She slept lightly, expecting Nathan’s weight on the mattress to wake her at any moment, but it didn’t. When she did wake, she didn’t remember what had stirred her from her sleep; she had only the sense that she’d heard something. She made her way to the window. The courtyard was quiet. Still. There was a light on in the carriage house.
She looked at the alarm clock beside her bed, blaring out its glowing blue numbers. It was past midnight. Nathan had always been a night owl. She glimpsed him briefly, walking past the lit window on the ground level of the carriage house, and then drew the curtains closed.
If he was avoiding her, she wouldn’t push. He would stay. Surely he would stay.
Yet dawn greeted her with unsympathetic light slashing through the blinds, and Nathan had never returned to bed. No toast this morning either. She threw up, brushed her teeth—which made her retch all over again—and stumbled downstairs, cursing her unborn and clearly ungrateful child.
Nathan’s laptop was out on the kitchen table, taking up half the space on the table with its external keyboard and mouse and second monitor and a USB adaptor flopping aimlessly from one port. He even had a can of compressed air out—he was so meticulous about keeping crumbs and dust out of his keyboard. She’d always thought the point of a laptop was portability, but Nathan never used his without all his peripherals. She closed the lid and went over to her phone, which was charging on the counter where she’d left it.
She’d missed a call from a former client. She checked the voice mail and made a mental note to follow up, then idly scrolled through her emails, distracting herself as she pinched tiny bits of bread off and tried to fool her gut into thinking they were something other than food. A client had finally paid a tardy invoice—good, that would help.
No sign of Nathan still. Frowning, she wandered through the house. There was a blanket on the couch in the living room, like he’d slept there, but no sign of Nathan himself.
A momentary panic stabbed through her gut. He was gone. He’d left—but he hadn’t left, she told herself. His things were still upstairs in the bedroom, his laptop on the kitchen table. And where would he have gone?
There was one place. The thought was traitorous. She looked down at the phone in her hand. She closed her email and swiped over to where the phone tracker app waited, her thumb hovering over it.
He’d gone out on an errand, or for coffee, or to get some air, she told herself. She wasn’t going to be the one who didn’t trust him. She turned off the display and jammed the phone in her pocket.
She got to work, as she had every day, without a particular plan. Today she went through the labeled items, actually throwing away the trash, surreptitiously removing some of the TOSS and DONATE labels for things she thought they’d need to check with her sisters.
She took an old vacuum cleaner—definitely on its last legs, but they didn’t have the budget for a replacement—and went to tackle the rug in the front living room. Through the window she glimpsed the car, and stopped, frowning. Nathan hadn’t left, then. So where was he? Not still out in the carriage house, surely. She bit her lip. If he was truly avoiding her that thoroughly, she didn’t want to intrude. She grabbed a stray glass from a sideboard and marched determinedly back to the kitchen. She opened the dishwasher to put it in and paused.
There were two wineglasses snuggled inside the dishwasher, the purplish stains of red wine caked to the bottom. She lifted one, turning it in her hand. There was a lip print on one side, bright red. And there was the bottle, in the recycling. Empty. Someone had been here last night, while she was out. Someone who wore red lipstick.
Someone Nathan might have left with.
Reluctantly, she took her phone from her pocket and this time she opened the app before she could talk herself out of it.
The dot that showed Nathan’s phone was indeed in the carriage house, practically dead center, and for a moment she scolded herself for letting her imagination run wild. But the dot was grayed out. A last known location, not his current location. She waited, thinking it might need a moment to load, but nothing happened. His phone was off.
And that was, in itself, bizarre. He was addicted to that thing. She had ground rules about putting photos of her on the internet, but every other part of his life was recorded, uploaded, and captioned. He followed celebrities on Twitter and replied like they actually wanted to hear his witty rejoinders and compliments. He kept up long text threads throughout the day—though that had been quieter lately.
He hadn’t even turned off his phone when—