Page 82 of Just Another Missing Person

“Sorry I can’t be there,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. Funny how two people can view the same events so differently: she thinks he cheated on her, he thinks she neglected him, their marriage, everything. Both versions are true. “Sure you mean that,” he said.

“I do.”

“If you were sorry, as in,regretful, you’d come,” he said.And it’s as easy as that to Art. Perhaps to everybody except her. Because it feels as complicated as algebra to Julia. The minute she found out who her blackmailer was, she should have phoned it in. Called it all off, and released herself, forgotten about Sadie Owen and Matthew James. But she just couldn’t do that.

The lights around them began to click off.

“Right,” she said, thinking how much was unsaid between them. Everything about the affair, everything after it, their future in question, and now everything with this case, too. She stood there in the dimness, feeling her full shadow self. “I’m dealing with a hard case,” she said thickly.

“I know,” he said. That simpleI know. Nothing more, nothing less. Just that he’d observed her from his perennial position on the side lines, the way he always had, and worked her out:I know. He saw her, he understood her, heknewher. That, even if it was for work, it was also for them, for Art and Genevieve.

Julia nodded quickly, saying nothing, wanting to say so many things to him. That shewassorry. That she missed texting him. Emailing him. Writing to him, in all the forms they had. That she had never been as hurt in her life as that Christmas. That she had done her very best to save their daughter, and Genevieve had just said she didn’t even want saving anyway.

But she didn’t say any of it.

The final light went off, and they were in darkness. Shapes came into focus. The lamplight from the custody suite rose through the window like vapor, gleaming a single gold square on the floor. In the gloom, Art reached for her hand. He hadn’t done anything like that since Christmas, that milky light, that awful secret that he had detonated in the middleof their marriage like a land mine. And, suddenly, Julia found herself wondering... had she lit the first match that had caused it all, by keeping Genevieve’s secret from him? Had she provided the conditions for an affair? Or is this just something women think about themselves when men cheat? She looked at Art, whose expression she couldn’t read in the dimness.

“Are you losers coming?” Genevieve called through, back to herself, intimacy about Zac swiftly covered over, and they broke apart.

But, God, she had missed it. She leaned into him, but she forced herself to drop his hand after just a second, like it had never happened at all. To return to the job, where she belonged.

And now. It’s late. She’s almost home. Nines has been instructed. He is in the right kind of business. Identities. Trading them. She only hopes she’s right to be following this line of inquiry.

Julia arrives home and unlocks her front door, exhausted, just as her phone begins ringing and her head starts swimming with the mess they find themselves in. “Julia Day,” she says to Emma, one eye on her hallway. Something about it feels—what, exactly? Art and Genevieve are coming home from Ghetto Golf in Bristol now—and maybe it’s just this: the strange feeling a usually full house takes on when it’s empty. Julia feels a glob of sadness slide down her chest as she thinks of her daughter. Had she truly meant what she said: that Julia’s cover-up had made it all worse?

“I’m listening, Emma,” she prompts, wishing for a second that this job was like other jobs. Even when she’s on record, and not off like at the moment, she could never not take this call.

“He’s got a storage locker. I found four things in it,”Emma says, and it’s at this moment that Julia realizes it isn’t an ordinary call. Not housekeeping, not checking up if they intend to charge Matthew with anything, not trying to find out how and where they had found Olivia.

Julia stands in her hallway, the sand from outside still on her shoes, crunching like glass. The lights are off. She’s in total darkness, but she doesn’t care. “What?” she asks Emma.

“Two passports. Sadie’s and another woman’s.”

Julia feels a flash of something zing up and down her body. A doctor would say it was adrenaline, nothing more, but to Julia, this is pure instinct, and, more than that: it’s knowledge. Sadie’s passport. They searched so hard for that during the investigation. It had never been used, that they were sure of, but they had never found it. And now—over a year later—here it is.

“Whose was the second? Prudence?”

“A woman called Gail Hannah.”

Julia walks into the kitchen, phone held between shoulder and chin, the exact place where it gives her neck ache, and writes this down on a piece of paper. “Okay. I’ll look her up. What’s the third item?”

“A lock of blond hair,” Emma says, and, even on the phone, Julia can tell Emma feels this has a relevance. A final reveal. But it doesn’t, to Julia. Because Julia has a theory, and this plays into it. “Fourth?”

“Bloodstained clothes.”

This Julia was not expecting. “How bad?” she asks.

“Bad.”

“Okay—bring them to me,” she says. “Double-bag them.”

“Also—he’s been visiting somewhere other than this storage center. A diner. Tandy’s All-American Diner. He didn’t want me to tell you.”

Julia writes this down, too. “Come over,” she tells Emma again. “Come over and we’ll discuss it. And you can show me them.” She hesitates, then adds, “Here, and not the station.” Another line crossed.

Emma’s silence may be judgmental, she may just be processing; Julia isn’t sure. Her mind is suddenly elsewhere. Momentarily distracted by the call, it’s now homed back in on what it was thinking about before: that her house doesn’t feel normal. It isn’t that it’s empty. It’s that it’s supposed to have that empty reverence of nobody being in it, but it doesn’t, tonight. Julia listens to these instincts. They’re usually telling her something, whether she wants to hear it or not.

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