I’m starting the review of the six-pack of Dab-A-Do! bingo daubers that arrived the other day （“Color is vibrant, exactly as pictured”） when I detect the faint sound of a car driving up the hill. I pause my typing to listen. I’d guess it’s the Pigeon returning home from a day of shopping with the #girlsquad she’s always tagging on Instagram, but I saw her hopping on the exercise bike in her bedroom ten minutes ago. I click off the monitor, put on my robe, and go downstairs. The dark gray fog outside is pierced by two beams of light as a car crests the hill and approaches the bridge. I move away. The car turns into my driveway, and the engine quiets. I hold my breath, expecting to hear footsteps thudding up the porch steps, but whoever it is jogs by the porch, down the path toward Sam’s office door. I pull back the curtains, and see the car—a green Mini Cooper with a white racing stripe—parked in my driveway.
The French Girl is here.
I move away from the window and go to the closet for my coat, resigned to be the one to have to tell her: Dr. Statler has been missing for forty-eight hours and is not available to indulge her insecurities for the next forty-five minutes. I open the front door and step onto the porch in my slippers. Perhaps I should offer my services, volunteer to be the one to tell her the hard, cold truth: her promiscuity is the result of low self-esteem. I happen to have been reading up on the topic since her last appointment, and I’ve come to understand that her licentious behavior stems from insufficient supervision as a young girl, leading her to use sex for attention, which will ultimately provide her with nothing but empty relationships and increased feelings of low self-worth.
“Hello?” I call into the darkness. “Are you there?” I walk gingerly down the slippery path toward Sam’s door. Silence. And then Sam’s waiting room light clicks on.
I duck down. She got inside. I turn and dash up the stairs into the house. My hands tremble as I lock the front door and race through the kitchen, down the hall to Agatha Lawrence’s study, where I drop to my knees in the corner of the room and pull back the smiley-face rug.
I hear the door to his office open, and then the click of the light switch. She’s walking around, and—my god—she’s opening the desk drawers. I don’t know what to do. Call the police? Scream at her to go away? I know. I’ll go down there and remind her that this is private property. But as I’m about to stand up, she begins to cry.
“Hi, it’s me. I’m at Sam’s office.” She’s quiet. “No, I came alone.” She pauses, sniffs. “I found the key in one of his coat pockets.” Something is off about her voice, and it takes a moment for me to realize what it is: her French accent is gone. “I just got here.”
It hits me then. That voice. I know that voice. It’s the same voice from that YouTube lecture—“Misery and Womanhood,” which I’ve now watched at least twenty times. My head swims. The French Girl isn’t a French girl at all.
The French Girl is his wife.
Chapter 23
“And?” Maddie asks nervously. “How does it look?”
Annie slowly opens another drawer in Sam’s desk, seeing a row of pens and the grid notebooks he likes. “Fine,” she says. Books in place on his shelves, vacuum lines still in the carpet. “I was here the other day, and it looks the same.”
Annie hears Maddie inhaling, and she pictures her cousin standing outside the restaurant she owns in Bordeaux, smoking the one cigarette she allows herself at the end of the night, after the last dinner serving. Maddie and Annie—eleven months apart—were often mistaken for sisters during the summers Annie and her parents spent in France, at the olive farm on which her mother grew up and where her aunt and uncle now live. Maddie and Annie kept a countdown calendar every year, ticking off the days until Annie would arrive and they’d share a room, even though there was space enough for Annie to have her own.
“I don’t love you being there by yourself,” Maddie says. “Can you go now?”
“Yes,” Annie says.
“Promise?”
“Yes.” Annie hangs up and scans the room. It’s peaceful here. The view of the yard, covered in a carpet of fog. The Palladian-blue walls that, Sam explained, were meant to evoke serenity. （“I thought that was your job,” she told him when he showed her the swatch.） She walks to the table next to his chair, riffling through the papers on top. A copy of an academic article on Anna Freud and defense mechanisms. The latest issue of In Touch Weekly, a story of Kris Jenner’s secret Mexican wedding on the cover.