Mother of All Secrets(12)

Also, please don’t hurt me too much when you come out. Please? K, thanks.

Love you forever,

Mommy





Chapter Six



Saturday, October 3

Like any normal person, I immediately took to Google to find out as much about Isabel as I could. And her husband. Connor. Connor and Isabel Harris. There weren’t any missing persons bulletins or news items on her yet, which wasn’t surprising given it had barely been a day, but I set up an alert on my phone to notify me as soon as that changed. Once I got started on my Google rabbit hole, I immediately realized how little I actually knew Isabel, which was strange—from our meetings, we knew intimate details of each other’s schedules and daily struggles. She had seen me cry, I had seen her breasts, she had kissed Clara’s head once, we’d talked about how many weeks our vaginas had bled after giving birth, and yet I didn’t know where she was from. We weren’t even friends on social media.

I quickly discovered that that was because she wasn’t on social media.

Strange, because she had been at one point—after all, she’d been the one to respond to my Facebook post about looking for a moms’ group. I pulled up her message: Hey! We have a group that started meeting a few weeks ago. Send me your email and I’ll send you the details. Now, that message just appeared to be from “Facebook User.” Maybe she was taking a social media hiatus. I could hardly fault anyone for that—I would have probably benefited from one of those myself. Still, it was odd for someone my age to be so disconnected. She wasn’t on LinkedIn, either; then again, if she didn’t work, which I was pretty sure she didn’t, why would she be?

I did manage to find that she was from Tarrytown (ancient field hockey stats still available online) and had gone to Williams College (acting major). I also found their wedding announcement in the Times and learned her maiden name was Wahrer. It was from 2010, which meant that she and Connor had been married practically forever. In 2010, I was in grad school and could barely handle the responsibility of buying groceries, opting instead to just grab a bagel, or nuts at whatever bar I was at, for dinner most nights. While I was still living like a suddenly unsupervised teenager, Isabel was getting married. She was the same age as me, though; we’d graduated the same year. Connor had a beard and looked totally different in their wedding picture—still gorgeous, just a lot younger and a bit more rugged looking than the polished man I’d seen on the steps in front of their house.

My search on Connor provided an explanation for their incredible town house. He was a partner at Zomar Capital, a boutique hedge fund in Manhattan that was wildly successful, having invested early in several hugely popular social apps. I was a teacher who had no interest in or knowledge of the world of investments, but even I could understand how much money investments like theirs would have yielded. He was probably worth tens, maybe hundreds, of millions. I found out that he’d gone to Williams, too; I assumed that’s where they’d met, which explained, to some degree at least, why they’d gotten married so young.

Other than a few articles that mentioned his company and their deals, Connor’s internet footprint was as small as Isabel’s, which must have been by design. He wasn’t on social media, either, and perhaps he was the one to encourage her not to use it; after all, maintaining investor relations surely required discretion. And with a sizable fortune to safeguard, it was little surprise that they seemed to value their privacy.

From Friday afternoon until Saturday morning, our text chain was radio silent, which made me feel antsy and unsettled. Clara woke up at 5:00 a.m., and I tried and failed to get her back to sleep. I considered waking Tim to take her for a while, but I knew there was no chance I’d be able to fall back to sleep anyway, so I used our early morning as a chance to take a walk with her and go scope out Isabel’s house again. The police tape was still up by the bloody sidewalk, which appeared to have been scrubbed, because the blood was barely discernible. There was one police car parked outside their house, but I didn’t see any officers, or Connor, or the grandma. They were likely sleeping; it was barely light outside.

Finally, late Saturday morning, Vanessa sent a text to the group.

Nothing to report. She’s still missing. I reached out to her husband and asked him to keep me updated if they found out anything, or if there is anything we can do. I’m planning to bring some food over there this afternoon, around 3:00 p.m. Anyone want to join me?

Moms are notoriously slow at texting back, so even though I read the text about thirty minutes after it came in, no one had responded yet when I saw it. Since it was a Saturday and Tim was home to help with Clara, I had been taking one of my weekly “real showers”—actually washing my hair, shaving, and, well, getting clean, instead of just standing under a stream of water for two minutes.

I heard Clara start crying a minute after I stepped out of the shower, and a minute after that, Tim came into the bathroom holding her while I was naked and generously applying desperately needed serum to my face. I picked up my towel off the floor and wrapped it around myself tightly. I knew I didn’t look disgusting per se, but I was definitely hyperaware of the stubborn stretch mark–streaked eight-pound tire around my midsection. Compounding my self-consciousness around my husband seeing me naked was the fact that, despite having been “cleared” for sex several weeks before, Tim and I hadn’t done it since before Clara was born. It was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do, and he hadn’t tried, either, which was both offensive and a total relief. I wasn’t sure if he hadn’t tried because he could tell I didn’t want to, or because he didn’t want to, either. I hoped the former, but talking it through would require me to muster energy I simply didn’t have. It would also force me to acknowledge that the baby wasn’t the only reason I didn’t want to have sex with him yet, that there was something else going on with me, something I hadn’t told anyone and vowed to myself that I never would. I was trying to avoid at all costs opening that particular locked box inside me, which I intended to keep locked forever and throw away its key.