Never Have I Ever(100)

Finally I texted, 150. Divorce is pricey.

She must have had her phone with her, because she answered immediately. 200K. Final offer. A penny less and it’s not worth it to me.

That left Char around forty thousand, but the math didn’t matter. I would see Roux in hell before she saw a dime. I let time pass, as if I were thinking, watching three minutes turn over on my phone. Then I texted, Deal. See you Monday. Noon.

Good girl, she texted back. And that was all. Not a word about Charlotte. Nothing personal. No jabs. Smart of her, but not quite smart enough.

Fuck her generous offer. Her discount blackmail. She’d hit me in exactly the wrong spot. She’d hit me in the Charlotte, and I was going to hit her back. Hard as I could. I waited for the old computer to finish booting, thanking God for Maddy’s impulsive nature, her big mouth. Roux didn’t think I could find her past before Monday came, but she didn’t know that I had Seattle.

I knew what I was looking for; she’d blinked at Rosie B’s. She was running from a man. Maybe her husband, maybe Luca’s father, I had no way to know. I did know he was dangerous. I did know that I wanted desperately to find him, this man who’d beaten her so savagely. This man who was a loaded gun. I wanted to point him at her, let what happened happen.

Maybe he would kill her.

I hoped that he would kill her.

If he did, he’d be in prison, so Luca would be safe from him.

Thinking the boy’s name steadied me, a little. Whoever this man was, he could be a clear and present danger to Luca. I’d need to make sure Luca was out of the way. Of course, he might not be related to the boy at all. I needed to stop projecting. To search now, find out what I could, and then decide best how to use it.

I started putting search terms into Google. Missing Teenager Male Seattle Custody Dispute.

I found myself on a website with a database for missing children run by the state government. Even narrowed down to Washington, there were pages and pages of tiny thumbnail pictures of young faces. It paused me, hurt my heart. Every face was someone’s missing darling.

I tried to narrow the search further to only Seattle, but the site was counterintuitive and clunky. I couldn’t figure out how to home in on a single city.

I went back to Google, thinking through the timeline. I remembered when Roux had first met Tig, but I was tempted to check with him anyway, just to be sure. It had been so very easy to remove him as a contact. Probably because I’d known it would be just as easy to put him back.

I shook my head. I knew the approximate date. I added a month and year to my search, but it didn’t help. I tinkered with the terms, and that led me to a national database. It was run by a nonprofit and less tricky to navigate. They even had a page called “Featured Missing Children by State.” I used the drop-down to go to Washington, and this time the result looked more manageable. Maybe a hundred young faces looked out at me. There was an interface that let me refine my search, and I went in and checked a box for Male, then checked a second box for Ages 12–17. I hit enter, and the page reloaded, slow, the old computer making an audible grinding noise. When it finished, I was looking at only a dozen or so photos.

The third face was Luca’s.

Impossible to miss that chiseled jaw, those cheekbones, even though his hair was blond in the picture. My heart rate jacked. I swallowed hard and moved my mouse. I clicked on the picture, and his page opened up.

The first thing I noticed was his birthday. I was wrong about his age. Luca wasn’t sixteen. He was fourteen. Younger than Maddy by almost a year. I felt a flush rise in my cheeks; Roux had let him tool around in that red convertible. He’d driven my girl to school, this kid who wasn’t even old enough to have a learner’s permit.

The info on the page was sparse, but I learned that Luca’s real name was Ezra Wheeler. He’d been missing for over a month now. There was a blurry picture of Roux, clearly cropped from something larger, under his stats. She was turning away from the camera, and she was a blonde as well, but I recognized the high curve of her cheek, the shape of her body. The photo was in the “Last seen in the company of” section. There was a warning that she might be dangerous. “Do not approach,” the page advised. Instead anyone who saw them should call the 1-800 number and report it.

I ignored that. I didn’t want to talk to a nonprofit, and I definitely did not want to talk to the police.

I went back to Google and entered Luca’s real name and birthdate. After a moment I added “Seattle” and the word “Missing.” The first hit was a website called bringezrahome.com. I found that my hands had left the keyboard to press my heart. It was beating so hard and loud inside my chest, it was as if only the pressure of my palms were keeping it there. I felt warm all over, flushed with an internal heat. I’d been right. It was a custody issue. This page was where I would find the man. The man I believed had beaten her so savagely. Would I really unleash that kind of hell?

On her? No question. But there was Luca to think about.

The page finally finished loading. The top was a school picture of Luca. He looked so much younger with his fluffy cloud of soft blond hair. Either he was blowing it out these days or the dye had tamped it down. His cheeks looked fuller, too, and the picture didn’t show how tall he was. He looked like a baby.

I scrolled down, and it took me a long minute to make sense of what I was seeing.

HAVE YOU SEEN EZRA? asked a huge, scrolling headline. There was a row of smaller pictures of Luca, three in a row. On a bike. Holding a yellow cat. But it was the third one that I could not understand. In it he was hugging a middle-aged woman. She had the same blond hair, cut into a fluffy bob, so similar that hers blurred into his. She was heavyish, her cheeks and jawline rounded, but I could see she had his same full mouth. His deep-set, serious eyes.