Somehow, it did the opposite.
After graduation, the hospital had given me friends, coworkers, a community I could surround myself with during the daytime hours before retreating home at night and settling into my isolated routine. And it had worked, for a while, but ever since I’d launched my own business, I had found myself completely alone. All day and all night. On the day I held Daniel’s card again, I hadn’t spoken to another human being in weeks, outside of the occasional text message from Coop or Shannon or Mom’s place calling to remind me to come visit. I knew that would change once clients started trickling through the doors, but that wasn’t the same. Besides, they were supposed to be talking to me for support, not the other way around.
Daniel’s business card was hot in my hands. I remember walking over to my desk and taking a seat, leaning back in the chair. I picked up my phone and dialed, the ringing on the other end dragging on for so long I almost hung up. Then suddenly, a voice.
“This is Daniel.”
I was quiet on the line, my breath caught in my throat. He waited a few seconds before trying again.
“Hello?”
“Daniel,” I said finally. “This is Chloe Davis.”
The silence on the other end made my stomach lurch.
“We met a few weeks ago,” I reminded him, cringing. “In the hospital.”
“Doctor Chloe Davis,” he responded. I could hear the smile stretching across his lips. “I was starting to think you weren’t going to call.”
“I’ve been unpacking,” I said, my heart rate slowing. “I … lost your card, but I just found it, at the bottom of my last box.”
“So, you’re all moved in?”
“Just about,” I said, looking around the cluttered office.
“Well, that’s cause for celebration. Do you want to grab a drink?”
I had never been one to agree to drinks with a stranger; every real date I had ever been on had been set up by mutual friends, a well-intentioned favor I knew was mostly motivated by the awkwardness that ensued when I was the only one in a group that showed up alone. I hesitated, almost made up an excuse as to why I was busy. But instead, as if my lips were moving in opposition to the brain that controlled them, I heard myself agree. Had I not been so starved for conversation that day, for any kind of human interaction, that phone call probably would have been the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
An hour later, I was sitting at the bar at the River Room, swirling a glass of wine in my hand. Daniel was on the barstool next to me, his eyes studying my silhouette.
“What?” I had asked, self-consciously tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Do I have food in my teeth or something?”
“No,” he laughed, shaking his head. “No, it’s just … I can’t believe I’m sitting here. With you.”
I had eyed him then, trying to judge his comment. Was he flirting with me, or was it something more sinister? I had Googled Daniel Briggs before our date—of course I had—and this was the moment I was going to find out if he had done the same. Searching Daniel’s name had yielded nothing more than a Facebook page with assorted pictures of him. Holding a whiskey at various rooftop bars. One hand clutching a golf club while the other clasped a sweating beer. Sitting cross-legged on a couch while holding a baby the caption identified as his best friend’s son. I had found his LinkedIn profile, confirming his profession in pharmaceutical sales. He was mentioned in a newspaper article from 2015 printing his finishing time for the Louisiana Marathon: four hours and nineteen minutes. It was all very average, innocent, almost boring, even. Exactly what I wanted.
But if he had Googled me, he would have found more. So much more.
“So,” he said. “Doctor Chloe Davis, tell me about yourself.”
“You know, you don’t have to call me that all the time. Doctor Chloe Davis. So formal.”
He smiled, took a sip from his whiskey. “What should I call you, then?”
“Chloe,” I said, looking at him. “Just Chloe.”
“All right, Just Chloe—” I smacked his arm with the back of my hand, laughing. He smiled back. “Really, though, tell me about yourself. I’m sitting here having drinks with a stranger; the least you could do is assure me that you’re not dangerous.”
I felt the goose bumps prickle across my skin, lifting the hair on my arms.
“I’m from Louisiana,” I said, testing the waters. He didn’t flinch. “Not Baton Rouge, a small town about an hour from here.”
“Baton Rouge born and raised,” he said, tilting his drink toward his chest. “What made you move here?”
“School,” I said. “I got my PhD from LSU.”
“Impressive.”
“Thank you.”
“Any possessive older brothers I should know about?”
My chest lurched again; all of these comments could be innocent flirtation, but they could also be perceived as a man trying to coax a truth out of me that he had already learned for himself. All of my other bad first dates came flooding back to me, the moment I had realized that the person I was making small talk with already knew everything there was to know. Some of them had asked me outright—“You’re Dick Davis’s daughter, aren’t you?”—their eyes hungry for information, while others waited impatiently, tapping their fingers against the table while I spoke about other things, as if admitting that I shared DNA with a serial killer was something I should be eager to reveal.
“How’d you know?” I asked, trying to keep the tone light. “Is it that obvious?”
Daniel shrugged. “No,” he said, turning back toward the bar. “It’s just that I had a little sister once, and I know I was. I knew every guy who ever looked at her. Shit, if you were her, I’d probably be lurking in the corner of this bar right now.”
He hadn’t Googled me, I would learn on a later date. My paranoia about his line of questioning was just that—paranoia. He had never even heard about Breaux Bridge and Dick Davis and all those missing girls. He was only seventeen when it happened; he didn’t really watch the news. I imagine his mother tried to shield it from him the same way mine had tried to shield it from me. I had told him the story one night as we lay sprawled across my living room couch; I don’t know what made me choose that particular moment. I suppose I had realized that, at some point, I had to come clean. That my truth, my history, would be the make-or-break moment that determined our life together, our future—or lack thereof.
So I just started talking, watching as his forehead wrinkled deeper with every passing minute, every gruesome detail. And I told him everything: about Lena and the festival and the way I had watched my father get arrested in our living room, those words he had uttered before being whisked away into the night. I had told him what I had seen through my bedroom window—my father, that shovel—and the fact that my childhood home was still sitting there, empty. Abandoned in Breaux Bridge, the memories of my youth twisted into a real-life haunted house, a ghost story, the place kids ran past with their breath held tight for fear of summoning the spirits that surely haunted its walls. I had told him about my father in prison. His plea deal and consecutive life sentences. The fact that I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in almost twenty years. I had gotten completely lost in that moment, letting the memories spill from me like the rancid innards of a gutted fish. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to get them out, how they were poisoning me from the inside.
When I was done, Daniel was silent. I picked at a fraying thread on the couch, embarrassed.
“I just thought you needed to know,” I had said, my head downcast. “If we’re gonna be, you know, dating or something. And I completely understand if this is too much. If it freaks you out, trust me, I get it—”
I felt his hands on my cheeks then, gently pushing my head higher, forcing me to meet his gaze.