He looks deep into my eyes, smiles, and then he’s gone.
When my phone comes to life, my heart does a little jump at the red circle above the green call button. A voicemail, from a number I don’t know. This is bad. I hold my breath as I press Play.
Taylor? Hello? Is this working?
It’s the tentative voice of Ms. Richardson, a family friend who lives three streets down from us. She usually calls our landline, and I’ve never had to save her number in my contacts.
Hello Taylor, it’s Madeline. I… Well this might seem strange but I went on my walk early this morning, and I noticed your car wasn’t there. Then I remembered it wasn’t there yesterday, either. At least I think so. My memory is not what it used to be. I thought I’d check in on you. It’s not like you to disappear.
She pauses, like she expects me to jump in and agree. She’s right. I have almost always been there in that house. Good Taylor, forever present.
Well, um, so I went to ring the bell, and I guess you really weren’t there.That bothered me a bit, so I went for another walk after lunch, and that’s when I saw a man.
My hand clenches around the phone, my heart in knots.
I was far away so I couldn’t see who it was… Anyway, he stood by the door for a while.
She clears her throat, and the wait feels excruciating. Get on with it, Madeline.
He had a suit on, but that doesn’t mean anything these days. I watched… You know I wanted to make sure you were okay now that… Well, I know what it’s like to be all alone.
It’s not exactly the same situation though, is it? Mr. and Ms. Richardson were happily married for something like forty years before he died a few years back. They had three children, some of whom now have children of their own. Sure, Madeline will chew your ear off about how her family doesn’t visit her anywhere near as much as she’d like them to—they live so close! No excuse!—but we’re not the same kind of alone.
Anyway, he searched around for a while, and then I saw he was holding something.
I press the phone harder against my ear, like that will make her speak faster. My heart stammers in my chest, trying to picture this man loitering around the house. Suddenly it hits me, how far away I am, how quickly I left. And I can’t explain any of it to anyone.
He had the keys! To your house!
Ms. Richardson pauses for effect, as if she knows how much this will startle me.
And he went in.
She’s whispering now, like she’s afraid of the man coming after her. I am too, and I’m on the other side of the world.
He didn’t try to hide or anything. I’d say he was in there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. It felt… Well, I don’t know. With all the changes your familyhas gone through… Call me back, okay?
I put down the phone, my mind running a million miles an hour. There’s only one man who has the keys to the house, and there’s no way in hell he was there this morning. He’s gone, forever.
My brain buzzing, I check my social media feeds. I never post on there; I have nothing to show, but I can’t help checking on other people’s lives. Pictures of Paris fill my screen as I scroll. Happy people having fun in this beautiful city. Drinking wine at the terrace of a famous restaurant. Taking in the view of the Eiffel Tower. Posing on the sidewalk of a charming little street. Maybe it’s all for show, snippets of fantasies that don’t come close to reality, but I buy it all.
I can’t call Madeline back. Deep down, she means well—I still wear the emerald-green scarf she knit for me many years ago—but she’ll be full of questions and I’ll have none of the answers. Maybe I should go home, forget about my past, forget about what my future could have been. I brush away the thought as quickly as it comes, Amir’s words ring in my ears.
No one’s here to judge you.
But that’s not true. BecauseI’mhere to judge me. And maybe this guy thinks this is all just a bit of fun to me. Some kind of self-empowerment crap about how women can have it all, even a solo honeymoon. And I can’t tell him how wrong he is, because no one would understand what led me here. I got in with the wrong family, the wrong person. I believed the lies fed to me, when I’d sworn nothing would hurt me anymore.
So maybe that’s why I’m here. For closure.
One last hurrah. And then I, too, will go away forever.
Chapter 8
Cassie
Now
No amount of staring at the three dots on my phone changes the fact that Darren doesn’t text again. Olivier and I finish our mains, and still nothing.
