The Break(58)

“Gabe,” I say, startled. I lean forward to get off the couch, which is harder because Lila’s on me and it takes so long that there’s an awkward beat where he’s just standing there crying and I can’t get to him. “I’m so sorry,” I say as I finally get up and move across the floor. I press against him, Lila between us, and we sway together like a ship going down. “I’ll try harder,” I say. “We’ll do the thing Sylvie was talking about—the special therapy for PTSD.” Gabe cries harder and I can’t believe it. “And I love the name Grace,” I say quickly. “So don’t worry about that. Lila Grace is a beautiful name.”

He pulls away. He looks at me, but everything feels different. Usually when Gabe looks at me—or at any woman, really—he’s a vortex: he can pull you into his dark stare with hardly any effort at all. It’s who he is. It’s part of his charm, his charisma. But now? I see terror in his gaze, in his bloodshot eyes and the set of his shoulders.

“You’re scaring me,” I whisper.

He puts his big hands on my arms. “Me too,” he says. “You’re scaring me, Rowan.”

“Where are my sonogram pictures?” I ask, not ready to let go of this. “Did you take them?”

“Rowan,” Gabe says, dark lashes fluttering. He sucks in a breath, his broad chest heaving with it. “June came here that night.”

I shake my head just slightly, trying to get between his words. “What? Which night?” I ask.

“After you went to see her in the café with Lila, the day you snuck out to apologize to her.” I flinch at his choice of language: snuck out, like I’m a teenager, a prisoner. “She was so upset that night when she got here,” he says.

“Because of me?” I ask.

And then after I say it, it dawns on me that he just lied to the police—we both just told the detective that we hadn’t seen June since I met her in the café.

“Well, sort of, it’s hard to . . .” His voice trails off, and I want to shake him. He clears his throat, looks down at our little girl between us. He’s more matter-of-fact when he says, “Your meeting really upset her. She’s come to really care about you, and . . .”

I hold up a hand. “I didn’t do anything other than tell her I was sorry, and she told me she was taking some time to get away to go to her parents, and we talked about Lila a little, and that was it. That and her roommate, Sean, came, and then he was waiting for her outside, and . . .”

“Did you tell the police that?”

“About Sean? You heard me tell the police that. I just told the detective about Sean waiting for her and how they left together.”

Gabe nods his head too quickly. What’s wrong with him? “Right,” he says. “I remember that. And hopefully they’re pursuing Sean as a lead. But then she came here that night, incredibly upset, and . . .”

“And you didn’t tell the detective?” I ask. My heart is off now, skipping beats. “What if someone hurt her, and you’re withholding information they need to find her?” Lila is so hot against me I feel like I could pass out. “Do you have any idea the kind of trouble you could get us in by lying to a cop?”

Gabe puts an arm out to touch us—me? Lila? I’m not sure—and I yank my arm away. “Rowan,” he says, “do you have any idea the kind of trouble we could be in if they find out I saw her last?”

“But you don’t even know that’s true,” I say. “She could have left here and gone out with a friend. You could be lying to the authorities for absolutely no reason.”

“I doubt she went back out with friends,” Gabe says. “She’d just gone out for drinks with Kai. You heard the detective—the day she disappeared started with you meeting her in the café, then she went off with Sean, and then much later: drinks out with Kai. As far as the detective knows, Kai is the last person who saw her alive.”

He sounds like a character in one of the TV shows he used to write for, recounting a timeline, catching up the audience.



“But the truth is that you were the last person we know who saw her alive,” I say slowly, the words physically painful. Alive. How are we having this conversation? How is this real? “And we’re telling the cops that, Gabe; we have an obligation to June—to protect her.”

Gabe’s eyes go blank, and then, like a robot, he says, “I didn’t do anything to June.”

“Then why are you lying?” I ask, more furious by the second. “You have to go to the cops—or call that detective right now, Gabe—you have to tell him.”

“But what if she’s dead?” Gabe asks, and my blood goes icy. “What if she’s dead, and there’s no way we can help her because it already happened, and it looks like I was somehow involved in it because I was the last person to see her on the night she disappeared?”

I put a hand to my forehead. I need to sit back down—I can’t just stand here in the middle of our living room, unmoored. “I don’t get it,” I say, inching back in the direction of the sofa. “Why would June ever come to our apartment if she was so upset by me? And where were Lila and I during your little meeting? In my bedroom?”

My bedroom, not our bedroom. Pronouns are one of the verbal indicators of how a character views her surroundings; her territory; her lover; her family—the things that belong to her. And because he’s a writer, too, Gabe catches it.