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Quiet pervaded the first floor of the house.
Michael peeked into the dining room and then the kitchen, seeing no sign of Angela. He saw the dirty dishes he needed to wash. He smelled the remnants of their dinner: grilled onions and peppers, chicken for fajitas. A half-full glass of wine, Angela’s, sat by the refrigerator, the cabernet strangely reminding Michael of blood.
He headed upstairs, his feet brushing the carpet as he moved past the unused bedrooms—one of which, they hoped, could someday become a nursery—and walked toward the entrance of the master.
Angela looked up when Michael came to the doorway. She sat on the bed with her phone in her hand, scrolling through either news or social media. A lamp cast a soft glow on her face, but the set of her jaw was hard.
“Is she gone?” she asked.
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
“So, she’s not gone, is she?” Angela asked.
Angela’s forehead creased with frustration. Her light brown hair was still pulled back, but a strand had worked its way loose and hung alongside her face. She tucked it away, her lips pressed into a tight line. Michael knew she had a lot to say, a lot of questions to ask, but he recognized the restraint she displayed. She excelled at patience, remaining calm in just about any storm, and possessed an inexhaustible ability to wait to hear what other people said before she responded. It made her a good salesperson at work and a good partner at home.
But in that moment, her patience felt spiderlike, a sticky spun web Michael saw no way to avoid tangling himself in.
“I’m going to go with her,” Michael said, “up to Trudeau. Where she lives now.”
He waited. Angela stood up, placed her hands on her hips, her face impassive. “Okay,” she said finally. “Why?”
On his way through the house and up the stairs, Michael spent time rehearsing exactly how he would tell Angela what Erica had told him about her daughter and the possibility he was the child’s father. He had found no good way, and as he stood in the bedroom, facing his wife, the words were slow to come.
He started with the part he knew would elicit Angela’s empathy. As a mother. As a person.
“Apparently, Erica has a daughter,” he said. “And the daughter has been missing since this morning.”
Angela lifted her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no. That’s awful.”
“Right. I can’t imagine. And when someone, a kid, disappears like this, the first forty-eight hours or so are the most crucial. If they want to get the kid back ... alive.”
The hand fell away from Angela’s mouth, and her eyes narrowed as she processed the news she’d just been told. “Is she married? Why is she here if her daughter is missing? Shouldn’t she be out looking, or else waiting for the kid to come home?”
Michael answered the first question because it was easy to answer. “I don’t know if she’s married. I don’t know anything about that.”
Angela waited, her patience back.
Michael considered telling her something else, leaving out the most damning and painful part of what Erica had told him on the porch.
But he couldn’t lie to her. He just couldn’t.
So he told her.