“I’m not sure I know where to start.”
Again he waited, his silence urging her to continue.
“My last name isn’t Tillman,” she admitted. “It’s Shipley.”
“Caroline Shipley,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Should I know that name? Are you famous?”
“More like infamous.”
“Caroline Shipley,” he repeated, eyes narrowing, then opening wide with recognition. “Oh, my God. The woman whose daughter disappeared…”
“Yes—‘oh, my God’—that’s my middle name.” She waited for him to pull away in horror, but instead he gathered her even closer into his comforting embrace.
“Thank you,” she whispered, clinging to him.
“For what?”
“For not being repulsed by me.”
“Why on earth would I be repulsed? I lost a child of my own, remember? I can only imagine what you went through. What you’re going through…”
She was crying in earnest now. “It’ll be ten years next week. I can’t believe it. Ten years.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head, not because she didn’t want to talk about it but because she was afraid that if she started talking, she wouldn’t be able to stop.
“I remember how guilty I felt after Jenny and Lara died,” he was saying, speaking more to himself than to her. “Survivor’s guilt, I think they call it. I kept thinking that if only I’d been there, if I’d driven Lara to school that day, if I’d been walking beside them, I could have saved them. Or maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. They’d still be alive.”
“Or you might have been killed, too.”
“I didn’t care. I wanted to die. I’m sure you felt the same. You blame yourself, you think it was your fault…”
“It was my fault,” Caroline said, encouraged by his openness, his understanding of her pain. “Everything, my fault.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I left my children alone in a hotel room. So I could have dinner with friends.” The words began spilling from her mouth, as she’d known they would, a decade’s worth of suppressed guilt and rage. She told him everything, embellishing facts already known, sharing the feelings of shame and despair she’d kept bottled up inside for ten years. She talked about her treatment by the Mexican police, their suspicions that she and Hunter were responsible for whatever had happened to Samantha. She took the blame for the deterioration of her marriage, for her strained relationship with Michelle. “They tell you it gets easier with time,” she said. “But it doesn’t. If anything, the opposite is true. It gets worse. Life just keeps piling on more and more for you to feel guilty about.”
“Like what?”
That was when she told him about Errol, the boy in her class who’d committed suicide, and how her school principal had subsequently asked her to resign.
“He had no right to do that.”
“I knew something was wrong, you know. With Errol. I could see it in his eyes. I tried to talk to him, get him to open up. I think he was on the verge, but then I looked up at the clock. Michelle had a dentist appointment and I knew how upset she’d be if I was late. And he noticed. He was such a sensitive boy. He clammed right up, insisted he was fine, told me he’d see me the next day. So I let him go. I went to pick up Michelle. And he went home and hanged himself.”
“You had no way of knowing what he’d do.”
“I knew he was vulnerable. Errol’s dead because of me, because I wasn’t there for him. Just like Samantha is gone because I wasn’t there for her. I’m the common denominator in this equation. It’s all my fault. Everything, my fault.”
He shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what? You have nothing to be sorry about. Not where I’m concerned anyway.”
He kissed the top of her head, burying his face in her hair. Neither of them said another word until Caroline reluctantly announced it was time for her to go home. Michelle would be waiting and there was school the next morning.
“Will I hear from you again?” she asked as she was leaving his apartment.
“Count on it,” he said.
—
“I’m such an idiot,” she said to Peggy, her fingernails scratching at Arthur’s byline. Except his name wasn’t Arthur. It was Aidan. A much trendier name. She almost laughed.
They were sitting at the kitchen table. Peggy had made a pot of coffee and taken the phone off the hook.
“You couldn’t know.”
“I should have been suspicious. It’s so obvious, thinking back.”
“How is it obvious?”
“The way we met, for starters. One of those ‘meet cute’ situations you only see in the movies. He probably engineered the whole thing, counted on his charm to win me over.”