But none of them, not even Madison, were going anywhere yet. We’re all stuck in this house, Lily thought. We have to play our hands through. If we weren’t going to do that, then we should have folded sooner.
She sat at the kitchen table, the thick stack of paper arranged neatly in front of her. She’d heard him come home while she was putting the twins to bed, making all the usual noises: throwing his keys on the front table, lumbering down the hall to his study. She couldn’t believe it, so she’d come down, on tiptoe, to check. Until the very last second, when she saw him snoring on his couch, she refused to believe that he really would have come back into this house without asking where his children were, if they were all here and accounted for.
So she was especially pleased with herself for having thought to go into his study as soon as she got home, before he got there.
Now, the boys were in bed, there was an empty bottle propped against the door to Bob’s study so that she’d hear him if he tried to come out into the house—another brainstorm—and Lily was in the kitchen with these accordion folders.
She hadn’t read through their contents yet, because she wasn’t sure how involved she wanted to be in whatever was there. She knew what Madison thought; she knew what Jackson would say if he were here. But she didn’t exactly want to take them on her own shoulders, not tonight. She just wanted to make sure they were no longer squarely on Madison’s. She wanted Madison to know that at least one adult was involved and on her side.
She was reminding herself of that, of her role as the twins’ protector and as Madison’s advocate, when Isabel and Mina came into the kitchen.
“What’s wrong,” Mina said immediately. Lily looked to Isabel. They couldn’t talk about this in front of Mina; surely, even if she didn’t know what was on Lily’s mind, Isabel would intuit this.
“Is he here?” Isabel asked.
“He’s down the hall,” Lily said. “I don’t know how he got home, but he’s in there sleeping it off.”
“He went to sleep,” Isabel echoed. Lily nodded, and Isabel laughed. She crossed to the sink and poured herself a glass of water. “Good for him.”
Lily looked pointedly at Mina, who was awkwardly attempting to remove the pins from her updo. She’d already taken off her earrings, as if this were her bedside and the night were already over. She froze and looked from Lily to Isabel, again.
“I can stay,” Mina said.
Isabel fixed her eyes on Lily for a moment and gave her a gesture almost too brief to count as a nod. She turned, then, back to Mina.
“No,” Isabel said. “You should go home. Get some rest.”
“I can sleep in the den,” Mina insisted. “I can make up something to tell Tom.”
“No,” Isabel said. “Thank you. For everything, truly. I think we all need to sleep this off. Including you. Tell Tom I’m so sorry for all the hassle. I’ll send him a bottle of scotch.”
Mina gathered her earrings in one hand, holding the train of her dress with the other. She looked back only once before she left the kitchen. Lily could feel the woman’s plea, her anxiety, but she refused to look up and make eye contact. The fact that we both hate Bob right now doesn’t make you family, she thought. Your part of the evening is over.
“You should call the police,” Mina said finally. “Or at least have Teddy call them. You should do something so that later it at least looks, to her, like you were all frantically looking for her.”
Isabel crossed the kitchen and walked into the pantry. Mina scoffed, and looked to Lily, her eagerness to recapture their earlier frankness written naked across her face. But Lily said nothing, and Mina turned to go. Isabel did not emerge until the front door had slammed.
She looked, for a moment, at the space where Mina had stood. Then she turned back to the table.
“So,” she said.
“These are some papers he locked in a drawer,” Lily said. “Madison saw him hide the key. A while ago.”
“And you knew where to look?”
“She told me about them,” Lily said. “Not at first. But I saw her—she snuck into the city last week, again. To meet with a journalist. I don’t know—”
She caught her voice before it faltered, reminded herself that some secrets were still secrets.
“I don’t know how she initially made contact with him, and she said she didn’t tell him anything. But she’s been thinking about giving him this stuff, because she thinks it’s the proof that he didn’t do anything wrong. Bob. I think she thinks these will—clear his name, or something. Wrap it all up.”
Isabel laughed.
“Do you think she really believes that?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “I don’t know what he’s been telling her. I think he’s probably talked about some of it with her.”
Isabel waited for a moment. She stood up, got a bottle of wine from the pantry, and brought it back to the table.
“Why are you showing them to me?” she said. Lily bit the inside of one cheek before answering.
“I heard,” she said. “About tonight. Mina told me, when I picked up the boys.”
“Superb,” Isabel said.
“I guess I don’t think it should be Madison’s problem,” Lily said. “I don’t think Madison should have to be the one to decide what to do with them. That doesn’t seem, I don’t know. That seems unfair to me.”
Isabel poured them each a glass of wine. They had done this only twice before, together. The first time had been after the towers, when for all they knew Bob was gone. They sat here, and split a bottle of wine, and waited to hear from him. Lily had been new to the family then, well-liked but not yet trusted.
“My daughter is no fool,” Isabel said. “She must know that, if he could save his own skin, or prove that he was right, lord it over everyone, then he would have done it by now.”
Lily said nothing. Isabel sighed.
“Do you know where she went?”
Lily shook her head.
“I spoke with Teddy already,” Isabel told her. “He called both apartments in the city. She’s not there, but we’ve got people watching both anyway. She left her phone at the party, I have it. So now, I guess, we wait for her.”
They waited there for three hours. They drank the wine in silence, and after the first hour or so, Lily made coffee. She could see Isabel’s fear, her exhaustion. The woman wasn’t a robot; she was afraid for her daughter. But Lily could see, too, that they both felt the same way, that a part of each of them dreaded Madison’s return. That this vigil was their penance for having failed to uphold some agreement, for having failed to render some service Madison should have been owed.
But never once did Lily think that she should tell Isabel she’d seen Madison.
“What makes you think she’ll come home tonight?” she said, after untold minutes had passed. Isabel didn’t reply for so long, Lily had allowed her thoughts to move on. But then Isabel spoke.
“I don’t know if she wants to put herself in real danger,” she said. “I don’t know if she wants to actually go find out what other people, outside her little world, think of her. I think she just wants me to know that she could. I think she wants to see what I’ll do.”