That was when he saw it. Small. White. Lined. Torn from a spiral bound notebook, a Clairefontaine, Sutton’s favorite for the smooth, lovely paper.
This…thing…was incongruous with the rest of their spotless kitchen. Sutton was above all things a pathological neatnik. She’d never just leave something lying about.
All the happiness fled. He knew. He just knew. He’d been all wrong. She hadn’t gone running.
He picked up the note.
Dear Ethan,
I’m sorry to do this to you, but I need some time away. I’ve been unhappy, you know that. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Forgive me for being a coward. Forgive me, for so many things.
Don’t look for me.
S
She was gone.
He felt something squeezing in his chest, a pain of sorts, and realized that his heart had just broken. He’d always thought that a stupid, silly term, but now he knew. It could happen, it was happening. He was being torn in two, torn to shreds. No wonder there were rites warning against this—What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
God was ripping him apart in punishment, and he deserved it. He deserved it all.
He didn’t cry. There were no tears left for either of them to shed.
He put the note down carefully, as if it were a bomb that might go off with the wrong touch. Went to their bedroom. Nothing seemed out of place. Her brush, her makeup case, her toothbrush, all lined up carefully on the marble. Her suitcase was in the closet.
He went back downstairs to her office, at the back of the house. Doubled checked.
Her laptop was on her desk.
Her cellphone was in the charger.
Her purse was on the floor next to her chair.
Her wallet inside, the smiling DMV photo that made her look like a model.
Like a zombie, he moved back to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and got out the milk. Poured cereal in the bowl. Dropped the stevia into his tea. Sat at the empty table, stared at the spot where his wife’s head should have been.
What was he supposed to do now? Where could she be? He ran through the possibilities, the places she loved, discarding one after another. Surely he was wrong in his thinking. Surely she’d simply run away, to one of her friends. That’s where she’d gone. Should he call Ivy and see if Sutton was camped in her kitchen, instead of his? Should he give her some time, and space, like she asked?
She left without her things, Ethan. Sutton’s lifelines are her laptop and phone. It’s her office, her world.
A dawning realization. Sutton hadn’t shaken the depression, not completely. She was still prone to fits of melancholy. She might have done something stupid, crazy. She’d tried once before, after…Oh, God. Her words. Perhaps she was telling him exactly what she’d done.
I’m a coward. Forgive me. Don’t look for me.
He threw the bowl of cereal across the room.
“Bloody fucking hell. You selfish, heartless bitch.”
DID SHE, OR DIDN’T SHE?
Don’t look for me.
Those were the last words she’d used to him.
And so he didn’t. Not right away, at least. He sat and wrapped his mind around the situation. Then he searched through everything of hers he could find, looking for something, anything, that might give answers.
Nothing. It was like she’d gone to take a shower and disappeared through the water into another land.
He went into deep, irreversible denial. She is fine, he told himself. She’s taking a break. The self-talk worked. His morbid thoughts fled. He knew, deep in his heart, Sutton would never be that selfish.
He gave her three hours to come back, three long, quiet as the bone hours, and then, when the idea that she might actually be in some sort of trouble started to eat at him, began calling round. Of course he did. He wasn’t a total asshole, despite what most people thought. It was the success—people automatically assumed because he was a man, and he didn’t like to give interviews, and held people at arm’s length at signings and he kept himself off of social media and focused on his work, he was a dick. Maybe he was.
He called her friends—there weren’t many, but the ones she had were close, bosom buddies, BFFs.
Rachel hadn’t seen her and was brusquely late for work. Out of character for her; a yoga teacher, she was generally the most calm and friendly of Sutton’s friends.
Ellen, the head of library sciences at Vanderbilt University, didn’t answer her mobile; he left an innocuous “Hey, call me,” message.
