Chapter 4: The Man at the Door
I didn't move.
The car idled for a long moment.
Then it pulled away.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding and stepped back from the window.
My hands were still shaking.
Lily made a small sound against my shoulder and I bounced her gently, more for my own sake than hers.
I needed to think.
Ray Calloway.
I turned the name over slowly in my mind, trying to line up what I knew against what Jennifer had just told me.
Ray was ten years older than my husband, Dennis.
He had money — the kind that came without a clear explanation of where it originated.
Import business, Dennis always said, when I asked.
Logistics.
Ray had a large house outside of town and a different woman at every family gathering and a habit of making people feel that they owed him something even when they couldn't identify why.
I had kept Jennifer away from him as much as I could.
I had told myself I was being overprotective.
I had never said it out loud.
Not once.
I set Lily down on the kitchen floor with a wooden spoon from the drawer — the only thing within reach that seemed safe for small hands — and picked up the denim jacket again.
Bottom left corner of the lining.
I found the kitchen scissors and worked carefully at the inner seam.
Three small stitches, then a fourth.
The lining pulled away and something slid into my palm.
A USB drive.
Small, black, no label.
I stared at it.
Jennifer had sewn a USB drive into her jacket lining and carried it long enough to send it to me inside a basket with her daughter.
Whatever was on it, she had been protecting it for a long time.
I closed my fingers around it and put it in my cardigan pocket.
The doorbell rang.
Lily looked up from the floor.
I looked at the door.
I didn't move for a full three seconds.
Then I picked Lily up, held her against my chest, and walked to the door.
I looked through the peephole.
Dennis.
My husband.
Who I hadn't spoken to in fourteen months.
I opened the door.
He looked older.
Heavier in the face.
He was wearing a jacket I didn't recognize and he hadn't shaved in several days.
His eyes went immediately to Lily.
"Who is that?" he said.
"Hello to you too, Dennis."
"Carol." His voice was flat.
"Who is that baby?"
"Come inside," I said.
"Or don't.
But I'm not doing this on the porch."
He stepped inside.
I left the door open behind him.
He stood in the middle of the living room and stared at Lily the way you stare at something you're trying to calculate.
She stared back at him with complete indifference and then looked away, more interested in the buttons on my cardigan.
"Ray called me," Dennis said.
I kept my face still.
"Why would Ray call you about anything going on in my house?"
"He said someone left a baby here this morning.
He said he saw it."
"Ray saw it." I said it slowly.
"Ray was watching my house this morning."
Dennis shifted his weight.
"He was driving past."
"At what time?"
"Carol—"
"At what time, Dennis?"
He didn't answer that.
He looked at Lily again.
Something moved across his face that I couldn't read.
"Is she Jennifer's?" he asked.
The question sat between us.
I had about four seconds to decide what to say and how much of it to mean.
"What makes you ask that?"
"Because Ray said—" He stopped.
Pressed his mouth together.
Started again.
"Because she looks like her.
Around the eyes."
I looked at Lily.
She did.
She looked exactly like Jennifer at that age, in a photograph I still kept in the drawer beside my bed.
"I think you should call Ray back," I said, "and tell him that whatever he thinks he saw this morning, he's mistaken.
And then I think you should tell me exactly what your brother knows about where Jennifer has been for the past five years."
Dennis went very still.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes you do." I took one step toward him.
Lily tightened her grip on my collar.
"You've known something this whole time.
I could see it on you.
I told myself I was wrong because believing it was too terrible.
But I wasn't wrong, was I?"
He looked at the floor.
"Dennis.
Look at me."
He looked up.
His eyes were wet.
That surprised me more than anything else he could have done.
"I didn't know what he'd done," he said.
"Not at first.
Not until the second year."
The room went very quiet.
"And then?" I said.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He looked at the screen.
The wetness in his eyes disappeared, replaced by something else entirely.
"I have to go," he said.
"Dennis—"
May you like
But he was already moving toward the door, and the look on his face when he glanced at his phone screen was not guilt anymore.
It was fear.
