Page 48 of To Have and to Hold

My mind blacked out at his words, plummeting into endless depths of ichor. “That’s all you can do?” I managed to ask, pretending disinterest when really,myheart was on fire.

“All right, how about this. She has a tattoo on her right side. A mix of roses and thorns cascading near her ribcage and around to her back.” He paused. “Who knew Emme had hidden Emo in her? Remind me to check her hair for purple streaks.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, smacking my forehead onto the exposed brick of the hallway and staying there. Emme did that with me. After seeing the scars across my stomach and around my hip and hearing where they came from, she wanted something in the same place on her body. Something beautiful but painful, she said, exactly like mine. “That’s still not enough. You need to figure out better proof of life if you want the kind of attention you’re looking for.For example, this person you have in mind to get your intended message.”

“What do you want then, a finger? A toe? So they can do that laboratory test and see if the amputation was done while she was still alive?”

I wanted to tear the skin from my body, to do anything to get rid of the venom swirling inside. I exhaled the toxin and said blandly, “There are way too many crime shows on television.”

“Funny, I was thinking the same about passionate, young lawyers righting sinister wrongs in courtrooms.”

“Tell me what our first date was,” I blurted, my fingers protesting the clench on my phone. “Give me the right answer, and I’ll know she’s alive.”

A few seconds of ponderous thought passed. “Fine.” His words distanced, but were still audible, when he repeated my question, and I hoped, against my life and Emme’s, that he would return and say the very thing that always had Emme grinning. Our first date was when she muscled me into becoming her tutor in a coronary-inducing English class hosted by a professor who enjoyed mentally lynching his students. She tried to thank me with a horrifying coffee so sweet my gums receded from my teeth. While I liked to say our first date was when I serenaded her with my favorite Italian restaurant where the owner’s mother rolled homemade tortellini at the window, she argued that while I didn’t know it, my first terrible sip was when I started to fall in love with her and therefore had to be classified as our first step to something.

“A library, she says, where she bought you a terrible latte,” the voice said.

The information shook me out of the haunting revere and hurtled me into the devastating truth. He had her.

“Good answer,” I said, but it was though I were speaking through a pile of broken stone. I massaged my throat.

A muffled, feminine sound came through the speaker and I froze, my fingers stilling.

… “Basement! In a hou—”

My phone was damp, nearly slipping from my sweating grasp, but those words—Emme’s voice—invaded my skull.

The voice cut in too soon.

“Eitheryou believe me or you don’t. I have better things to get to.”

“No, don’t—”

But it was too late. The man who had Emme hung up, and I was left reeling.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

I’d hurled out of the bathroom area, nearly toppling over a table of four and onto a toddler running around. The urge to hop away was nonexistent, because my next phone call was more important.

Eventually, thankfully, the line picked up.

“Hey, babe.”

Noelle’s unhurried voice filled my ears, and amidst a howling taxi driver outside and his ensuing horn, I looked up to the ceiling in thanks.

“Are you all right?” I asked and bustled over to the booth where Becca was now standing as soon as she saw me.

“Fine. Buried in a pile of contracts I’m supposed to edit in two hours.” But she became unsure. “Why do you sound out of breath?”

“What I’m going to say may not make sense, but please, stay at your office as long as you can. Don’t come home until I tell you it’s okay. And don’t ever be alone. You have a paralegal that can sit with you? Help you with the contracts?”

“What? Spence, what the hell?”

“Noelle, honey, just listen to me,” I said as I sat down. Becca sat down with me, but her storm cloud was about to burst. “I’ll explain everything when I get home. But don’t move from your building. Stay on the thirty-eighth floor, don’t pass security even for lunch. Okay?”

“You’re scaring me.”

I tried to soften my tone. Shouting through the phone in a crowded diner would only make this worse. “I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t serious. Promise you’ll stay?”

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