Page 119 of The New Couple in 5B

I use my opportunity to try the door again but this time my key doesn’t fit. How could he have changed the lock so quickly? Something is going on behind those doors, and someone is clearly trying to hide it.

Exhaustion pulls at my limbs, my eyelids.

I walk through the lobby, the mailroom and into the back of the building to ride the service elevator up to my floor.

All the way up, I pray that when I walk inside, Chad will be there. His phone lost or broken. An explanation for why he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, where he told me he’d be, ready on his lips.

I’ll believe him. I just need him to—correct the tilt of our world, put us back on the axis of our happy, hustling life where everything—my book deal, his new role, our quest to grow our family—is moving in the right direction.

But no.

As I enter quietly and walk through my empty apartment, it doesn’t seem like ours anymore. Images of death, the tarot card Sarah pulled, the horrible things I’ve seen, are on a loop in my mind, mingling with what Arthur told me about the Aldridges, their lost child falling down the elevator shaft. What a horror.

“Chad?” I venture.

But silence is the only answer.

The space feels violated—items moved or taken, things not left as they were. The dining room chairs stand askew. The magazines seem swept from the coffee table, lie open and scattered on the floor. The area rug is flipped up. The drawers of my desk are open, emptied. My computer, the Windermere box gone, books tossed from shelves. I try to straighten things.

We’ll make it right again, I tell myself, when all of this is over. We’ll make it our home again. We’ll heal this place. Maybe it’s us—our new energy, a future child that will finally heal the Windermere, release Willa and Miles and every other dark thing trapped here.

When my phone rings, I frantically dig it from my pocket.

Max.

I decline the call, don’t know what to say to him. He calls again, then texts.

Did you decline my call? I need to talk. Call me.

I can’t bring myself to call him back. Then there’s a soft knock at the door.

When I open it, Ella is there, stylish even in her sleepwear—black silk pajamas and a cashmere robe. Without her makeup she looks her age, tired tonight, wrung out. Her gray hair is tousled, eyes worried. Charles stands behind her, expression similarly concerned.

Whatever Ella sees in me makes her face go soft with compassion.

“Oh, my dear girl,” she says. “What’s happened?”

She opens her arms and I let her take me into her fragrant embrace, leading me into their apartment.

At their kitchen table, I tell them everything that’s happened. They both lean into me with concern, Ella holding my hand and Charles making all the right affirming noises.

“There must be some terrible misunderstanding,” says Ella firmly when I’m done. I’ve left out the part about Dana’s gallery showing, how they were all there, while I was home with Ivan, how Chad seemed to be too intimate with their daughter, Lilian.

“Chad would never do anything to you or anyone,” says Ella. “You must know that. He’s a good man who adores you, Rosie. Anyone can see that.”

“Then where is he? Betty Cartwright is dead, and he was seen arguing with her. Her sister said he was harassing Betty. Now he’s missing—didn’t show up on set.”

Ella has risen and taken a pot from the refrigerator and put it on the stove. It’s her famous chicken soup. Just the smell of it warming gives me comfort.

“You must be starving. When did you eat last?” she asks.

“I think the only logical thing for us to do,” says Charles, rubbing at his forehead, “is get in the car and go up north and find Chad.”

He’s echoing my own earlier thoughts. But it seems like a fool’s errand. And what if Chad is in trouble, comes back here and finds me gone?

“The detective said he’s not there. Not at the hotel. Not on set.”

“Well,” says Charles, jutting out his chin, determined. “We’ll just have to see that for ourselves.”

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