The train pulled into 77th Street. The crowd moved up the stairs in a slow trudge, each person pausing at the top to open an umbrella or pull up a hood. It was earlier than I usually came home, the tail end of rush hour still thick with commuters. My thoughts looped back to Adam. That slimy bastard. Preying on disgruntled employees to get his next story; converting other people’s unhappiness into fuel for his ambition. I wondered what Julia ever could have seen in him, even as a friend.
Then it occurred to me, as I waited for the light to change on 3rd Avenue. Julia. Had she seen Adam lately? Had she mentioned his name? I sifted through my memory: no, she had never said anything. But this city wasn’t very big. Even I had run into Adam, and what were the odds of that? And Julia kept in touch with everyone, even people she claimed to dislike, even the bitchy girls from prep school. But she hadn’t uttered his name once since that rainy March night, sophomore year, when she’d disappeared upstairs with Adam during that party. I wasn’t stupid. I could guess what had happened. But after that party, the fights tapered off. Things felt steadier, calmer. She went away to Paris, and, after that, we were happier than ever. We never spoke about it again. It had been left completely, resolutely in the past.
As I turned onto our block, I passed a group crowded under a bar awning, smoking cigarettes in soggy Santa hats and holiday sweaters. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” blasted out through the bar’s open door. A girl wearing an elf costume stumbled into me as I pushed through the crowd. “Whoa!” she said, sloppy and laughing. I mumbled an apology. She stuck out her tongue, swaying on her feet. “Merry Christmas, grinch!” she shouted at my back.
The image materialized as I dug my keys out of my pocket. Julia, turning at the sound of her name. At a bar or a party, or some sidewalk in the city. Smiling at an old friend. Softening and bending toward him, like she had all those years before. A little lonely, bored in her job, with so many hours alone in that tiny apartment. So much restless energy. What might have happened between the two of them, reunited after so long? The conversations, hours and hours of conversation, saying everything she had to say. The things she was no longer saying to me. Julia always loved a good listener.
The apartment was dark when I opened the door. The light, when I flipped it on, illuminated a strange scene. The blanket was rumpled around a fresh-looking dent in the futon. A takeout container of soup sat on the coffee table, still steaming with heat. The dread swelled, a tinge in the back of my throat. Where was she? I spun around, surveying the room for clues. But the rest of the furniture was neat and in place. A bowl and mug sat on the drying rack next to the kitchen sink. The tea towels hung square from the oven door. The bed was smoothly made, the pillows plumped. A stupid phrase came to mind: There was no sign of struggle. Julia had just up and left moments earlier.
I pulled out my phone and called her. I belatedly realized that the ringing was louder than usual, coming not just from the speaker next to my ear but also from somewhere in the room. I followed the chime and buzz to the coffee table, where her phone was partially obscured by a stack of takeout napkins. I picked up her phone, which was glowing from my missed call.
The wallpaper on her iPhone screen, for a long time, had been a picture of the two of us taken during that summer in Europe. She had handed her phone to another tourist while we leaned against the railing that separated the rocky path from the bright blue sea below. She loved that picture. The two of us smiling and squinting, happy and tired and sunburned from an afternoon trekking through the Cinque Terre. After the digital shutter snapped, we relaxed our smiles, Julia thanked the tourist, and we walked back to our B and B in Monterosso. That night we drank wine on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. She pulled her hair loose from its bun and tilted her head back to look at the stars. I took her hand and led her back to our room under the attic rafters. We fell asleep curled together as the waves crashed far below. But that photo, that moment, that life was gone. In its place, on the phone screen, was a generic image of planet earth floating in space. That image wedged in my brain like a shard of glass. Erasure of our happiest memories. Evidence of just how far we had drifted.
But that’s not what I was really looking at. I was reading, over and over again, the text message that appeared on the locked screen of the phone. Eight short words, but that was all it took. It became suddenly, painfully clear who was behind the revelations about Spire. Who had been drawing closer and slipping information to the person on the other side of the table.
Adam McCard, thirty-two minutes ago.
I’m sorry, babe. I had to do it.
Part 3
Chapter 14
Julia
Last week I was lying in bed, pretending to take a late afternoon nap but really just staring at the ceiling, when I heard a car pull up in the driveway.