No One Can Know

Yet dawn greeted her with unsympathetic light slashing through the blinds, and Nathan had never returned to bed. No toast this morning either. She threw up, brushed her teeth—which made her retch all over again—and stumbled downstairs, cursing her unborn and clearly ungrateful child.

Nathan’s laptop was out on the kitchen table, taking up half the space on the table with its external keyboard and mouse and second monitor and a USB adaptor flopping aimlessly from one port. He even had a can of compressed air out—he was so meticulous about keeping crumbs and dust out of his keyboard. She’d always thought the point of a laptop was portability, but Nathan never used his without all his peripherals. She closed the lid and went over to her phone, which was charging on the counter where she’d left it.

She’d missed a call from a former client. She checked the voice mail and made a mental note to follow up, then idly scrolled through her emails, distracting herself as she pinched tiny bits of bread off and tried to fool her gut into thinking they were something other than food. A client had finally paid a tardy invoice—good, that would help.

No sign of Nathan still. Frowning, she wandered through the house. There was a blanket on the couch in the living room, like he’d slept there, but no sign of Nathan himself.

A momentary panic stabbed through her gut. He was gone. He’d left—but he hadn’t left, she told herself. His things were still upstairs in the bedroom, his laptop on the kitchen table. And where would he have gone?

There was one place. The thought was traitorous. She looked down at the phone in her hand. She closed her email and swiped over to where the phone tracker app waited, her thumb hovering over it.

He’d gone out on an errand, or for coffee, or to get some air, she told herself. She wasn’t going to be the one who didn’t trust him. She turned off the display and jammed the phone in her pocket.

She got to work, as she had every day, without a particular plan. Today she went through the labeled items, actually throwing away the trash, surreptitiously removing some of the TOSS and DONATE labels for things she thought they’d need to check with her sisters.

She took an old vacuum cleaner—definitely on its last legs, but they didn’t have the budget for a replacement—and went to tackle the rug in the front living room. Through the window she glimpsed the car, and stopped, frowning. Nathan hadn’t left, then. So where was he? Not still out in the carriage house, surely. She bit her lip. If he was truly avoiding her that thoroughly, she didn’t want to intrude. She grabbed a stray glass from a sideboard and marched determinedly back to the kitchen. She opened the dishwasher to put it in and paused.

There were two wineglasses snuggled inside the dishwasher, the purplish stains of red wine caked to the bottom. She lifted one, turning it in her hand. There was a lip print on one side, bright red. And there was the bottle, in the recycling. Empty. Someone had been here last night, while she was out. Someone who wore red lipstick.

Someone Nathan might have left with.

Reluctantly, she took her phone from her pocket and this time she opened the app before she could talk herself out of it.

The dot that showed Nathan’s phone was indeed in the carriage house, practically dead center, and for a moment she scolded herself for letting her imagination run wild. But the dot was grayed out. A last known location, not his current location. She waited, thinking it might need a moment to load, but nothing happened. His phone was off.

And that was, in itself, bizarre. He was addicted to that thing. She had ground rules about putting photos of her on the internet, but every other part of his life was recorded, uploaded, and captioned. He followed celebrities on Twitter and replied like they actually wanted to hear his witty rejoinders and compliments. He kept up long text threads throughout the day—though that had been quieter lately.

He hadn’t even turned off his phone when—

She cut off the thought. Anxious possibilities spilled from her mind, impossible to claw back once they were free. Nathan at the bottom of a ladder with his neck twisted around. Nathan in the passenger seat of a car, so eager to leave he didn’t bother to pack. Nathan slumped in a chair with a hole in his skull, in the hall in a pool of blood, shirt stained dark—

She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. She should leave him alone. Give him space. She knew this. Except now those images were in her mind, and she could only spin through the same loop over and over again. He’s fine. Almost certainly fine. Except what if he isn’t?

She knew how this would go. She would sit on the couch, steeling herself unsuccessfully against panic, picking up one horrifying possibility after another and playing it through to its end. As if by working out the logistics of each fate, she could make it hurt less. The same thing seized her sometimes when he was even a few minutes late getting home from work. By the time he walked in through the door, she had worked out getting to the hospital or calling his parents to break the news, thought about where the life insurance documents were, imagined a rotating cast of doctors or police offers saying, “Ma’am, we’re sorry to have to tell you…”

Nathan always found it amusing. He laughed at her for the grand tragic scripts she wrote out in her head. But it wasn’t at all amusing to be inside of that relentless what-if. The only way she could bear it without panicking was to make those detailed plans.

“You could have just checked the app,” he would always tell her, and she would try to explain how that would mean she really was being overly anxious and spying on him to make herself feel better. So instead she fretted and pretended not to, and stopped asking him to text her if he was going to be late, because he always forgot anyway.

He wasn’t on the road and out of reach, though, he was thirty steps away, and she was being ridiculous. She would poke her head in. Say good morning. Say she was sorry, yet again, and hope that this time it was enough.

She put her phone away and arranged her face in an expression of what she hoped was only casual interest. She made herself walk unhurriedly out the door.

The lock on the carriage house door was undone, sitting on the step. She pulled the latch, swinging the heavy door open, and stood at the threshold. Dust swirled inside, lit by the slant of sunlight coming in; the interior was dim, and her eyes struggled to adjust. It had been decades since a horse or carriage had been inside this building, but two stalls remained to the far right. The rest of the space had been left open to store the actual carriages, but her father had converted it into a workshop, for those times when he decided that being a man meant cutting up pieces of wood and screwing them together in a different configuration. There were workbenches and a variety of tools set against the walls, including a table saw and a miter saw and other things that might have been worth a bit of money, if they were anything close to new or functional.

“Nathan?” she said. No answer. She could feel her pulse at her throat. “Nathan, are you in here?” she asked, though it was obvious that he wasn’t.

Then where was he? Where would he go without the car?

Unless someone picked him up, she thought, and chased that idea off into the shadows again.

There were footsteps in the dust, crisscrossing the floor. She followed them inside, lacking anything else useful to do. She stepped around the side of the big worktable in the center of the room, and she froze.

Nathan lay on the ground beside the worktable. His eyes were half-opened. One leg was twisted awkwardly under him where he had fallen. His T-shirt was stained dark, a single neat hole in the fabric at his chest. His face had a look of vague surprise.

Kate Alice Marshall's books