“Do you think you can find her?” asked Jackson. He sat up and put on his glasses. He was a towheaded Harry Potter, his face a beautiful, delicate mask of hope and still, even after everything, innocence. He still believed in happy endings.
But the answer was no. Wolf felt with his whole heart that Abbey was gone; he didn’t feel her, not the way Merri claimed to. He knew what the odds were of finding Abbey alive. The truth was, he wasn’t going to The Hollows for Abbey. He was going because he needed to be there when Merri realized, too, that their daughter was dead. That someone had taken her because Wolf had failed as her father, her protector, and she wasn’t coming back. He had given up on happy surprises long ago.
“I don’t know, kiddo,” he said. “We’re going to try.”
“Did you ask Uncle Blake about the missing man?”
“I did,” said Wolf. “He’s looking into it.”
Jackson released a breath and looked up at his father. “Okay.”
“Grandma will take you to school in the morning,” said Wolf. “And she’ll pick you up, too. I’ll call you in the afternoon.”
“You’re going now?” Jackson glanced at his clock. It was nearly midnight.
“I don’t want your mom to be alone up there.”
Jackson nodded, seeming more relieved than anxious or upset as Wolf expected—which Wolf took as a positive sign that he’d made a good choice. He tried not to think about the fact that both his mother and his son had the same reaction, as if everyone was silently hoping that he’d do the right thing for once.
He threw a few things in a bag and was on his way out the front door by twelve thirty. He was surprised, though he really shouldn’t have been, to see Kristi standing outside the building.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
He knew he sounded cold, but he didn’t have time for this, for her. Her face was blotchy from crying, her mascara running. It didn’t soften him.
“What?” he went on when she didn’t say anything. “Were you going to ring the bell—with my parents and my son up there?”
Something in her face shifted from hurt and vulnerable to angry.
“This is what you think of me,” she said lifting up her phone, presumably to show him the text he’d sent. The street was quiet the way TriBeCa was at night. It was more of a residential neighborhood, and lights were dark, streets felt empty. It didn’t throb and pulse like the rest of the city. Her voice echoed in the emptiness. “You think you can just send me a text and that’s it. I just disappear like I never existed.”
He couldn’t stand the sight of her. For the first time, he saw her for what she was, the bleach-blonde embodiment of all of Wolf’s failures and mistakes. His throat was thick; he had no words.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “Like I’m something you can’t scrape off of your shoe?”
They’d met at a press party. She was the publicist for a luxury hotel group and was hosting an event at their new Manhattan property on the stunning rooftop bar.
She’d been wearing a shift with sequins glittering on the front. He saw her when he first walked in; she’d greeted him at the door, looked at him with big eyes.
“You’re Wolf Gleason,” she said. “I love your work!”
She was just—shiny. Dress, nails, lips, eyes. Everything sparkled. Merri didn’t exactly sparkle anymore, certainly not for Wolf. Lately, it seemed like his wife only noticed him when she was mad about something he’d neglected to do. Mostly they just fought and shuttled the kids back and forth to school, and worked, and stood around on fields or sat in small chairs at parent-teacher conferences. In fact, there was very little sparkle in midlife, it seemed to Wolf. That was maybe, more than anything, what had attracted him to Kristi—that she wasn’t everything else. Of course, nothing sparkles forever.
“Why did you tell me about that place?” he asked now. He’d been wondering about it for a long time, could never bring himself to ask. He didn’t even want to remember that it had been Kristi who first told him about The Hollows.
She blinked, confused. “What place?”
“The Hollows.”
She blew out a breath of disdain, rubbed a hand to her forehead. “Not so that you would take your family up there on a fucking vacation.”
Her voice had come up an octave, and a woman walking down the sidewalk on the street turned and stared, then kept moving.
“Then why?”
She shook her head, gave him the look that women always seemed to give him sooner or later—angry, disappointed, tired.
“You don’t even remember, do you?” she said. Not really a question. “Because that’s where I’m from. I was trying to tell you about myself. But you never heard that, because you never gave a shit who I was, or am, or what I wanted.”