Page 67 of Just Another Missing Person

Something seems to settle in the air between them. Jonathan will know this is beyond his remit. Julia could shut it down easily, pull rank, but she never would.

“You don’t remember,” he seems to decide to say. He doesn’t need to interrogate her any more than this. It’s absurdly out of character that Julia wouldn’t remember something like that.

“Why don’t we talk about this after we’ve sorted Lewis?”Jonathan says. Julia startles, meets his eyes, then realizes just as the morning sun floods the room properly, bathing them in it. She could weep for it. For his humanity. He knows exactly what’s going on—or has some idea, anyway—and is giving her an out. A day or two, at most. A reprieve in which to decide what to do. His eyes hold hers, brown, soulful. A message communicated: a ceasefire.

“Let’s do that,” she says to him softly.

“Let Matthew go. Andrew, whatever his name is. Let everyone know Olivia’s back, charge Lewis with fraud. Hush it up, don’t let the press in on it,” he says, while Julia’s mind reels, spinning over what he knows, over what it means to her, over what he might do next. “We don’t need the vultures all over it. It’s a tragedy, a bad decision, nothing more than that, isn’t it?”

“But Matthew—he...”

“What?” Jonathan says curiously, but the words die on Julia’s lips. She can’t let Matthew go; she can’t. But neither can she detain him further, or tell anybody why, truly, she suspects him. And she can’t charge Lewis. She can’t send a heartbroken man down.

Julia nods, mutely, saying nothing, thinking that, whatever she does now, she will be found out; she has been found out. Her corruption is now past tense, but that she became so controls her entire future.

***

Julia stares up at her house at six thirty in the morning. One room is lamplit. The room Art sleeps in. Genevieve will be asleep. She can imagine Art inside, just reading a novel. Like somebody from another time. He would never sit andscroll, or play a phone game to pass the time. If Art had been born in the 1800s, the 1910s, the 1950s, he’d still be the same Art he is today. He has always had that timeless quality. Julia supposes that is why his infidelity was such an awful shock. But then, perhaps he just behaved in a completely timeless way, actually, the way so many men before him have.

The outside smells like frozen seaweed. She walks to the front door, her coat wrapped around her, as lost and alone as a shipwreck.

She sighs as she walks into the empty-feeling house, then heads upstairs. She looks in on Genevieve, still sleeping on her side, one leg cocked, the way she always did even as a baby, when it terrified Julia. But, when Julia looks more closely, her eyes are open. “You awake?” she whispers.

A single nod from Genevieve.

“Why?”

“Bad dream.”

“Yeah?” Julia says tentatively. Don’t scare her off. Don’t act too interested.

Genevieve shifts so that she is propped up on her elbow. Her eyes meet Julia’s. “I dream about him almost every night,” she says, seemingly out of nowhere. “You know?” Her arm is trembling just slightly with the weight of her head. She seems so little, all of a sudden, there in the bed. A child.

“Zac?” Julia says, her voice low.

“Mmm.”

“Go on?”

“Forever,” Genevieve says, and Julia frowns, not following, until Genevieve finishes her sentence: “I will have taken somebody’s life. For as long as I live.”

“Oh, but—” Julia starts to say, wanting to correct her, totalk about Zac’s decision to mug her, about sepsis, about causation, but Genevieve stops her.

“It’s true,” she says. “That’s the way it is. But I dream about him—the blood...”

Julia drops her head. “I’m sorry,” she says to her. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there,” she goes on, wishing she could add everything she’s doing now to save her daughter.

“I wish I could atone without paying the price,” Genevieve says sadly.

“I know. I do, too.”

Genevieve swallows, saying nothing, but nodding, her eyes wet. “Thank you,” she says, and Julia reaches for her hand, almost identical to her own, and grasps it. They stay there for a while, not saying anything, but this time not needing to, either.

Later, or the first time since Art had moved into their spare bedroom, Julia knocks on its door. He says, “Come in?” in a kind of baffled voice, like he doesn’t know whether he even has the right to grant her access to her own guest bedroom.

Julia pushes the door open. Behind him is a lamp. And a novel—Sally Rooney—splayed open on the bed. Her stomach turns over sadly.

He’s in loungewear, a gray T-shirt and jogging bottoms. White socks pulled up over the cuffs. He looks comfortable and safe in the impersonal surroundings of their tired spare bedroom. A seascape painting, a pink lamp and him.

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