An Anonymous Girl(89)

“You sent your wife a fake text?” How desperate he must have been, I think.

Thomas looks down at his hands. “I thought for sure Lydia would leave me if I cheated on her. It seemed like an easy way out. She wrote a whole book titled The Morality of Marriage. I never believed she’d insist on trying to repair our relationship.”

He still hasn’t answered a basic question: Why didn’t he just admit he had the affair with April?

So I ask him.

He picks up his mug and takes a sip, his fingers covering up most of the words in the quote. Maybe he’s trying to buy time.

Then he puts it down. But the words facing me are different because he twisted the position of the mug when he moved it: take is equal.

Like a jigsaw puzzle coming together, the entire line blooms in my mind: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

I was right: Thomas must have sung that line by the Beatles to April on the night when they were together. That’s how she discovered the song she listened to with her mother.

“April was so young,” Thomas finally says. “I thought it might be hard for Lydia to know I’d chosen a twenty-three-year-old.” He appears even sadder now than he did when I first came in; I swear I can see him fighting back tears. “I didn’t know at first how damaged April was. I figured we both wanted a one-night thing . . .”

He looks at me meaningfully, and I know what he isn’t saying: Like you and I did.

I feel my cheeks grow warm. Inside my pocket, my phone vibrates again. Somehow it feels more insistent now.

“How did April become subject 5?” I ask, trying to ignore the buzzing against my leg. My skin feels prickly, like the vibration is spreading out across my entire body. Like it’s trying to consume me.

I glance to my left, at the closed door to Thomas’s office. I didn’t see him lock it. I don’t recall him bolting the main door to the suite after he let me in, either.

Thomas no longer feels like a threat to me. But I can sense danger lurking nearby, like the curl of smoke from an approaching fire.

“April got really attached to me, for some reason,” Thomas continues. “She called and texted a bunch of times. I tried to let her down gently . . . She knew from the beginning I was married. A couple weeks later, it stopped as abruptly as it all started. I figured she’d moved on, met somebody new.”

He pinches his forehead between his thumb and index finger, like he has a headache.

Hurry, I think to myself urgently. I can’t identify why, but my instincts are telling me to get out of this office quickly.

Thomas takes another sip from his mug before he continues. “Then Lydia came home and told me about this new subject in her study, a young woman who’d had a traumatic reaction to the experience. We talked about how the survey must have triggered something, perhaps a repressed memory. I was the one who encouraged Lydia to talk to her in person, to help her. I didn’t know it was April. Lydia only ever called her Subject 5.” Thomas lets out a harsh laugh that seems to encapsulate all the snarled, complicated feelings he must hold. “I didn’t realize April and Subject 5 were the same person until a private investigator contacted Lydia about her file.”

I’m barely breathing. I don’t want to interrupt him; I’m desperate to hear what else he knows. But I’m also acutely aware of the phone against my leg. I’m waiting for the buzzing to start up again.

“I’ve had some time to piece it together,” Thomas finally says. “And my best guess is that April figured out who my wife was. Then she signed up for the study because it was a link to me. Or maybe she felt like Lydia was her competition and she wanted to learn more about her.”

My head jerks to the right, toward the window. What was it that commanded my attention? Maybe a muffled noise, or a movement on the sidewalk or street outside. The blinds are angled, so I can only catch shards of the view. I can’t tell if Noah is there.

Whatever danger I’m sensing does not appear to be emanating from Thomas. I believe his story: He wasn’t in contact with April in the weeks before her death.

It isn’t just blind faith or my instincts that tells me this, however. I’ve read April’s file a half dozen times by now. And I’ve learned a key piece of information about the relationship between Dr. Shields and April: I know some of what happened between them on the night that April died.

Dr. Shields wrote about it in script that looks more jagged than her usual graceful handwriting. Their final encounter is documented on a page in the file right before April’s obituary, the one I looked up online. And I captured it all in photographs on the phone in my pocket, the one that feels unusually warm right now. The one I keep expecting to erupt again at any moment.

You disappointed me deeply, Katherine April Voss, Dr. Shields wrote. I thought I knew you. You were treated with such warmth and care, and you were given so much—intense attention to your well-being, carefully selected gifts, even encounters like the one tonight when you came to my home and perched on a kitchen stool, sipping a glass of wine while the slim gold bangle I’d taken off my arm and given to you slid down your wrist.

You were invited in.

Then you made the revelation that shattered everything, that put you in a completely different light: I made a mistake. I slept with a married man, just some guy I met at a bar. It only happened once.