Filly (Phyllis, really, but she hated to be called by her given name) answered her landline on the first ring, no doubt assuming it was Sutton calling. Even at Ethan’s voice, her greeting was cheery and excited. When Ethan asked if she’d seen Sutton, she seemed genuinely concerned, but claimed they hadn’t talked for a few days because Sutton had been so busy. He couldn’t help it, Filly’s concern was so genuine and helpful he immediately suspected she knew something, but when pressed, she reassured him Sutton was probably just out for a run and told him to call her when Sutton showed up, then got off the phone with a lame excuse about her baby crying. Way to twist the knife, Filly.
Ivy was out of town on business, or he’d have called her first. Ivy was friends with them both. She was Sutton’s closest friend and confidant, a true part of their lives. Had been for three years now. He glanced at his watch, hesitated for a minute, then sent a text. A self-employed stock broker, she was good about keeping her phone on her. She’d get back when she was able, she always did.
He sat at the table, head in his hands. Jumped a mile when the phone rang. He didn’t bother looking at the Caller ID, answered with a breathless, “Sutton?”
“It’s Siobhan. What’s wrong?”
Oh, bloody retching hell. Sutton’s mother was the last person he wanted to involve in this. To put it mildly, Siobhan and Sutton weren’t close, and Sutton would be furious with him if she knew he’d spoken to her at all.
Deflect, and get her off the phone.
“Good morning, Siobhan. How are you?”
“Has something happened to Sutton?”
“No, no. Everything is fine.”
“Let me guess. She stormed off and won’t return your calls.”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I haven’t seen or spoken to my daughter in weeks. By the way, thank you for the cruise. The Adriatic was amazing. You should take her sometime.”
The sudden urge to confess, to shake this venal woman from her self-absorbed life, was overwhelming, and the words spilled from his mouth. He told her what he’d left out of his previous conversations.
“She’s gone, Siobhan. She left a note and walked out on me. I’m worried about her. She didn’t take her things—her phone, her computer, her wallet are all here.” As if that would explain it all.
And it did, enough at least that his motherin-law reacted. “I’m on my way over,” and she hung up on him.
Oh, bollocks. All he needed was Siobhan wandering the house looking for clues. Looking in the corners, at the dust and secrets.
You’re an idiot, Ethan. Whyever did you tell her? That desperate, are we?
He poured himself a fresh cup of tea, looked around. Fuck cleaning up. So the place wasn’t pristine. Who cared. Siobhan would find a flaw, a fault, no matter what. They could scour the place top to bottom, have it Architectural Digest photoshoot ready, and she’d still want to move a vase or find a small part of the counter with a smear.
Siobhan Healy—Shiv-awn, for the uninitiated, which she delighted in sharing, loudly—took pride in being different. Her friends (and some of her enemies, Sutton included) called her Shiv for short. She was Sutton’s opposite in every way, looks (small and dark, Black Irish with her ebony hair liberally streaked with gray and cobalt eyes, face pinched and mean) temperament (brash and extroverted; Siobhan adored attention, good or bad) speech (lowbrow, in Ethan’s mind, though she didn’t have an accent, she claime
d she was from a Dublin slum and never hesitated to share the story of her continually upward journey.)
She’d come to the States and married a succession of men, each wealthier than the last. She was on husband four now, a meek-mannered man named Alan, who liked to make jokes, corny jokes, about he and Ethan—hey, we should go into business together, call ourselves…Ethan Alan, ha ha ha ha, get it, Ethan Alan—when he drank too much.
Ethan wasn’t sure how this woman could have created her daughter, often wondered about their storied past, but Siobhan and Sutton both refused to ever talk about her childhood, punctuated however briefly by the one night stand sperm donor who was her father. It wasn’t, as Sutton said, one of the husbands. He was anonymous. Never around. Sutton had never met him.
