“Didn’t you say you’d had a playdate with her once? That’s why you knew her address when Kira and I went to scope it out the day we found out she was missing?”
“Yeah, so?” Selena’s eyes were locked with mine.
“So you knew her—know her—better than I did. I honestly barely remember my interactions with her, which is so frustrating, because—”
“Jenn, slow down,” Selena said, putting one hand up. “I had one playdate with her that lasted an hour. It doesn’t mean we’re best friends, though I’m not sure what my relationship with her has to do with anything.” Selena was starting to get fed up and it was obvious.
“I just feel like I’m missing something. I really don’t think she would have left, or hurt herself”—I was thinking of that day I’d seen her at the park with Naomi, again—“and we’ve probably spent more time with her than anyone over these past few weeks, so maybe there were clues we just didn’t see. Do you think—would you want to go visit her house with me again? I want to get a better read on Connor. Her mom said come back anytime, and she seemed more than willing to talk to me and Vanessa when we were there, so maybe she’d even know something about why Isabel thought I had plans with her, and—”
Selena was shaking her head as I spoke and this time held both hands up to stop me midsentence once more. “Look, Jenn.” Her tone had shifted from patient to exasperated. “I am really not interested in playing detective with you. I thought you wanted to hang out to get to know me. To have the babies play together. Not to talk about a missing woman whom we really do not know all that well and whose case we know nothing about. What do you even mean, you’re missing something? It’s not up to you to solve her case. It has nothing to do with us, okay? It’s very sad, but we aren’t involved. In any way.”
I knew she was right and I also knew that I seemed unhinged. I felt involved, though. My name was in her phone and hers was in mine. A baby whose cheek I had touched and whose paci I had retrieved from the floor was missing her mother. If that were me who was missing, I would want anyone who’d ever met me to feel involved, to try to find me and bring me back to my girl. Selena may disagree with my meddling, but I disagreed with her apathy. Just because we hadn’t known Isabel long, that didn’t mean that her disappearance shouldn’t mean something to me.
“But it just seems like we could help,” I protested lamely.
“If we wanted to help, we could have reached out to help her before this happened, because anyone could have guessed that she was having a hard time. The fact is that she probably killed herself and tried to cover it up so as not to hurt her family or ruin her reputation.” My ears rang at this, but she kept on. “I’ve seen it happen before—mainly with people whose companies have gone under and who feel they’ll never be able to recover financially. That they’ve failed their families. Maybe even because of some shady business dealings. They kill themselves but try to make it look like an accident—to save face, and sometimes for insurance money. Of course, Isabel didn’t need money, but otherwise, this could very well be the same thing. She’d had enough but doesn’t want people to know that this is something she chose. Having detectives in the mix may honestly be a polite formality on the part of the police. And the lack of press may be because it’s obvious to both police and her family what really happened. Who knows.”
So she did have opinions that she had been withholding. Frightening ones, too.
I absorbed her words, slowly, painfully, like a blunt knife. This whole time, I’d been operating on the assumption that Isabel was kidnapped, hurt, maybe murdered, but possibly still alive. In my mind I’d already ruled out suicide, but maybe that’s just because I was trying to deny my own culpability—for indeed, I’d been so caught up with my own sleep deprivation and depression and anxiety over Clara and grief over my mom that I hadn’t once said to Isabel: Hey—are you okay? Really okay? I’m here if you need to talk. Even though I’d noticed her dark undereye circles and wondered about her anxious watch checking, I’d never asked, truly asked, how she was. And maybe if I had—
But no. I clung to the conviction that she wouldn’t choose to leave Naomi. I knew that as hard as things were for me, too, the idea of not being with Clara was unfathomable. Impossible. Worse than anything else. “Do you think we could somehow get access to her phone?” I heard myself saying. “Her mom would honestly probably let us look at it, if they have it.”