amiss, they’d blow up the house with us in it.”

“Jesus Christ, Derek.”

“I went to the house. There was a For Sale sign out front, and inside it was empty, hardly any furniture other than a sofa and a TV, and a small bed in one of the back rooms. But there was a toy on the floor. A cheap plastic thing, the kind you get with a Happy Meal. A Pokémon. I don’t know which one, the yellow one. It was lying there, as if to say, someone has been here. A child has been here.

“I sat on the couch. Around midnight the phone rang. He said to leave the money and go. I asked him where my son was, why they didn’t bring him. And then I heard Bash crying in the background. I started shouting, and he shouted back, and then the phone went dead. And a minute later, I got an email saying…”

“What? What did it say?”

“It said, ‘Too late. You fucked up. He’s dead.’”

Marin claps a hand over her mouth, choking back a scream.

“I don’t know what I did wrong, Marin, I did everything they asked, I had the money, I was at the right place, I don’t understand why they … why they…” He can’t finish.

Oh god oh god oh god …

“No,” she says. The word comes out a wail. Noooooo. “No, god, please, no.”

“I tried to call back, but the number just kept ringing and ringing. An hour later, it was disconnected. I sent emails to the address, and they all bounced back.”

Derek is gasping for air, shivering violently, and all Marin can do is stare at him in horror. Half of her wants to comfort him and tell him that she might have done the exact same thing; the other half wants to put her hands around his throat and squeeze and keep squeezing until his Adam’s apple bursts and every last molecule of air inside him is used up.

“I don’t know what I did wrong, but I killed him, Marin,” Derek says, his voice strangled, as if her fingers really were around his neck. “I killed our little boy. And I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you because I knew if you knew, I would be killing you, too.”

He starts sobbing again, and unable to stand it any longer, Marin reaches for him.

They cling to each other, at the custom-built granite island in the designer kitchen of their dream home in their perfect life, and they cry.



* * *



“There’s something I need to tell you,” Marin says ten minutes later, when the sobs subside, as they eventually do, because you can’t sob like that forever. It’s physically impossible. At some point, you start to go numb. It’s the body’s way of coping.

Derek looks better than she feels, but he’s had sixteen months minus five weeks to grieve their son; it isn’t new to him like it is for her. At some point later—she doesn’t know when, but later—she will figure out her next step. Her final step. But for now, there are things that need to be said.

“What is it?” Derek’s whole body is sagging. It’s strange to see. Her husband’s physicality has always been such a big part of who he is. His height, his stride, his presence when he walks into a room—he’s always commanding, always in charge.

“It was Sal who took him. He did it for the money.”

She fills him in on everything Castro told her, stopping short of mentioning anything specifically about Julian. She refers to him only as “the fixer.” She’s deeply ashamed of what she did with Julian, and she can’t bear to tell Derek about it, not now, and probably not ever.