It takes almost no time at all for him to ask, “Why, Reese, because you have so many guys waiting for you back home?” He laughs, but it’s not a funny laugh. It’s cruel. Tears sting my eyes, and I think of all the things I said to him that I never said to anyone else. “You said so yourself. They don’t like you. No one thinks of you like that. No one thinks you’re pretty.”
No one thinks you’re pretty.
My heart hurts. There’s a squeezing feeling in my chest, my ribs. My chin trembles.
“You’re not crying, Reese, are you?” he asks. When I say nothing, he says, “So you’re not sick then,” running his hands through his hair, his cruelty turning to anger. “So you were lying.”
“Just leave me alone, Daniel. Go away.”
“You’re making a mistake, Reese. You’ll be sorry,” he says.
“I don’t care. Just go away.”
He stands there a long time. Saying nothing. Breathing hard while I don’t breathe. While I hold my breath, my heart pounding inside of me until it hurts.
“You’ll regret this,” he says. “Do you hear me? You’ll fucking regret this.”
I won’t. The only thing I regret is ever liking him.
He backs slowly away. When I can’t see him anymore, I slide down in bed, lying on my side with the covers pulled up to my neck.
I think he’s gone, that he’s left.
But then, from outside, I hear the flick of a lighter and see the glowing cherry at the end of a joint. I smell weed.
He’s not gone.
He’s still out there, watching me from the trees because I’m backlit by the kitchen light, on full display.
Lightning flashes in the sky again. Thunder rolls. It never rains.
I stare at the glowing red embers, at the movement of them as he inhales and then lowers his arm to his side, over and over again.
In time, he puts out the joint so I can’t see where he is anymore.
It doesn’t matter because even if I can’t see him, I know he hasn’t left. He’s still there.
He’s still watching me.
Courtney
In the morning, I find Mae crying for Emily when I get up. She’s disconsolate, curled into a ball on the sofa, folded over and weeping into the arm of it. I sit down beside her and rub her back, and then later, once I’ve managed to calm her down, I show Elliott the key to the cottage next door. “Ms. Dahl said the police have finished their investigation and that we can go in and take what we need. The kids might like some of their and Emily’s and Nolan’s things,” I say, thinking it might help Mae if she had something of Emily’s to hold.
Elliott agrees, though we haven’t been on the best terms since our argument yesterday afternoon. Instead, we’ve avoided one another, giving each other a wide berth, which is hard to do in a cottage this size.
Still, he comes with me. We don’t tell the kids where we’re going, only that they should stay inside, lock the door, and that we’ll be back in a couple minutes. Elliott and I are quiet as we climb the hill to the cottage, the tension in the air palpable. I didn’t sleep again last night, lying awake beside him all night. He never reached for me. He didn’t whisper an apology in the darkness. He didn’t tell me good-night or say that he loved me. I didn’t say anything either. Instead, I lay there, thinking through things, trying to remember every moment of the last few days, the details I might have forgotten.
There was one.
It came to me in the middle of the night. I remembered that the night before Reese disappeared, she and Elliott were in the small kitchen together in Emily and Nolan’s cottage. They were talking, which I remember only because Nolan, Emily and I were waiting for Elliott for so long that eventually I took his turn at rummy so the rest of us could play.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Elliott asks now as we arrive at the cottage. He turns to me, standing before the front door with the key in his hand.
I don’t answer. Instead, I search his face, his eyes. Elliott’s chin juts out, his jawline hard. As I watch, he reaches up to rub his temples as if feeling a headache coming on.
I say, “I thought about something last night.”
“What?” he asks, frowning, and already, I can hear the impatience in his tone.
