Chapter 6: The Mistake That Cost Six Years
James left to make calls.
A hospital social worker named Patricia had come to sit with Sarah — a soft-voiced woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain who produced a colouring book from her bag as if she'd been expecting exactly this situation.
Matthew sat three chairs away and watched Sarah choose a purple crayon with the focused deliberation of someone making an important decision.
He thought about six years ago.
He didn't want to.
But the thinking came anyway, the way it always did when he tried to stop it — faster, more insistent, arriving at the worst details first.
He had been twenty-nine.
Anne had been twenty-seven.
They had worked at the same firm for eight months, and for six of those months Matthew had been aware of her the way you were aware of a window in a dark room — not always looking directly at it, but always knowing where the light was coming from.
She was not like the women his family approved of.
She had no connections, no family money, no interest in the things his world considered important.
She ate lunch at her desk.
She stayed late without being asked.
She laughed at things that weren't meant to be funny and stayed serious about things that everyone else dismissed.
He had fallen in love with her in the particular helpless way of people who don't realize it's happening until it already has.
They had been together for four months when Richard Hale — his oldest friend, his college roommate, the best man already chosen for a wedding that hadn't been planned yet — had sat across from him at dinner and said:
"I need to tell you something about Anne.
And I need you to hear it before you go any further."
What Richard had told him was a lie.
Matthew had not known it was a lie.
He had believed it because Richard had delivered it with the specific texture of reluctant honesty — the pauses, the eye contact, the "I wish I didn't have to tell you this." He had believed it because Richard was his oldest friend.
He had believed it because he was twenty-nine and had not yet learned that the people closest to you could be the ones most carefully positioned to do damage.
He had ended things with Anne the next day.
Coldly.
Completely.
He had not explained.
He had told himself it was kinder not to explain — that an explanation would only prolong something that needed to end.
He had told himself that for six years.
He knew now, sitting in this corridor, that it had not been kinder.
It had been cowardice dressed as consideration.
"You're thinking very hard," Sarah said, without looking up from her colouring.
"Sorry."
"Mommy does that too.
She gets a line right here." Sarah touched the space between her own eyebrows.
"She says it's where the hard thoughts live."
Matthew touched the same spot on his own face.
"Your mommy is a very wise person," he said.
"I know." Sarah selected a yellow crayon.
"She says the hard thoughts don't go away if you ignore them.
She says you have to look at them until they stop being scary."
"And does that work?"
Sarah considered.
"Mostly.
Sometimes they're still scary.
But at least then you know what you're scared of."
Matthew looked at this child — her careful crayon strokes, her gray sock, her cardboard box sitting faithfully beside her chair — and felt something loosen in his chest that had been wound tight for a very long time.
"Sarah," he said.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"Does your mommy ever talk about her life before?
Before you were born?"
Sarah kept colouring.
"Sometimes.
She says she had a different life once.
A life with more noise in it." She paused.
"I asked her if she missed it.
She said she missed one thing.
But she said she had something better now."
"Did she say what the one thing was?"
Sarah looked up.
"She said it was a feeling.
The feeling of being known by someone.
Really known." She tilted her head.
"Do you know what she meant?"
Matthew's throat tightened.
"Yes," he said.
"I know exactly what she meant."
His phone buzzed.
James.
He read the message.
Then he read it again.
The car that h*t Anne Miller was registered to a shell company.
The shell company had been incorporated fourteen months ago.
The sole director was listed as a man named Thomas Greer.
Thomas Greer was Richard Hale's brother-in-law.
Matthew stood up.
His voice, when he spoke to James on the phone, was very quiet and very clear.
"Find him," he said.
May you like
"Find Richard.
Tonight."
