Flames rise all around me—my cheeks are hot, everything’s hot—and it feels as if my spine is melting.
My gaze flies from one frame to the next. Micah—or his twin, and he doesn’t have a twin—engaged in loving embraces with three children.
Three children I couldn’t have.
Elizabella chatters about Nini, but I can’t focus on her words.
She’s tugging on my pant leg.
“Ellie-Belle, wait. Wait a second.” I’m nearly breathless. I pick her up, and despite her wriggling in my arms, I walk down the hallway with her and place her, a bit too firmly, on the stairs. “Stay here.”
She protests with puffed out cheeks. Arms crossed. Head shaking.
“Stay.”
Micah’s song rises in my head: Stay with me. Stay some more.
“Stay here, Ellie-Belle.” My voice sounds as if it’s far away, underwater maybe.
She’s kicking her feet against the steps.
“Stay!” I say again over my shoulder.
The song continues in my head, a haunting memory of how foolish I was to believe in him, to believe everything he ever told me. “Stop!” I scream to the song. But it won’t stop. It keeps playing, and I feel him next to me, stepping on my feet, out of sync with the song he’s singing incorrectly. “Stop, stop, stop!”
And I stomp back to the family room to confirm I really saw what I think I saw. It isn’t possible. He couldn’t have . . .
He’s dancing with me, but playing house with another family.
Hands in my hair, I’m pulling on my curls at the roots.
Don’t scream. Don’t scream. Don’t scream.
Can’t scare Elizabella.
I look from frame to frame. Micah and a pretty little girl. Micah and a boy and a colorful fish on a hook. At a beach. On a boat. By a red, yellow, and black-striped buoy.
Where is she? The woman who bore these babies? Why aren’t there any pictures of her?
My jaw aches. My teeth hurt from grinding them.
I reach for a frame and slam it to the tile at my feet.
Crash!
I reach for another and another and another.
Crash, crash, crash!
Glass shatters.
Wood frames splinter.
Picture after picture after picture shatters.
And despite my attempts to stifle my rage, I’m screaming.
Screaming at the top of my lungs, like a savage.
Screaming in pain, as if the glass has lodged in my heart, instead of scattered on the floor.
“Mommy?”
I glimpse Elizabella, huddled in the hallway.
Peering around the corner.
Shaking.
I can’t catch my breath.
My limbs tremble and remnants of the pictures scatter as I make my way toward her.
She flinches when I reach for her, but her little arms tighten around me the moment I lift her to me.
“Mommy’s sorry.”
She presses her cheek to mine.
Our tears flow together like a confluence of two rivers.
“Mommy’s sorry.”
“You broke the pictures of Daddy.”
“Mommy’s sorry. I lost it, baby. But I’m okay now.”
She buries her head in the hollow between my neck and clavicle, like she used to do when she was a newborn.
For a moment, she’s that same small baby in my arms, her baby scents so real I swear I smell them: talcum and lavender lotion.
For always, she’s my miracle.
“I’m okay,” I tell her.
The chime of the doorbell reverberates in the hallway.
Simultaneously, our heads turn toward the door.
“Nini,” she whispers.
Chapter 22
I open the door to a uniformed police officer wearing a navy-blue, short-sleeved button-down shirt tucked into shorts in the same fabric. He’s leaning against a column on the front portico. A ten-speed bicycle marked with official police department regalia is parked next to my SUV on the motor court.
“Evening,” he says, cool as can be.
“Evening,” I say over a sniffle.
“Everything all right in there?”
My cheeks flush. He must have heard the breaking glass and screams. I start to nod, but before I can get a word in, he’s handing me a business card.
“I’m Officer Laughlin, Key West PD. Got a call from your local department, up in Lake County, Illinois, asking us to check in, keep an eye on you.”
Of course. Guidry said they’d be sending someone.
“Your husband is missing, they say.”
“We’ve lost him,” I correct the officer, who must not have been thoroughly informed. Lost. It appears I lost him before Elizabella was born. I wipe a tear from my cheek.
“He went to God Land,” Bella says.
I tighten my grip around her.
“Sorry for your predicament,” Laughlin says. “You need anything—anything at all—feel free to call, all right?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“And if you’re planning to go anywhere . . .” He wipes the back of his neck, then proceeds to give it a good massage. “Well, let’s just say you ought to check in with us before you leave on any excursions.”
“Where would we go?” I ask. “I mean . . . where do you think—”
He shrugs. “Dry Tortugas. Fort Jefferson. Back to the mainland. Who knows? Just check in before you go. Shows good faith.”
“Good faith?” I maneuver the business card beneath my fingernail. A splinter from a wooden picture frame dislodges. “Look, I don’t know what Detective Guidry told you, but I don’t plan on going anywhere but back home.”
He offers a half smile and another nod. “All right.”
“And actually . . . maybe you can help me. Do you know the people who used to live here?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s a small island, right? Not too many locals? Mostly tourists? See, I own this house. Only I didn’t know anything about it until recently. My husband arranged the purchase, and . . . well, now that I’m here, I’m seeing that maybe the house isn’t the only thing I didn’t know about.”
“Wish I could help. But I haven’t had an occasion until tonight to even come up the drive of this place.”
“Any of your colleagues then. If they know anything—” I shut up when I catch something in the way he’s looking at me. Accusation maybe. Annoyance. Or mistrust.
I swallow over an initial sense of shock building up in my throat. They, too, think I know something I’m not telling. “Well, if you think of anything—or if you hear anything, maybe—I wouldn’t mind if you check in with me every once in a while.” Maybe now they’ll get it through their thick skulls that I’m not trying to hide anything, that I didn’t come here to run away—let alone from the law—but to piece together everything that doesn’t make sense.
And that includes, apparently, my entire life with Micah.
But Laughlin stiffens, pressing his lips together in a way that makes the muscles in his jaw twitch. “We’ll be checking in. I promise you.”
“Well”—I clear my throat and cough to hide my intimidation—“I’d appreciate it.”
He doesn’t budge.
“Is there anything else?” I ask. “I have a hungry three-year-old here.”
“This is your first time on the island?”
“Yes.”
“Nini goed here once,” Bella murmurs into the hollow of my neck.
While the officer glances toward my daughter, he doesn’t pry. “Have a nice night, ma’am.”
“You too.”
“Check in before you go anywhere.”
“If I go anywhere, I will.”
He’s walking down the steps now, toward his bicycle.
“I wish I knew what you think I’m hiding,” I call after him.
He stops and turns to shoot a disciplined stare right through me.
“If I knew, I’d clear it up for you,” I say. “My world is falling to pieces . . . everywhere I turn, just fragments . . . and I don’t understand why you’re looking at me as if . . .” Unspoken words trail into nothingness.
“Why do you assume I’m looking at you in any way?”
“You see?” I wipe a budding tear from my eye. “You’re implying I have a guilty conscience. But what if I just want help understanding what happened to Micah?”
“Your husband disappeared under rather mysterious circumstances,” Laughlin says. “From what I understand, he left debts behind—debts in only his name. And here you are, in a house you say you never knew you owned. I’m sure you understand. We have to rule out the spouse.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help you rule me out, then let me do it.”
“Will do.” He raises his chin. “Evening, ma’am.”