But when she looked at Markos, Lee saw no deception or agenda. Markos seemed to understand loss and responsibility.
“I’m scared all the time,” said Lee softly. “Not just about Regan. About…everything. My brain tells me terrible things.”
“Like what?” Markos asked.
Lee hesitated. “Like…my family would be better off without me. Like, I’ll never feel peace. Finding Regan won’t even change anything because I’ll still be…I’ll still feel this way.”
She waited for him to offer platitudes. Markos kept his eyes on her face. “This voice,” he said finally. “Is it telling you the truth?”
“It feels like the truth.”
“Possible, this voice is a liar,” said Markos.
Lee felt a small space opening between herself and Depression’s relentless narrative. She nodded. “Possible,” she acquiesced.
“As soon as the warrant comes through,” said Markos, “we’ll know which flight Regan was on and where she went.”
Lee nodded.
“I cannot promise what condition she will be in, Lee,” said Markos. “But I promise we will not stop looking.” Lee stared at Markos, hearing Depression’s warning:Don’t trust him. Don’t be vulnerable.
She thought of a quiet rebuttal:Possible, this voice is a liar.
Her chest grew warm, and her stomach eased. For a moment, hope flickered inside Lee. Markos’s hand found hers (finally), and he held her fingers.
Possible, she would feel peace.
Lee caught sight of their reflection in the front window of a cottage: grieving woman being comforted by handsome cop. Even now, she was arranging herself for an imagined audience. Embarrassed, Lee pulled her hand away.
35
Lee
Days passed—why was the warranttaking such a long time to reveal any information from the flight manifests? When Lee complained, Markos told her Greece was a slow-moving bureaucracy. Lee suspected, too, that a missing, middle-aged American just wasn’t a priority. Crime shows implied that police departments dropped everything to focus on a single case, but Markos was not Mariana van Zeller; Regan’s disappearance not aTraffickedepisode.
Lee discovered a dull and exhausting sense of purpose trying to take care of the girls, her admiration for Regan growing by the hour. How had Regan tackled the sink full of dirty dishes day after day? The trash bag full to bursting, teenaged dirty clothes everywhere, counters somehow splattered with tomato sauceandspilled milk? No wonder Lee’s sister had craved an internet thrill!
—
After dragging the garbage to the street one night, Lee sat on the couch next to Flora, who was clicking through her mother’s camera roll on her own computer. (Flora and her crew had accessedthe images as soon as Regan didn’t return home; they’d been poring over them since, to no avail.) Lee winced, gazing at Regan’s badly lit selfies. Regan had lost weight; she looked wan and desperate. In many of the photos, she was holding her hair back to show a pair of diamond earrings.
“What’s the deal with the earrings?” muttered Lee, thinking of the empty jewelry box in Regan’s bedside table drawer.
“She got all these stupid gifts from him.” Flora’s shoulders fell forward a bit. “I talk about François like he’s aperson,” she said, disgustedly.
Lee had often wondered ifshewere really a person—or just the character named Lee Perkins that she played on her “reality” show. For example: Right now, Lee felt as if she were in some sort of crime drama, playing a concerned aunt helping a worried child find her mother. Yet putting her arm around Flora had been instinctual; Flora’s head on Lee’s shoulder was true.
But it also would have looked good for the television crew.
“I should have asked more questions when she said she’d met someone,” sighed Lee.
“It’s not like you guys are close,” said Flora.
“Ouch,” said Lee.
“But it’s true, Auntie Lee, right?”
Lee shrugged. “I guess,” she said. “Yeah.”
