Even for someone perfectly fine, that path into the woods is easy to get turned around on. It’s easy to get lost. The trees limit the view. There are no landmarks and it’s easy to misjudge distances. I, perfectly fine, felt disoriented walking in the woods. Jake may very well have stumbled off in the wrong direction, going deeper into the woods instead of back to the marked path. Who knows how far he walked before he collapsed. It’s hard to imagine a person could just completely evaporate somewhere around here. It’s the suburbs of Chicago and not the wilds of Alaska, but still, the forest preserve encompasses twenty-five hundred acres of land. You can fit something like eighteen hundred football fields in that space, and most of it is heavily wooded, which means that I could search for Jake for years and never find him.
The thing is that Jake is an upstanding citizen. He’s a doctor. He’s never been in trouble with the law, as far as we know. There is no reason for anyone to believe he’s a predator.
Lily has physical wounds: the scraped knees and the impressions of his hands on her arms. But even that is circumstantial at best and healing. It’s only a matter of time before they’re completely gone.
Jake’s blood and bone fragments on a rock with Lily’s fingerprints also on it—that’s evidence. Her blood-soaked clothes in the bag still hanging on the garage door handle—that’s also evidence.
What Lily did isn’t murder. It’s maybe manslaughter. There was no intent to kill him. But manslaughter comes with jail time, and I won’t let my wife and the mother of my child go to jail.
I can’t live without her, no matter for how long.
Years ago, Lily’s identity was stolen. It was a nightmare. Whoever did it opened credit cards in Lily’s name and bought expensive but ridiculous things with them. They changed her address so that the credit card bills went somewhere else, not to us. We had no idea any of this was happening until we went to apply for a loan for a car, and realized Lily’s credit rating was incredibly low. It took years to restore.
I got smart and locked down our internet and accounts. I downloaded VPN software and figured out how to go undetectable on the web so that we couldn’t be hacked. What that means for me now is that my search history can’t be monitored. I can google things like what a BMW 7 series key looks like without it being traced back to me. I show Lily the image. It’s not your standard key, but a key fob. I tell her that it would have the BMW logo on it, and then remind her what the BMW logo looks like. Our best bet at moving the car comes down to Lily finding this thing. “That’s what you’ll be looking for,” I say. “Check a key chain. Or purse pockets.”
Lily nods and says okay, but I can tell that she’s nervous. She doesn’t know how she’s going to pull this off. Lily isn’t used to breaking rules. She’s rule abiding to a fault. She doesn’t speed. She always wears her seat belt. She won’t look at her phone when driving, even at red lights. When a lane is about to end and she has to merge, Lily is the first to do so, no matter how many times I tell her that the laws of physics say it’s better if she waits until the last second to merge, like me. She doesn’t, because it pisses other drivers off. Lily doesn’t like to piss people off. If a restaurant menu says no substitutions, she won’t even ask, no matter how much she wants or doesn’t want something.
Later that night, lying together in bed in the dark, we talk through ways for Lily to search Nina’s purse for Jake’s key. “Where does she keep her purse?” I ask. Lily faces away from me in bed. I spoon her from behind, my hand under her shirt, across her abdomen where our baby is.
Outside it’s raining, the rain like fingernails tapping against the glass, and I think of that rain washing any last remnants of blood from the rocks and grass.
I want more than anything for it to be a downpour.
“I’ve seen it in her classroom, under her desk,” Lily says, about the purse. “She closes the door when she leaves the room. They lock automatically.”
“Is there any way you can get into the classroom if the door is locked?”
“Yes,” she says. “My classroom key unlocks all of the classroom doors.”
“That doesn’t seem safe,” I say, surprised but also relieved because it makes things easier on us. I didn’t expect it to be that easy.
“Teachers have complained.”
“I would too. So you’ll go when she’s not in the room. Does she take her purse with her to lunch?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Lily says. “She might just bring a lunch and eat in the classroom, like me.”
“But eventually she’d have to leave?” I ask, hopeful.
Lily says yes. I ask her when she personally leaves her classroom, leaving her purse behind. When she goes to the bathroom, the copy room, or for things like department and team meetings, she says. My hope for that key hinges on Lily’s ability to pull this off, and that worries me because it’s not in Lily’s nature to break into places and steal things. “You just have to be confident and calm and quick. Do you think you can do this?”
“I don’t know, Christian,” she says. She’s scared of getting caught. She’s scared of being seen. “What happens if I can’t?”
“Then we’ll find another way,” I say, because the last thing I want to do is make her uncomfortable and scared. “Just do your best. If you can’t, you can’t.”
Lily turns around in bed to face me. “Christian?”
“What?”
“Why are you being so nice? Why are you helping me like this when I did a terrible thing?” she asks. I made a vow to Lily once. For better or worse. I never imagined that the worse would look anything like this, but life is unpredictable at times, and there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
In the dark, I just barely make out the outline of Lily’s face. I run my fingers along her hairline, her cheek, seeing her with my hands. I lean forward into her, close. She does too. For a minute, we breathe each other’s air. I feel her breath on me. Her hands slip around me, pulling me toward her so that we’re flush, one continuous being.
Lily brings her face somehow even closer to mine. She hesitates, and then she kisses me. It’s sedate, slow, deep. I feel that kiss everywhere. I’ve been too afraid to touch Lily. I’ve wanted to. God, how I’ve wanted to. But I’ve been walking on eggshells around her, not wanting to do anything she didn’t want to do, not wanting to do anything that would be uncomfortable for her, after what she’s been through both with Jake and the baby.
I pull gently back from her kiss, though our faces still touch. “Because I love you,” I whisper, sliding a tentative hand beneath her flannel shirt, stroking her softly, and she sighs quietly at my touch, like a breeze moving through leaves. Her body responds. Lily rolls onto her back. Her legs fall open. She reaches for me. I rise above her, slowly lowering myself between her thighs. “Because I would do anything for you,” I say. “And because what you did wasn’t terrible. It was necessary.”
It was necessary.
I just don’t know that everyone would see it that way.