“I can’t begin to tell you.” I spy the bottle of rum Christian dropped off to welcome us to the island that first night. Dare I have a drink? I fill her in on the computer searches, on Guidry’s theory about the Xanax. I tell her the men that came to tell me Micah was dead weren’t really federal agents.
“So . . . he might be somewhere out there?” she asks. “No wonder that cop looked at me funny when I told him about the night we found out Micah was dead.”
“If he’s out there, he’s in way over his head.”
“You know, I told the detective this . . . that taller one came back after you left. He was poking around, looking in the windows. And I started thinking that maybe I’d seen him around the neighborhood before. Before the whole thing began.”
I think of the cigarette on the eleventh fairway. I wonder how long they’ve been watching me. And why.
“There’s more. Suffice it to say you were right about Misty Morningside, and now they say I have motive.”
“I knew it! I knew she wasn’t here for you that day. I could see it in her eyes. She wasn’t mourning for your loss. She was mourning her own.”
“You might be right, but that’s not the only woman I’m talking about.” I give her a quick rundown about the boys’ birth certificates. “Their names are Connor James and Brendan Micah. Their mother—not the redhead on my doorstep—is Gabrielle.”
“I knew it!”
“Their father? Micah. James. Cavanaugh.”
“I’m assuming not Senior.”
“You got it.”
“In the middle of the night, I’d wake up for a glass of water, and there he’d be: your husband, walking the streets, chatting on that damn mobile phone. But I never dreamed he’d be stupid enough not to prevent other children.”
I pinch my eyes closed. “Yes, he kept a lot of secrets.”
“Do you think that’s why he’s gone? Because of these other kids?”
“Maybe. But who are these men, then? The ones who told me he was dead?”
“Maybe they’re his friends. Maybe he was trying to leave without owning up to anything. Maybe he figured if the world thought he was dead, he could start over.”
My phone blips with an incoming text.
It’s from Shell: You have Bella?
Of course I have Bella. Where else would Bella be?
Unless . . .
I sent the picture of my daughter to both Shell and her son. Could she have assumed she was replying to Micah?
Chapter 40
It’s a possibility, Guidry says.
When you’re struggling with infertility, these words give you hope . . . sometimes an undeserved sense of optimism. But now that I’m struggling with a search for the truth, these words instill only an unnerving sense of frustration.
It’s a possibility that Shell has been in touch with her son. It’s possible Shell assumed Micah sent the picture of Bella.
Until the detective manages to talk with her again, and until he secures her phone records, there’s no way to know for certain.
It’s a possibility Micah is looking to connect with our daughter, but unlikely he’s looking to flee with her. If that’s what he wanted, Guidry rationalizes, wouldn’t he have taken her with him when he left?
It’s possible Micah wants to be presumed dead.
It’s possible he’s dead already.
It’s also just as possible, in Detective Guidry’s opinion, that I know where my husband has been the past twenty-three days since he last kissed me goodbye. I’ve lost track of time, which isn’t hard to do in Key West. Guidry hasn’t found anything connecting a seven-year-old child named Mimi, or Nini, to my husband, and there’s no telling who Tasha is, if not Natasha Markham. But he did say he’d been in touch with my college roommate on a lead he wouldn’t share with me, and he said he’d give her my cell phone number and ask her if she would please call me.
I twist my wedding band, but it’s still too tight, although I’ve lost about five of the pounds I packed on since we began IVF. A yank and a tug later, all I have to show for my efforts is a sore finger. I let out a growl.
“Mommy!” Bella giggles. “Silly Mommy.”
What a terrible few weeks.
I can’t take it anymore.
“Bella? It’s time to take a bath.”
“No. We’re coloring, Mommy.”
“You’ve been coloring and getting dirty all day. It’s time to take a bath.”
“I know, Nini,” Bella says. “Mommy’s always mad.” Her tongue appears at the corner of her mouth as she scribbles a black mass over her drawing. “Me too, Nini. I wish Mommy left and Daddy stayed.”
“What did you just say?”
“Daddy loves us,” my daughter sasses. “Not like you.”
“Elizabella, Mommy loves you more than anything. You know that.”
“Daddy’s better at hugs, better at games, better at coloring, and better than you! I wish he stayed and you left!”
“You don’t mean that.” It comes out more as a wheeze than a sentence.
“Yes! I! Do! I hate you!”
I lunge at her, rage bubbling inside me so wildly that I feel it vibrating in my joints.
Bella flinches, a look of disbelief and fear in her eyes.
I tear her from the table, kicking and screaming.
“Want Daddy! Want Daddy! Want Daddy!”
I charge up the stairs and all the way down the hallway, through her room, and to the shared bathroom. I plant her on the closed lid of the toilet and turn to fill the tub.
She’s shrieking now, as if in great pain.
“Ellie-Belle, calm down!”
“No! No calming down! Want! My! Daddy!”
“You know what?” I’m screaming now, too. “I want your daddy, too. Just once, I want him to handle you at your worst. I want him to spend more than three hours alone with you to see how he might measure up in your head when he starts to lose his patience. If I left him to deal with even half the shit he’s piled up around me, he’d be long gone! He couldn’t handle this! He couldn’t handle you!”
I bite my lip and wipe tears from my eyes as I turn to look at my daughter, who is shaking and white.
And I’m responsible.
Instantly, I try to pull myself together, but the sight of her little body huddled atop the toilet only drives me to unravel even further. Tears sprout from my eyes like April showers, and I’m sobbing, a rumpled mass of bad mother on the cold mosaic tile floor.
“Bella, I’m sorry.”
She flinches when I reach for her.
I sniffle over tears. She’s just being a little girl. I’m supposed to be the adult. I’m supposed to take a deep breath. I’m supposed to count to ten before I erupt. I’m supposed to place blame where it belongs. I’m supposed to remember she’s a sweet and precious gift, even when she’s sassy and unmanageable, and I’m supposed to rise above it and teach her with a better example.
I remember when Mama was always a sniveling, screaming mess, when I was her verbal punching bag.
I’m losing my mind.
The water from the faucet is thundering in the tub, bringing me back to the here and now.
“Bella, I’m sorry.” I lay down on my back in the middle of the bathroom floor, hands covering my eyes. Deep breaths.
“Bad Mommy.”
“Yes, you’re right,” I tell her. “Lately, I haven’t been very good. But you have to listen, too, and lately, you haven’t been very good at that, either.”
She’s cuddled at my side now. “Sorry I didn’t listen.”
My arms curl around her tiny frame. “I love you, baby girl.”
“I love you, too, Mommy.”
Christian was right.
I’m not doing myself—or my child—any favors by staying cooped up in this house all day and night. I have to get a job. Elizabella has to start back at school. We have to move on.
“I’ll get in the tub now,” Elizabella says.
“Thank you. And when you’re squeaky clean, let’s go see if Emily and Andrea can come sit with you.”
For a second, she’s silent. Then she offers: “And do one-two-three-fly?”
I nod. “If they don’t mind.”
She presses a sloppy kiss to my hot cheek.
“I love you,” I say one more time.
Chapter 41