Sean and I talked until it was so late and we were so tired that our eyes were closing. We exchanged a freighted but chaste little peck on the cheek. He went to his room, and I went to mine. As soon as I got into bed, I was wide awake. The thought of him there in the dark, in my house, was almost like having sex. I masturbated, thinking about him. I wondered if he was doing it too, thinking about me.
Just knowing he was a few rooms away was like phone sex without a phone. It took every ounce of self-control not to go to his room. Meanwhile I was still telling myself that nothing was going to happen, that I wasn’t the sort of person who sleeps with the husband of her disappeared best friend.
I knew that even if we could do it without anyone finding out, we would feel so guilty that the next time we saw the police, they would pick up on it and maybe mistake it for guilt about something else. I knew this was ridiculous, but still . . .
But there it is: desire in the air. Everything is soaked in it, even though I know that Sean and I are both thinking: your wife’s best friend, your best friend’s husband. Emily loves and trusts us. What kind of people are we? And the fact that we both feel that guilt and desire, and know the other is feeling it, makes everything hotter—and more confusing.
Many nights now Sean and Nicky come for dinner and stay late. Nicky falls asleep in Miles’s room, and Sean carries him out to the car and drives him home. Sean and I have been staying up, drinking brandy, and talking, and amid all the sexual tension, or maybe because of it, Sean has been opening up. He’s told me about his horrid childhood, his alcoholic upper-class British mother, whom his college-professor father left for a colleague when Sean was twelve and who has come way down in the world but not in her social ambitions and her illusions about herself.
I talk a lot about Davis and Miles. I don’t mention my blog. It’s interesting to me that I so wanted Emily to respect and admire my blog, but I don’t want Sean to even read it. I’m proud of what I write. But I avoid the subject. Maybe I don’t want Sean thinking I’m just another overinvolved supermom with a laptop. He makes fun of mothers who project that semi-aggressive competence and always have the latest baby equipment. He calls them Captain Mom. I don’t want him to see me as another Captain Mom. Maybe I worry he’ll compare me unfavorably with Emily and her glamorous career in fashion.
We talk a lot about Emily. He’s told me how they met, which—oddly, now that I think about it—never came up when Emily was talking about her life. Usually you exchange those stories early on in a friendship. Her fashion company and his investment firm were cochairing a benefit for a relief organization that works to bring clean water to women in Africa. The dinner was at the Museum of Natural History, which—with the flowers and candles and the mood lighting—was terribly romantic.
Emily introduced the person who introduced the person who introduced her boss, Dennis Nylon. And when Sean saw her on the podium, in a simple but stunning black evening dress, and he saw—on the giant screen monitors around the room—the tears in her eyes when she spoke about the charity and about the hard lives of the women they were helping, he decided then and there that he was going to marry her.
It made perfect sense to me. I knew how moving Emily’s tears could be. I’d seen her cry for me and my husband and my brother. Sean’s account of their meeting and courtship was one of those beautiful stories that I wish I could tell about my own life, my own marriage.
Talking about Emily helps us both. It makes us feel more hopeful about the possibility that she is still alive and will be found. And it defuses the tension between us, as if she were actually there, reminding us that she’s the person we love—and not each other.
One night Sean told me that there were a few things about Emily that I probably didn’t know. Things she’d kept secret. I held my breath because I still believed—even though it seemed clear now that I was wrong—that I knew everything about her. Or almost everything.
It turned out that she’d been abused by her grandfather when she was a little girl. Her parents never admitted it, which was part of the reason she’d been estranged from them. Also (possibly as a result) she’d had a drinking problem during her twenties; she’d also had a brief flirtation with painkillers and Xanax back then and spent a month in rehab. But she’d been clean ever since.
I was shocked, not by what he told me but by the fact that I hadn’t known. Was this what she’d meant when she talked about the “wild days” when she got her tattoo? In all the conversations and confidences we’d shared, why had those traumatic things not come up? I’d trusted her with secrets I’d never told anyone. Why hadn’t she trusted me?
I’d never seen any evidence of the problems Sean described. She always drank sensibly around me. Even after they beat their addictions, people with drinking problems are always weird around alcohol. And Emily wasn’t. Once, at her house on a Friday afternoon, I almost went for a third glass of wine, and she gently reminded me that I had to drive Miles home.
But every day was making it more obvious that unless she’d been injured or killed, she’d left us on purpose. She wasn’t the person Sean thought she was, the person I thought she was.
Where was she going in the rental car headed west? Whom was she going to see? Was there someone in her past? Someone she’d recently met? Some dark mystery she needed to solve, some unfinished business?
I read the Patricia Highsmith novel that Emily left when she disappeared. It’s about a man who is trying to kill his son-in-law, in Rome and in Venice, because his daughter has committed suicide and he blames his son-in-law. Nobody ever knows why the girl killed herself, though the husband gives some reasons that don’t make sense. Something about her loving sex or hating sex and being too much of a romantic to live in the real world. I couldn’t figure it out, and even though we know the grieving husband is innocent, there were moments when I didn’t blame the father-in-law for nursing his smoldering, deadly rage. I wondered if the book was a message from Emily, a hint that she planned to kill herself and that no one would ever know why.
In which case we could only wait for her body to turn up. In the Highsmith novel, the murderous father-in-law is always expecting his son-in-law’s body to wash up by the side of a canal. But the young wife who kills herself does it in the bathtub. There’s a body and blood—no question about what happened. But with Emily, there were mysteries leading to more mysteries, questions upon questions.
I think about Sean all the time. I put on makeup and my most attractive outfits (I try to keep it subtle) whenever I know he’s coming over with Nicky. I always offer to collect Nicky from school, in theory so Sean can get some work done but in truth so I’ll have an excuse to see him. I love his charm, his attention, his easy natural laugh. I’ve always had a weakness for men with beautiful smiles.
Sean has begun staying for dinner more often. I’ve found out what foods he prefers. Steaks and roasts mainly. After all, he’s British. I’ve learned to make them the way he likes. Burned. Miles couldn’t have been more delighted when I stopped trying to persuade him to eat vegetarian meals.
I’ve been eating red meat for the first time since Chris and Davis died. I’m amazed (and a little disappointed in myself) by how much I still love that rich, salty, juicy, bloody taste. And I’ve started to associate that delicious taste with being around Sean. I feel almost as if we’re vampires on a sexy TV series where the undead with their fangs and perfect bodies zoom across the screen to have sex.