I'd told myself it was nothing—busy shift, phone in a locker, the usual unreachability of a surgeon on a full day. I said it three times and believed it less every time. By six o’clock, I was in the kitchen making Lily’s dinner and checking my phone every four minutes as if I could force a notification to appear.
"You keep doing that," Lily said from the table.
"Doing what?"
"The phone thing." She didn't look up from her coloring. "You've done it five times since we got home."
"I'm waiting on a work thing."
She looked up. She had Cassie’s eyes—direct and far too perceptive for a five-year-old.Sure you are, the eyes said.
I put dinner on the table, sat down, and ate. I didn't check my phone. For a while, at least, but the temptation was too strong to resist.
I checked it again and… nothing.
I called Bellows after the dishes. He picked up on the third ring.
"I need a favor," I said.
"The kid?"
"Just for an hour. Maybe two. Something’s come up."
A long pause. I could hear his television in the background. "Bring her over," he said.
I helped Lily into her jacket. She stood in the hallway, watching me the way she did when she was deciding whether to ask a hard question.
"Is it Maddie?" she asked.
I didn't answer. She just kept looking at me, steady and quiet. I realized then that I wasn't just hiding things from Maddie; I was trying to hide them from a child who lived in the same house. It wasn't working.
"I'll be back in a bit," I said. "Bellows is going to hang out with you for a while."
She thought about that for a second. Then she picked up Gerald from the counter and tucked him under her arm. "Tell her we want her on Friday," she said. It was matter-of-fact, as if the solution to every complicated adult problem was just to state the obvious.
I crouched down so I was eye-level with her.
"Yeah," I said. "I will."
I drove her to Bellows’. He opened the door in his cardigan, looked at Lily, then at me, and said absolutely nothing. It was the most Bellows thing he could have done. Lily walked past him into the house like she’d been living there for years. At the door, she turned back and looked at me one last time.
"Gerald says good luck," she said.
I turned the car toward Maddie’s.
Her car wasn’t there. The lights were off. I stood on the pavement, looking up at the dark windows, and felt something cold in my chest. It was a feeling I recognized from a dry shack in North Dakota; the specific kind of silence that meant something had gone wrong.
I called her. Voicemail.
I called again. Same thing.
I drove to the hospital.
The woman at the front desk recognized me—I’d been there enough for Lily’s checkups—and she looked up the log without making a scene. Dr. Clarke had signed out at seven-fifteen. Her car had cleared the lot a few minutes later.
"Did anyone see which way she went?"
She looked uncertain. "Dr. Reyes might know. They were talking in the parking lot."