Part Two: Through the Floorboards
I have thought many times about that minute of silence in the attic — what it was like to be there in the dark with a dead call and a locked door and no information, only Mara’s voice still ringing in my head. Don’t tell Caleb.
I crouched near the center of the attic, away from the small vent window, my phone screen dimmed to almost nothing. The rain continued on the roof above me, closer now, louder. I measured time by my own breathing.
Then I heard Caleb’s voice.
It was not the voice of a man coming to look for his wife. It was not worried, or sleepy, or the particular gentle impatience of someone who had woken to find the other side of the bed empty.
It was calm. Conversational. And it was addressing someone who was not me.
“Lights are off,” he said.
I stopped breathing.
Another voice answered from inside my house. A man’s voice, one I had never heard, low and unhurried.
“Then she knows.”
Through a gap between two of the attic floorboards — a gap I had noticed once, years ago, when I’d come up to look for Halloween decorations and seen the hallway below in thin slivers — I saw the hallway lamp had come back on. Not the dimmer, warm glow it usually had. The overhead, full and flat and white.
Caleb stood in the hallway below in his sweatpants. My laptop, the one I kept on the kitchen table for work, was tucked under his arm.
Beside him stood a man I had never seen. He wore a black raincoat, the kind you bought for function rather than style. He was perhaps fifty, broad in the shoulders, with a calm about him that I would later learn to identify as the specific calm of people who had done dangerous things long enough that danger no longer registered as unusual.
They spoke for a moment below me, the words running together in a way I couldn’t follow, shock doing something to my ability to process sound. Then the stranger opened a small case he was carrying — hard-sided, like a case for glasses — and held it out.
Caleb took it.
He looked inside.
He took out three passports and set them on the hallway table.
Even through the narrow gap, I could see what they were. I could see the colors, the dimensions, the photographs on the open page. One photograph was of Caleb. One was of a child — Noah, his school photo from September, the one I kept on my phone and had ordered prints of, still sitting in an envelope on the counter.
The third photograph was mine.
I don’t know how long I stared at them before I looked at the names.
The names were wrong. Not our names. Not Morrison. Not any name I recognized.
My phone vibrated in my hand and I nearly dropped it.
