“You’re on a mission,” he says. “I can tell it’s a big one from the way you’ve been acting.”
He’s trying to bait me into asking how, exactly, I’ve been acting. But I just want to get this interrogation over with, so I don’t take it.
“It should be straightforward,” I say. “A month tops. Some sibling rivalry over a phone app called Budgie.”
Waylen’s expression is unreadable. He grabs his phone, scrolls through something on the screen, and then slides it to me. It’s a Reddit post titledMen who got away with murder? Help! Trying to research for a college paper.
I glance at Waylen, who scrolls down to the third reply. It’s about Bertram Casimir, and it’s a vague accusation. Some anonymous poster claims to have worked for a small copy and print center outside of London, and the parents of a young woman named Annie came in and printed up a hundred missing person posters. One of the posters hung outside of the copy center for a week before it was torn down. It promised a ten-thousand-pound reward for information leading to her safe return. She was last seen leaving the UK with her boyfriend, tech mogul Bertram Casimir.
“Seems like it’s not that straightforward,” Waylen says.
“How did you get his name?” I ask.
Wrong question to ask. His neutral expression betrays his frustration. “You forget I used to be in this life too, Margaux,” he says, taking on the tone he uses when he’s being stern with our child, like he thinks every word he’s about to say is dire. “I have my ways of finding out.”
“You could have asked me,” I say. “It’s never been a secret I’ve kept from you.”
“Don’t talk to me about secrets,” he says, and sighs. “I think you know what I mean. It’s been weeks since we’ve talked about anything besides what to make for dinner.”
“I didn’t think wehadto talk about everything,” I say. “I thought we just knew.”
“We used to,” he says, and the words hit me harder than they have any right to.
Waylen isn’t confrontational. And according to the court-ordered therapist I had when I was twelve after my parents died, I am a classic avoider. To me, this feels like a match made in heaven. We never have to talk about anything. If we ignore it, maybe the problems will pack up their bags and leave.
But Waylen has been stewing on this one for a while. I can see it in the way he fidgets with his coffee mug and avoids my eyes. “How long is this going to last?” he asks me. “How long until Collette and I are enough?”
“Don’t do that,” I snap. “Don’t bring Collette into this.”
“She’s nevernotbeen in this,” he counters. “She’s the reason for everything.”
He’s right, but I try not to think about that. The morning I paced back and forth in the bathroom of my tiny apartment, waiting to see if two pink lines were going toshow up on the stick, my heart was beating out of my chest. I buried the positive test in the wastebasket under wads of tissues and didn’t tell Waylen until a doctor had confirmed. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready.
But my fears about motherhood were washed away in the tsunami of Waylen’s excitement. I told him over dinner, nervously pushing around my penne alla vodka with my fork. He threw back his chair, lifted me from mine, and spun me around, laughing a madman’s laugh of pure glee. He’d always wanted a family.
When I think about my life since Collette was born, there’s no regret about keeping her now. But the rest of it—the wedding, Waylen’s sister doing my hair and makeup before I went to the altar, the mortgage and the suburbs, Waylen trading his vigilantism for a stable career in publishing—I’ve been waiting to love as much as I love my daughter. One of these days I’ll have to admit that I don’t. I just don’t.
As if Waylen can read my thoughts, he softens. “Of course I worry every time you walk out that door. I know the risks of what you do. I used to do it too. And I can’t just call the police if you disappear on me.”
I stare at the granite countertop. Silver swirls with glittering flecks. Waylen’s mother hired an interior decorator as her wedding gift to us, and I let her have carte blanche over all the decisions.“You’re so agreeable, dear,”she’d said. But my head was spinning. When the walls are closing in on you, you aren’t concerned with which paint swatch looks best on them or whether to choose a ceramic sink or a steel one.
“I look at the parents at Collette’s school,” I finally say. Waylen leans in, eager for my words. “And I think they’re so lucky to be worried about such little things. They never think about what’s happening out there.” I nod to the window, gesturing to the greater world. But even from here, things look peaceful. Flurries of snow melt on the pavement.
The world looks safe from here. When something terrible happens on the news, we press for details. We try to think about the ways it could never happen to us, but the truth is that nowhere is truly safe. Darkness moves like a winter breeze.
By the time Collette arrived, Waylen was eager to prove that we could have what he called a normal life and was already trying to convince me to ditch the vigilantism. He had worked his way up to an editorial position at his publisher. And because we lived in a Connecticut suburb ninety minutes outside of Manhattan, he was making New York money without having to pay New York expenses. “You don’t have to work,” Waylen told me. “Take up painting. Learn how to fix cars. Whatever makes you happy.” With one little caveat that he didn’t say out loud, of course:Stop trying to fix the world.
I tried for a few months. I avoided the news. I tried journaling. I watched videos on meditative breathing. Collette was a low-maintenance infant. Try as I might, I couldn’t connect with the other parents at the revolving “mommy and me” classes I signed up for. I became an insomniac. When I put Collette down in the afternoon, I napped between her feedings.
Until the day I heard strange footsteps coming up the stairs. Groggily, I’d awoken in the rocking chair in the nursery and looked out the window. It was late afternoon, that time when the sky feels too bright and yet dark at the same time. Waylen’s car wasn’t in the driveway, and I knew something wasn’t right.
Paralyzed by fear, I watched as a stranger’s shoes walked past the crack below the nursery door. Collette was awake and staring too. I slid my hand between the slats in the crib and pressed one finger to her puckered mouth, willing her not to cry, not to make a sound.
I still don’t know how long we stayed like that. Her warm little breaths against my skin, both of us listening as someone rummaged through our lives. I could hear him shuffling through my jewelry box in the bedroom. He would take my mother’s engagement ring, the ruby earrings that had been in my family for three generations. He wouldn’t bother trying to crack the safe in the closet—he took the whole thing, containing ten thousand dollars cash, among which, the pickle jar of my old waitressing tips that Waylen and I kept for sentimental value.
My cell phone rang from where I’d left it on my bedside table. Waylen would be calling to check on me, to ask if the rash on Collette’s cheek was clearing up, and if I wanted him to bring home something for dinner. The phone rang until it went to voicemail, and then he tried again. The strange footsteps stopped moving. I squeezed my eyes shut.
I think our intruder realized that someone was home. Nobody leaves their cell phone behind. He would be lookingat the photo that came up when Waylen called me: us on New Year’s Eve, his hand under my chin before he pulled me in for a kiss.
