“Are you telling me,” I said, “that Emily might still be alive?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and for the first time in fifteen years, I watched my husband cry in front of me instead of behind a locked door. “I’ve been chasing pieces of a girl who might be her for eleven years, and every lead has gone nowhere. I never told you because I couldn’t survive hoping in front of someone else and being wrong again. I didn’t think I had the right to hand you that kind of grief when it wasn’t even confirmed to be real.”
He slid a single sheet of paper across the table — the investigator’s most recent report. A name. A city three states away. A photograph of a young woman, twenty-three years old, with Rachel’s eyes and Mark’s exact smile.
“This is the closest lead I’ve ever had,” he said. “I was going to look into it alone. Quietly. So that if it was nothing — again — I’d be the only one who had to carry it.”
I looked at the box that had sat between us for fifteen years of marriage. At the man I now understood completely differently than I had that morning.
And I realized the real question was never who I had been sleeping next to.
It was what I was going to do, now that I knew.
