“You have to stop being so apologetic, Lily.”
She sets her pen down. “So what’s going on? Is there any news about Jake?”
“Some. But that’s not why I’m here. I have something for you,” I say.
“Something for me?” she asks. “What?”
I reach into my pocket. I clasp it in my fingers and pull it out, opening my palm flat. There in my hand is a small silver hoop with a tiny pearl.
“Is that my earring?” Lily asks.
“Yes,” I say.
Lily is practically ecstatic. Her face lights up. She’s so happy to have her earring back. She pushes her chair back and stands quickly up, coming around the edge of the desk to take the earring from my hand. She wraps her hand around it, and then grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me into an awkward but quick hug. “Thank you so much for finding it, Nina.”
“I know how much these earrings mean to you. I know you were upset when you lost it.”
“Christian gave these to me for our anniversary a couple years ago,” she says, which I know because she’s told me before. “I thought it was gone. I didn’t think I’d ever see it again.”
Lily smiles at me. She clutches the earring to her heart. “Thank you again. I’m so grateful.” She turns away from me. She goes back to her chair to sit. She doesn’t ask where I found the earring. I thought she would have been more curious but maybe she already knows. She reaches for her pen like she’s just going to go back to grading papers.
“Aren’t you going to ask where I found it?” I ask. Lily looks up. She reads my face.
“I just assumed the hall or the copy room,” she says, knowing the answer is no. She stands slowly back up as if gaining leverage. She crosses her arms. She hangs back, by the whiteboard, keeping distance between herself and me. “No?” she asks.
I shake my head. “No, Lily. That’s not where I found it.”
Lily is almost afraid to ask, but she does so anyway because it would be strange not to. “Where did you find it?”
Imagine my surprise when last night, I searched Jake’s car after getting home from the auto pound. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but just any little thing the police might have missed that could provide details of Jake’s last day or of his disappearance, something innocuous but revelatory, like a store receipt, that would have told me where he’d been.
I found the earring on the floor in the back seat of Jake’s car. At first I didn’t know whose it was. I thought maybe it was mine. It was dark in the garage and I couldn’t get a good look at it. I got out of the car and held it up to the light. I knew almost immediately then that it was Lily’s. Silver hoops are generally unremarkable, but the pearl gave it away. They’re pretty earrings, simple but still on trend, and the hoop is minimalist enough to put the small pearl on display.
Standing in the garage, I stared at the earring open-mouthed and at a complete loss. My breath had changed. It was hot in the garage all of a sudden and harder to breathe.
I wondered what it was doing there, how Lily’s missing earring had wound up in the back seat of my husband’s car.
I could only think of one reason. That Lily had been in Jake’s car. Because how would her earring have been there if she wasn’t?
I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t what I was thinking, that maybe it was something completely innocuous like that Lily’s car broke down on the side of the road and Jake gave her a lift home.
Except that now, when I ask Lily, her face goes blank. She stutters and trips over her words, becoming inarticulate. She can’t come up with a lie to save her life.
CHRISTIAN
Every day is like New Year’s Eve and waiting for the ball to drop. Except that when the ball does drop, we won’t be celebrating. Jake’s body will have been identified. Everyone will know where he is and that he’s dead and, soon enough, they’ll know who did it. Identifying a body takes time. The medical examiner might be backed up, or a fingerprint match might be harder to make because of the level of decomposition. I don’t ever want them to identify his body. But I also can’t stand the anticipation.
Lily calls me that afternoon when I’m at work and she’s on her way home from school. It’s unlike her to call me at work. Usually she texts because she doesn’t like to interrupt me if I’m busy. She’ll text and say something like Can you talk? and then waits for me to call her.
I’m sitting at my desk, responding to an email from a client when my cell rings. “Hey,” I say, answering. “Is everything okay?”
Lily says, “She found my earring.”
It takes a moment to process.
“The one I gave you?” I ask. This is good news, then. I think often of that day Lily sat in the chair in our family room and told me what Jake had done to her, but not before first confessing to the lost earring. I’m sorry. I lost one, she’d said, crying, as if I would care. Lily had been upset that the earring was gone. I was upset, too, but not as upset as Lily. Lily loved those earrings, and symbolically they meant something to us. Five years of marriage. Twenty percent of marriages end in divorce within five years. It felt like an accomplishment, like something worth celebrating. I’m not superstitious. I didn’t think her losing one was prophetic. But still, it’s good to have that earring back because I know how much she loved them and how much they meant to her.
“Yes,” Lily says, though I can’t help but think that Lily is upset about something. Her words are too cryptic, too clipped.
“That’s great news,” I say, as if trying to convince her. “Who found it?”
“Nina.”
“Where was it?” I ask. There is a hesitation on the other end of the line and I think that I cut out, that Lily didn’t hear me. I ask again, “Where was it, Lily? Where did she find it?”
Lily says, “In Jake’s car.”
The blood drains from my face.
I’m typing the email as we talk, only partially listening. I have the phone balanced on my shoulder so that my hands are free to type.
My hands freeze over the keys. I stop typing. I reach for the phone, holding it in a hand so that I can get up from the desk to go and shut the office door for privacy.
“Whoa,” I say, whispering now because even with the door shut, I don’t know what people on the other side of it can hear. “Back up, Lily. What do you mean in Jake’s car? Since when did Nina find Jake’s car?”
It feels like the walls are closing in on me, like the room is getting smaller.
“Yesterday. The police called her. It was impounded for being illegally parked.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t know. Not until today when she told me.”
“What exactly did she say?”
“That the police called about the car. She went to claim it, and then last night, when she got home, she searched the car and found the earring.”
This is happening fast. I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it. I’m trying not to panic but to process things. Sooner or later the car was going to be found. I knew that. Lily had to know that. It couldn’t sit in that hotel lot forever. Our goal wasn’t to make it disappear forever, but to take it away from the place where Lily was seen and where Jake was killed.