The Break(24)

“Oh, right,” Art says, a laugh in his voice. “June Waters. Her stage name, isn’t it? I do believe she told me that one this past Christmas.” His words sound tinny on the phone. He’s quiet for a beat, and then his voice is harder when he says, “It’s not her real name, though. Did you know that?”

“Um,” I stall. I lock eyes with Gabe. Did we seriously not check June’s license or any form of identification before hiring her to watch our baby?

“I’m a close friend of the Wallenz family,” Art goes on. “I’m also a police detective. And June never made it to her parents’ house this morning as planned, which is why they called me. And I certainly know young people, how their plans change and so forth, and the local law enforcement won’t take it seriously with June barely being missing. But it’s unlike June to text her father the night before with an arrival time and then disappear into thin air and leave her father waiting for her on the train platform. I pinged her phone and can’t get a location, which happens when a phone’s battery is dead. I’m sure you can imagine their concern, being a parent yourself.” The whites of Gabe’s eyes are glowing. I put the call on speaker so he can hear the rest.

“Well, I certainly hope she’s okay,” I say. “But I wasn’t the last person to see June. Her roommate, Sean, was waiting for her after we went our separate ways.”

Gabe’s lips part. I can see the questions on them: Who’s Sean? When did you see June? Why?

“The last person to see June?” Art repeats with a chuckle. “You really have been writing too many of those mystery novels, haven’t you, Rowan?”

My skin goes icy. Did he google me before the call? Gabe’s face has folded, and I don’t know whether it’s because he’s worried about the route the call has taken or he’s trying to figure out why I saw June and Sean.

“Let’s back this up then,” says Art, still sounding eerily happy, like this is a game. Is this a game?

“Is this a prank?” I ask.

“I can assure you it’s not,” he says, stoic now. “When was the last time you saw June?”

I swallow. “Yesterday morning,” I say.

Gabe’s eyebrows go up, but he says nothing.

“Was she babysitting for you?”

The phone is on the bed between Gabe and me now, lit up like a warning. Slow down, it tries to tell me, but I don’t listen: I press the accelerator and fly faster over treacherous ground. “I saw June yesterday morning in a coffee shop,” I say. “We had a long talk, during which I apologized for my behavior.”

“Your behavior?” asks Art.

“Yes. I apologized for something I had done—the way I’d treated her while she was babysitting. I wasn’t right, postpartum hormones and all of that, and I apologized to June.”

“What was it that you’d done?” Art asks.

“That’s not your business, Mr. Patricks. It’s mine. And if a real detective, not a family friend, wants to come question me about it, I’ll be happy to answer any questions with my lawyer present.” I let out a chilly laugh. “Jeez. I guess I have been writing too many of those mystery novels.”

Click—the line goes dead. But it was Art who hung up, not me. I stare at the phone, and then I look up to meet Gabe’s eyes. I brace myself for a fight.





TEN


June. Four and a half months ago. June 17th.


Two weeks after that night I botched kissing Sean, my dad is lugging a box of miscellaneous crap from his car to the doorway of my new apartment building, and I’m practically bursting out of my skin anticipating them seeing my place and meeting Sean. My mom’s standing just outside their Toyota Camry with her green eyes narrowed and seeming even more skittish than usual. She’s glancing from my stacked cardboard boxes to the glass door of the building, and I’m pretty sure she’s thinking about how someone could rob us. She’s always considered herself an unlucky person, which would never make sense to an outsider, only to my brother and me.

“Mom, you okay?”

That’s not a question I usually ask her, but we’re so out of our norm it feels all right. We never came down to New York City when I was growing up, even though it was only a few hours south of our town.

“I’m fine, Junebug,” she says, and indeed her using my nickname is a sign that this is a good day for her; that she’s truly all right, maybe just a little nervous. Maybe she’s just not sure about all this, even though I explained to her that Sean and I met for coffee a few times during the past two weeks and ironed out all the details of living together (I also used those coffee talks to make it abundantly clear to him that it was all just-friends and platonic).

My dad puts a shower caddy next to the building’s front door. My heart is full when I see it, because I know my mom put this together for me; there’s the strawberry shampoo and conditioner I like, and the kind of loofah no one I know uses, but some people must because they always sell them in the checkout section at Marshalls. I want to thank her, but she always shuts down when I get emotional, so instead I gesture to the chain-link fence and boarded-up window I can tell she’s fixating on, and I say, “Mom, I know this street might look understated, but it’s actually a highly coveted neighborhood.”