Page 76 of Just Another Missing Person

“Of course it would have been,” I say, my voice thick. “We were always—you know.” The words come easily to me, andit’s like it’s last year again, when we talked about you, and where you were, all day, every day. DCI Day’s investigation has reopened, and so has our wound.

“I think so, too. She trusted us, didn’t she? To make everything better. To keep her safe.”

“Don’t use the past tense,” I say. The past tense is a betrayal of you.

Yolanda sighs. Her breath is almost invisible in the warm kitchen air, but not quite. It disperses, unseen, unless you’re looking closely for it. It vaporizes on the bowl she’s standing over.

“What’re you making?” I add softly.

“Katsu.”

I leave it for a second, then ask, “Do you think she’s alive?”

For a while, I think she hasn’t heard me. The whisk is the only sound in the room. She dumps a bag of prechopped chicken in it and covers it with cling film. For a long while, I think she isn’t going to answer me.

Eventually, she speaks. “No,” she says. Her voice is thick and lined as she says it. A pair of curtains on her grief. She darts a quick look at me, and I wish I hadn’t asked it of her. “I just... there is not an explanation, to me, that is good.”

“She might be okay.”

“She might,” Yolanda concedes. She looks at me now, and I think I see sympathy there on her face. “But—Lewis. She isn’t. You know what we said at the beach.”

“I know. I do know that,” I say, and I do. I really do. I would know if you were still alive. I think we both would. I heave a sigh, trying to shift the sadness off my chest, as I stare directly down the barrel at life after you.

Yolanda turns her mouth down, and I can see it then. She has always been able to distinguish between what is true, andwhat she wants to believe, and is an ardent atheist for this reason. “Heaven would be great,” she once said, “if it was real.”

It’s dusk. The sky outside is stained-glass blue. I stare at our garden as the neighbors call their children in. Their security light blinks on as their little bodies run past it. God, they have so much time ahead of them.

“You felt that if you could prove Andrew had done it, we might be able to get her back,” Yolanda says simply, succinctly. I blink. The bowl of chicken is on the counter between us, and I reach and rotate it, the ceramic still warm from Yolanda’s hands. How perceptive that she would say this now. Almost like she knows what I’ve been doing.

Thank fucking God we have each other.

I stare at the place where the sun went down. The sky is bleached white. The sun is gone, it’s an optical illusion, but it’s still there, out there somewhere, somehow, like rainbows, like sun flares, like souls.

“Come on,” Yolanda says. She stands up, extends her hand to me, and I take it. “We can watchSelling Sunsetif you want. While the chicken does its thing.” I grab on to her hand, and to normality, gladly, momentarily happy, momentarily okay, in that way we are sometimes these days, little chinks of light in a dark, dark room. I sling my arm around her shoulders and pull her to me.

“I’ll love her forever,” I say, a sentence so true, so pure, that it doesn’t even need a response. Yolanda nods into my shoulder. “And you,” I add, and Yolanda leans right into me then, the way she used to, the way she did that day in the lift, right before we were rescued. And now look at us: rescuing each other, in grief.

It’s at that precise, relaxed, poignant moment that I realize how to find out who Prudence is: work. The passport office.

Three Hundred and Seventy-Third Day Missing

35

Julia

Julia has never once slept at work, but she does, today, after resting her head on her forearms and thinking about Jonathan.

“It’s your kid,” he had said, when she had finished, biting his lip. “God, Julia, of course you did it.”

“Do you really think that?” she said, her voice as viscous as cough medicine, emotional with having finally told somebody, with having been understood at last asgood.

And then he said it: the sentence she didn’t even have to ask him to say: “I’d have done the same.”

“Would you?”

He blinked, took his glasses off, as though he wanted the barrier gone, his gaze direct on hers. “Without a second’s hesitation.” He paused. “I remember Zac, when he died and you got that case. I remember thinking—well. Nothing of it. Probably died committing crimes. And didn’t he? On your daughter.”

“That is not the way a jury would see it.”

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