Page 117 of I Will Find You

Harmless, I scoff now, almost saying it out loud.

Ronald looks at Rachel first. He starts to smile. Cheryl and Rachel are close, so I am sure that Rachel visits here often enough. This encounter is probably, if not familiar, nothing particularly surprising or new. I lower my head and veer a little to my right. I have the mask pulled up. I slow down and turn behind me, as though I’m not with Rachel. Rachel doesn’t miss a step. She keeps walking toward Ronald, takes hold of his arm, and says a little too merrily, “Hey, Ronald.”

Ronald kisses her cheek.

The kiss is stiff, but then again, so is everything about Ronald. I stop right there, not taking that thought any further. I start walking back toward them, staying close to the wall, my face turned toward it. I don’t break stride. I don’t risk a glance in his direction.

I close my eyes and move past him.

Safe.

Rachel is trying to escort him away from us, but he stops her.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Ronald says to her. “Did you hear about David’s escape?”

I hurry-walk away. There are three unmarked doors in front of me. One is where my wife—ex-wife, sorry—will be. Time is ticking. I take hold of the knob on the first door, turn it, step inside.

And there she is.

I had interrupted Cheryl typing on some kind of tablet. She looks up. I still have the surgical mask on and my head is shaved, but that doesn’t matter. She recognizes me right away. For a second, neither one of us moves. We just stare. I am not sure what I feel or, more apropos, what I don’t feel. I feel it all and then some. Every emotion surges through my worn-out veins. It is overwhelming.

For her too.

Cheryl and I fell in love in high school. We dated, got engaged, married, and had the sweetest little boy together.

A weird thought pops into my brain: Ronald might come back. Or a nurse or colleague might come in. I turn and lock the knob. That’s it. That’s the first move I make after seeing Cheryl. I turn back to her, not sure what I will get, what sort of reaction, but Cheryl is already on her feet and running around the desk, and when she gets to me there is no pause, not the slightest hesitation, and as she throws her arms around me and pulls me toward her, I half collapse and she, I swear, holds me up.

“David,” Cheryl says softly, with a tenderness that tears my heart out of my chest and rips it into little pieces.

I hold her. She cries. I cry. I can’t. I just can’t. I have a million questions, but there is a reason I’m here, and it’s not this. With perhaps a little too much edge, I take hold of her arms and pull her off me.

There is no time for a preamble.

“Our son may still be alive,” I say.

She closes her eyes. “David.”

“Please listen to me.”

Her eyes are still squeezed shut. “No one wants that to be true more than I do.”

“You saw the pic?”

“It’s not Matthew, David.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Tears start flowing down her cheeks. She lifts both hands and takes hold of my face. For a moment, I fear I may collapse again and never get up. “Because Matthew is dead,” she says almost too softly. “We buried our little boy. You and I. We stood together and held hands and we watched them put that tiny white coffin into the ground.”

I shake my head. “I didn’t kill him, Cheryl.”

“I wish so much that was true.”

The words sting more than I would have imagined. She looks down. Pain etches its way onto her face. I don’t want to go there, not now, not ever, but I can’t help myself.

“Why did you give up on me, Cheryl?”

I hear the pathetic whine in my voice and hate myself for it.

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