I moved to the bedroom. Dresser drawers hung open, socks and boxers spilling onto the floor as I dug toward the back panels, my nails catching on the wood. There was a desperate, ugly rhythm to it—checking under the drawer liners, flipping the mattress, shaking out his old yearbooks.
The closet offered up nothing but ghosts. I moved through his suits, my hands diving into pockets only to find the debris of a life I was sure I knew: lint, gas receipts, a peppermint wrapper from a restaurant we’d visited months ago. Every empty pocket felt like a personal insult.
Still nothing.
I went back downstairs to his laptop, sitting closed on the kitchen counter where he'd left it over a week ago. I opened it and waited for it to wake up, then opened his browser history. Work sites. News articles. YouTube videos about fixing a leaking faucet. His email was already open, and I scrolled through the inbox, then sent items, then trash. Client correspondence. Spam. A thread with his sister about some TV show she was working on.
Clean. All of it was so unbearably, impossibly clean.
I stood there in the kitchen with the laptop screen casting blue light across the countertops, and something inside me cracked. I don't remember deciding to sit down. But suddenly I was on the floor with my back against the cabinet, and then I just... broke. The sound that came out of me didn't feel like it belonged to a person. My chest heaved and my throat burned. I pressed my face against my knees, trying to muffle it even though there was no one there to hear.
I was losing my mind. Tearing apart my own house like a crazy person, looking for proof of something I didn't even wantto be true. Ryan was dead. He was gone. And I was sitting on the kitchen floor at six-thirty on a Tuesday, surrounded by the wreckage of his dresser drawers and coat pockets, trying to find evidence that my husband had been lying to me.
I was supposed to be at work. I'd been on bereavement leave for just over a week and nobody had called to check in, which meant they were being respectful, which meant eventually I'd have to go back and sit in that basement and process other people's paperwork while mine was on fire.
The buzz of a phone made me lift my head.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand and reached for my phone on the counter, but the screen was dark.
The buzz came again, muffled, from somewhere near the sink.
Ryan's phone. Still sitting where I'd left it next to the wallet and the watch and the wedding ring. The screen was lit up with a notification.
I stood, my legs shaky, and picked it up.
The message preview showed just enough to read:
Ryan, please answer. I just want to know you're okay.
Chapter 5
Olivia
Ryan, please answer. I just want to know you're okay.
Iread the message once. Then again. Then a third time, like the words might rearrange themselves into something that made sense.
An unknown number. Ten digits with no name attached, no contact saved, nothing to tell me who was on the other end except the desperate familiarity of the message itself. I scrolled up, my thumb searching for the history that belonged with a message like that, but the screen was a blank void.
Please answer.
Not "Mr. Hartley" or "Hey" or any of the careful distance you'd use with a colleague or a client. Justplease, like they had the right to ask. Like they'd asked before and he'd answered.
I just want to know you're okay.
They cared. Whoever this was, they cared whether Ryan was safe. They were worried about him. And they had no idea that he wasn't okay, that he'd never be okay again, that he'd been gone for six days and was currently six feet under frozen ground in a cemetery on the other side of town.
My hands were shaking again. I set the phone down on the counter next to his wallet and his watch and took a step back, like distance would make it less real.
It didn't.
I couldn't call back. Couldn't text. What would I even say?Sorry, Ryan's dead, who is this?The thought of hearing a voice on the other end, of having to explain, of confirming what I already knew but didn't want to know—I couldn't do it.
But I needed to know who this was.
I grabbed my own phone and opened the browser, my fingers clumsy as I typed the number into Google. The results loaded and… nothing. Just articles about reverse phone lookup services and spam call databases. I tried adding quotation marks around it, searching again. Still nothing.
I opened one of the reverse lookup sites, the kind with banner ads promising to reveal anyone's identity for free. I entered the number and waited while the page loaded, a spinning wheel that felt like it was mocking me. Finally, the results appeared.
