And her heart stops.
Why is there a flip-phone tucked in the corner of the drawer?
She glances around, making sure she’s alone. Then she picks up the phone gingerly. She flips it open and it springs to life.
Why would Anna have this phone? Anna uses an iPhone. Cassie’s seen her use it a million times. It’s not Andrew’s phone.
There’s a green button on the phone that seems to be used to make calls. Cassie presses it, and the phone starts to dial a number. The last number that was called with the phone.
That’s when Cassie hears ringing in the other room.
No. It couldn’t be.
“Cassie.”
Cassie jerks her head up. The phone slides from her hands and clatters onto the floor, smashing to pieces. Anna is standing at the door to Andrew’s room, a sweet smile on her lips. She’s holding Cassie’s cell phone.
“Your phone was ringing, Cassie,” Anna says.
And then Anna closes the door behind her. When she turns to Cassie, her eyes are dark and foreboding.
Anna
During the second half of my pregnancy, I couldn’t sleep.
People warned me that as I got closer to my delivery date, sleep would elude me more and more. But even before my stomach was bulging and pressing on my bladder all night long, I had horrible insomnia. And because of the pregnancy, pills were out of the question. The best I could do was practice good sleep hygiene and drink glasses of warm milk.
One night, Dean woke up and caught me pacing our bedroom at one in the morning. He cracked an eye open, rubbing at his already messy dark hair. “Anna,” he mumbled. “What are you doing? Come to bed.”
“I can’t sleep.”
He yawned as he struggled into a sitting position. Before the baby came, he still made it to the gym a few nights a week, and his well-muscled bare chest was extremely appealing. He grinned at me. “You want me to wear you out?”
“Yes, please,” I said, because Dean had delivered on the promise he made during his first date. He was a damn good doctor. He was a damn good kisser. And he was damn good in bed. I mean, damn.
After it was over, he passed out with his arms wrapped around me, but instead of wearing me out, the good sex had energized me. I slipped out of his arms and reached for my phone on the nightstand.
The WhereAmI app was still on my phone. Dean allowed me to install it on his so that I would be able to locate him wherever he was, which felt increasingly important as my due date neared. One other person I was also able to track was Lydia.
This was, more or less, innocent. Lydia had no regard for anyone else’s time but her own, so she thought nothing of telling me we were meeting at a given time, then showing up twenty minutes or even half-an-hour late. She never called to say she’d be late, or if she did, it was always after I was already sitting in the restaurant like an idiot, waiting for her. So one day, after she had been an enraging forty-two minutes late for our lunch together, I plucked her phone out of her purse while she was visiting the ladies’ room. The screen was locked but her password was Violet’s birthday. It took me thirty seconds to install WhereAmI on her phone, so that I’d always know exactly when she was on her way to meet me.
I loaded the app on a whim. Dean’s location was blinking in the same place as mine—his phone was five feet away from me. But Lydia wasn’t home. She was somewhere else. Somewhere surprising.
She was at Joel’s new girlfriend’s bookstore.
Dean was sound asleep, snoring softly. I got out of bed, shrugged on my coat, and called for an Uber to meet me downstairs. Ten minutes later, I was outside Bookland. Well, down the block. I instructed Pierre, my Uber driver, to keep in the distance. I slipped him a twenty to shut off his lights and let me stay in the car to watch.