Ethan found that sad. His own parents had been kind, generous people, though he hadn’t understood them well, nor they him. They were both gone now. They’d died quietly and unobtrusively four months apart when he was twenty-two. He’d been sad, but not devastated. They’d sent him to public school when he was a wee lad, and he’d only seen them at breaks. Ethan had always been bookish; it was the all-boys school he attended that shaped his personality: brash and wildly creative. It was a fine way to grow up, but Ethan wanted something different for his life. He’d always dreamed of a close-knit, exuberant household for his own family one day. Children running in the backyard, dogs playing and barking, a knockout wife, madly in love. Safe and stable.
The American dream. That’s one reason he’d moved to America, after all.
Safe and stable. He’d tried. Lord knew, he’d tried.
A text dinged. Ivy.
I haven’t seen her, or talked to her since I left on my trip. We chatted Thursday and she seemed fine. Do I need to come home? Do you need help?
Ivy: always the one willing to lend a hand, pitch in, make their lives easier.
He sent back: No, I’m sure she’s just gone off to upset us all.
Ivy sent back an emoticon that he took to mean “eye roll”. He didn’t understand emoticons. Or abbreviations. LOL. BRB. For God’s sake, when had it become so difficult to actually use words anymore?
The doorbell sounded, impatient, as if it were being stabbed repeatedly with a thick finger—which of course it was. He opened the door for his motherin-law, who sailed through like the Queen Mary, then turned on him. “So what did you do to upset my daughter now?”
Her dyed black hair was shoved under a dingy Nashville Sounds baseball cap; she was unkempt and smelled like stale liquor. She and the mister must have been hitting the bottle hard the night before. They liked to party, liked to hang out at their country club with other well-soused individuals, eating good food and drinking good wine and lamenting their fates. Such a lovely woman.
“I didn’t do anything. I woke up this morning and she was gone. She left me a note.”
“Show me.”
Biting back the response he wanted to give, he instead led her into the kitchen and handed her the paper. She read it three times, lips moving as she did, and he wondered again how this dull, crass woman had created the glorious Titan he’d married.
Though during Sutton’s bad times, the breakdowns, he saw bits of Siobhan in her.
Siobhan set the note down and crossed her arms on her chest. “Where do you think she’s gone?” Her voice was curiously dispassionate, missing its usual aggression toward him.
He shook his head. “I was hoping you’d have an idea. I’ve called her girlfriends. They say they haven’t heard from her.”
“Did you tell them about the note?
“I mentioned it to Filly and Ivy. I got the sense Filly might know something but wasn’t willing to say.”
She waved a hand. “Filly has always loved Sutton’s drama, and is hoping it will rub off on her. She’s a sad little woman living through everyone around her. She doesn’t know anything, or she’d already be here, glorying.” Siobhan played with the edge of the paper, sat down at the table.
“Sutton’s been in bad shape since the baby,” Ethan offered, almost unwilling to open the door. But he needed help, damn it.
Siobhan nodded, surprisingly grave. “Can you blame her?”
“Of course not. But I kept hoping… Siobhan, is there something else I should know? Did she tell you she was leaving me? You don’t seem terribly surprised by this.”
She gave a windy sigh that smelled suspiciously like dirty martinis. “Sit down.”
Ethan wasn’t used to taking orders in his own house, especially from a woman he wasn’t fond of, but he perched on a counter stool and set his hands on his knees. Siobhan watched him for a moment.
“When we spoke last, a few months ago, Sutton told me she was very unhappy. It wasn’t like her to confide in me. You know we don’t always see eye to eye about her choices.”
“If you mean how you suggested she leave me last year after Dashiell… I know. She told me all about it.”
“Do you blame me, Ethan?” That strange, dispassionate tone again. Almost as if they were confidants here, not enemies. “You treated her badly. You handled things poorly. She was in bad shape and you were too busy with your little fling to notice.”
His little fling. His stomach clenched. No one could know the truth there, it would destroy them all, Sutton especially.
“I made a mistake. I came clean, I apologized. We were getting things back on track. We’d talked about… We talked about moving, maybe, getting away from all the bad memories. Starting over.”
“Moving? Where?”
“Back to London.”
