CHAP 1 — The Woman Beside the Brick Wall
The first thing I dropped was the shopping bag.
A loaf of bread rolled across the wet sidewalk. A carton of eggs split open near my boot. Apples scattered toward the curb while people stepped around us with that careful city indifference people use when they do not want to inherit someone else’s disaster.
But I could not move.
The woman beside the brick wall had my wife’s eyes.
Rachel’s eyes.
The same eyes I had watched close in old photographs after the police told me her car had been found near the Willamette River. The same eyes I had searched for in crowds for the first year after she disappeared, until grief finally taught me to stop punishing myself with impossible hope.
Miles pulled free from my hand.
“Mom?”
The woman flinched like the word had struck her.
Her small paper cup crushed in her shaking fingers. Coins clinked against the pavement. Her face was thinner than I remembered, pale beneath the cold gray light, but there was no mistaking her.
Rachel Blake.
My wife.
The mother of my son.
The woman I had buried without a body because everyone told me waiting was killing Miles.
I stepped toward her.
“Rachel?”
She looked past me first.
Not at my face.
Not even at Miles.
Past my shoulder, across the street, toward passing cars and storefront windows.
Fear moved through her before recognition did.
Then her expression hardened.
“You were never supposed to find me, Caleb.”
Miles began crying.
Not loudly.
Worse.
Quietly, like he was afraid sound might make her vanish again.
I felt something break open in my chest.
“What did you do to us?” I demanded. “Do you have any idea what he went through? What I told him every night? What I had to say when he asked why his mom didn’t come home?”
Rachel’s jaw tightened.
“I know.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t get to say that.”
She started to stand, weak and unsteady.
I reached out.
She recoiled so violently that Miles gasped.
That stopped me.
Whatever anger was burning through me, terror was burning through her harder.
Rachel looked at our son.
For one second, the defensive mask cracked.
“Miles,” she whispered.
He took one step forward.
“Why didn’t you come home?”
Her face collapsed.
Then she looked past me again and whispered, “Because someone made sure I couldn’t.”
Across the street, a man in a black coat lowered his phone.
Rachel saw him.
May you like
Her eyes went wide.
“We have to move,” she said. “Right now.”
