The Night Before(18)

I drove my parents crazy. I know I did. They told me I did. I was hard to love. Maybe impossible. Maybe I still am.

I shove this all aside. Jonathan Fields is a nice man and he leans forward for his beer but really because he wants to be closer to me. I can feel it. These thoughts are wrong. These concerns are meaningless. I gather them so I can push away nice men like Jonathan Fields who want to love me. And I do this so I can keep finding the wrong men who won’t love me.

I want to cry. I feel tears coming, but I hold them back.

Knowledge is power, right? I will stop this from happening. This is why I came home. This is my job now. To stop old me from ruining my life.

I go to the bathroom. I splash cold water on my face. I get my shit together and return to the table.

Jonathan Fields gives me a huge smile. Then he opens his mouth to start a new conversation. Only it’s not new. It’s the same one he’s been trying to have all night.

“Okay,” he says. “So why is it you haven’t been back home sooner?”

What is going on here?

Why is he so interested in my past?

He seems to know about my list of concerns. Maybe he’s trying to stop me from making it any longer. But that’s exactly what he’s doing.

“You know what?” he says. “Let’s get out of here—go for a walk by the river.”

I tell myself it’s nothing. A molehill. Not a mountain. There are no instincts I can trust. No skills I can rely upon. Just determination.

My mouth opens and out comes the word he likes so much.

“Okay.”





NINE


Rosie. Present Day. Friday, 11 a.m. Branston, CT.

Another hour passed quickly. Rosie and Gabe drove in his car to meet Joe on Richmond Street. There was a frenzied discussion about what to do next and, again, whether they should call the police. Gabe didn’t weigh in. This was their call. And, in the end, Rosie’s. It was her sister who would have to live with the consequences, one way or the other.

Joe didn’t have to say it—the impact it could have on Laura, on her emotional stability, if they dredged up her past and forced her out of the shadow of anonymity she had created.

Gabe was the only one of them who was not reeling with fear, and on his face Rosie could see something even worse—resignation. Time felt precious, but that’s all it was. A feeling. An urgency fed by the panic of not knowing. If something bad had happened, it was over. They were already too late.

Rosie made the decision, though without the conviction she’d had even an hour before when they were standing in her kitchen. They would wait.

Joe took her minivan back to the house and she took his car and followed Gabe to the waterfront, where Laura’s phone had last sent a signal. The exact location was a parking lot between an office building and a gym. But that meant nothing—people coming to the restaurants and bars parked in all of the lots, and along the streets as well.

So they walked the streets and the paths between them, stopping in apartment buildings, asking people if they recognized any of the men from findlove.com. They had narrowed the thumbnail photos down to twenty-seven. Laura had said enough about him to rule out the rest. Full head of hair, clean-shaven, fit. Still, it was a needle in a haystack, and they landed back at the street where they’d parked their cars, with nothing helpful.

Gabe laid the sheets of photos on his hood, studying the faces.

“Do you recognize any of them?” Rosie asked. Gabe sometimes talked about his cases. Most of what he did was more mundane—working out glitches in corporate computer systems. But for his other work—using IT to investigate spouses—it was, invariably, women who hired him. And it always made Rosie think of her mother.

“Funny you should say that,” Gabe answered. “The last case where I needed to sort through this shitty website was Melissa’s. Her husband was trolling for younger women under a fake profile.”

“Sorry…” Rosie said. Gabe and Melissa liked to forget this little fact about how they met.

“No, don’t be. You know, it’s okay to sleep with your client as long as you marry her.” Gabe gave her a wink and Rosie managed a smile. But the levity slipped away quickly.

“Some of these guys have been on here for years. This one”—Gabe pointed to a man with a seductive smile, holding a fish at the end of a line—“he was on here two, three years ago—before Melissa’s case. I remember this stupid fish.”

Rosie looked at the picture. “We should cross him off the list. Laura would have mentioned the fish. She would have found it ridiculous.”

Gabe took out a pen and put an X through the photo.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “She would have psychoanalyzed the hell out of it—a pathetic attempt to convey success, manliness, dominion.”

“It’s a curse and a blessing—how she sees through everything and everyone.”

Gabe’s face returned to resignation. “Except herself,” he said. “She never understood why she did the things she did.”

Rosie began pacing the sidewalk, arms folded around herself, squinting from the sun, which was almost directly overhead. She checked her phone. It was eleven.

“The restaurants should be open now,” Gabe said. “Most of them serve lunch. The staff will be setting up.”