“I see. And Sutton was happy to do that?”
“We hadn’t made any concrete decisions. We were talking. Planning. The future…bloody hell, Siobhan, at least she was talking to me again. You have no idea what the past year has been like, not really, for either one of us. It’s been torture. Oh, yes, we’ve put on a brave front. But once the door closed and the people disappeared, once the funeral was over and the neighborhood stopped tiptoeing around, we were left alone, to try and muddle through. It was hell.”
“I can imagine,” she said, and she sounded almost like she cared. He knew she didn’t, not really. She was in it for the money. Siobhan and Sutton had a weird, twisted relationship, more like catty girlfriends who despised one another than mother and daughter. But despite all his advice, Sutton refused to cut her out completely. Ethan would never understand.
“I don’t care what Sutton told you, or didn’t. She’s been on edge lately, secretive. Something has definitely been going on with her. Do you know what she’s been planning?”
Sutton’s mother suddenly looked gray and old. “No. But her note doesn’t sound like someone who’s gone gaily off to do the Lord’s work. Why don’t you call the police? If you have nothing to hide…”
“Give me a break, Siobhan. I didn’t hurt her. It’s not like she’s a missing person, either. She left a note, after all. Besides, they won’t even take a missing person’s report for seventy-two hours on an adult.”
“How do you know if you haven’t talked to them?”
“I do research my work, Siobhan.”
“For your books. Yes, of course.”
Oh, the disdain in her tone. Ethan tried not to place his very large hands around his motherin-law’s neck. Siobhan never had understood the creative gene that he and Sutton shared. Sutton said Siobhan wanted her only child to find a rich man to marry, one who would allow her to play tennis at the club and host fabulous backyard garden parties. His temperament was optional. What were a few black eyes and broken ribs in the face of never-ending wealth and comfort?
They’d never told Siobhan how much Ethan was worth, how much he made on his novels. It was none of her business.
The uncomfortable silence grew between them. Finally, Siobhan stood.
“I’m sure she’s simply run off. She is always very dramatic when she gets upset.”
“And if she isn’t being dramatic?”
“You’re upset.
I understand. You asked my advice, and here it is. Sutton’s been unhappy, and she probably doesn’t want to be found. But if you’re not content with that answer, call the police. Let them look for her.”
“You don’t seem very upset by the news that your daughter is missing. Or that she could have been harmed somehow.”
“Because I don’t think she’s missing. I think my daughter finally left you. Something she should have done long ago.”
“Thanks a lot, Siobhan.”
“You’re welcome. Now, my check? It was due today. If Sutton’s not here, perhaps you should see to it.”
And there it was. She didn’t give a flying damn about Sutton, just wanted to get the money she wrenched out of them. That’s why she’d called, and then come over. Not to help. To take her cut.
Sutton generally handled the quarterly allowance she stubbornly insisted on paying her mother. It was a sore spot between them; having Siobhan standing with her greasy paw out all the time nearly sent him over the edge.
“You must be joking.”
“I’m leaving town this evening. We have a trip to Canada. I’d like to deposit it before I go. And who knows when Sutton will resurface.”
“You are a seriously cold woman, Siobhan.”
“You have no idea.”
Ethan went to his office, pulled out the checkbook. He filled in the check, dated it, and stormed back to the kitchen.
“Here.” If only I could lace it with rat poison and watch you die, you miserable, uncaring witch.
“Thank you. Keep me apprised if she shows up, will you?”
“Why would I? You’ve made it quite clear you don’t care about Sutton, or about me. All you care about is your precious money.”
“I care more than you realize, Ethan. But you’re her husband. You do what you think is right.”
“I will. Trust me.”
As the door closed on her, she turned. “Ethan? Even after all these years, I don’t think you know my daughter at all.”
LIE TO ME
by J.T. Ellison
Available soon from MIRA Books.
Lieutenant Taylor Jackson Collection, Volume 1 Page 120
