How many times had she imagined what she would say to him if they ever ran into each other at a party or one of the favorite restaurants they had frequented over the years? Stomp on any hearts lately? Or maybe she’d ask him how many other women he had proposed to recently. Or, best of all, she would take the high ground and be gracious and content in his presence, and he would realize what a mistake he had made, giving up the life he could have had with her.
But now Patrick was here in her mother’s living room, and none of that mattered anymore. From the chair beside her mother’s, he had their full attention.
“Okay, this is embarrassing and makes me sound awful, but I won’t waste any time skirting around it. After we broke up, I couldn’t let you go. I’d wake up wondering where you were and what you were doing and whether you were okay.”
Mike started to rise from the sofa, his purposeful scoff summing up her own feelings.
“Wait,” Patrick said. “I promise, I’m not here in some grand attempt at reconciliation. My point is that I tried to keep track of you, even though we weren’t together anymore. I’ve listened to every episode of The Justice Club, and, well, I probably check your social media on a daily basis.”
Mike half-muttered, half-coughed the word “stalker.”
“Pretty much,” Patrick conceded with a shrug. “So, I saw your post with the curlers in your hair. You looked beautiful, by the way. Happy. And the caption said something about taking the leap. I figured if it was what I suspected, Katie would be there, and then I saw that she had posted a photo of a wedding cake at a winery down the road from the Cape house. I put two and two together, but I had to know for sure. I called the town clerk up there and confirmed it. And then I got curious about your new husband, but it turns out there’s a lot of Charles Millers on the internet. Oh man, this is so embarrassing. I wound up calling the vineyard where you got married and talked the event planner into giving me the information on the business card that Charlie had given her.”
“Are you kidding me?” She could not believe what she was hearing.
“Like I said, this is embarrassing, but that’s how strongly I feel that you need to know this.”
“So, what did you find out?” Mike asked.
“That there’s nothing to find out,” Patrick said. “The website for his firm? The domain name was bought only a year ago, even though his online business profile says he’s had his own outfit for six years. And the lease on his office was signed only a week later.”
Patrick was an experienced programmer who specialized in building web applications for businesses in the private sector. She wasn’t surprised that he could trace the history of Charlie’s website. “You checked on his office lease?” she asked.
“I know I sound crazy, but I’ve done work for that building management company. I only asked because his website information didn’t add up. That office space is a tiny hole in the wall in a rundown walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. Have you ever even been there, Melissa?”
The one time she had been nearby and wanted to meet for lunch at Chez Napoléon, he had been waiting for her on the corner nearest to his building even though she had planned to go upstairs and see his firm’s offices. He explained that he was starving and wanted to eat as soon as possible. Then afterward, he said he needed to go back to the office alone for a conference call, blaming the time crunch on the flambéed crepe they had shared for dessert.
Feeling her family’s eyes on her, she asked to speak to Patrick alone. Once they were in the privacy of the dining room, she didn’t even pause to sit down.
“You had no right to pry into my life that way, especially after the way you derailed it. Did you want me to be alone forever, pining for you? I was crushed, Patrick. Utterly devastated. And then when my father died, all you did was send flowers? You couldn’t even call? I was a wreck. And then I met Charlie. I made a decision to be happy.”
“And that’s why I’ve kept my concerns to myself. I picked up the phone so many times to call you, only to change my mind at the last second. I convinced myself there had to be some explanation and that I was only looking for an excuse to get back into your life.”
“As for all this sleuthing, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Charlie’s a widower. He had to move across the country after his wife died, raising a baby girl alone. He dropped almost all of his work. So I’m not the least bit surprised about the timing of his lease or that he’d need to start with a humble space.”
“Okay, but you have to trust me on this, Melissa. He would not have let his domain name go. That business he supposedly runs? I would bet everything I have that it did not exist—if it exists at all now—before last year.”
She asked him for the date the website was set up. It was two weeks before she met Charlie in counseling.
“And now this child is missing,” Patrick said. “And your mother would only tell me so much, but it doesn’t sound like this guy Charlie is acting quite right.”
Melissa rubbed her eyes, determined not to cry in front of him. “I have the information now,” she said coolly. “Is there anything else you unearthed?”
“No, but is that all you’re going to say? What should we do about this?”
“There’s no we, Patrick. You were the one who chose to stop being the person I turned to with important decisions.” She could see the pain in his eyes, and softened her tone. “I do appreciate you coming all the way out here to tell me this, but I need you to go now.”
“Missy—”
She shook her head. He didn’t get to call her that anymore. “I’m serious. You need to go.” She was nearly shooing him toward the front door as he argued. “You really cannot be here. Riley’s not only missing. The police obviously think she’s dead, and that I’m the one who murdered her.”
His face contorted with confusion, and Mike and her mother looked away. “Let me help you. Please.” He reached for her, but she pulled away.
“Patrick,” she said sharply, “do you have any idea how horrible it will look if the police find out that my ex-fiancé is here with me right now? You told me to listen to your expertise on that website, and I did. Now it’s time to listen to me. You have to leave. Now.”
He held her gaze and then nodded, muttering an apology as he left.
Melissa’s mother immediately sprang from her chair. “Oh, Melissa, I am so sorry. It was my fault for telling him to come. I was trying to help.”
“Mama, it’s fine.”
“But you were right,” her mother said. “What if the police are watching the house and this becomes something else they use against you?”
“Then I’ll handle it when the time comes.”
“Can we go back to what matters most here?” Mike asked. “Not cool that Patrick basically stalked you, but that stuff he found out about the website and the lease was weird. I’m telling you—something is seriously wrong here.”
“I know,” she said, finally wrapping her head around the truth. Charlie could have been lying about everything since the day they had met. She had to rethink every assumption she had ever made about him. What did she actually know, and what had she simply chosen to believe?
Riley. She felt a pain in her heart at the thought of her name. Riley was real. That much was certain.
Linda. When she had been searching for proof that Linda was actually dead, she never found any evidence that an American woman had taken a fatal plunge from a waterfall in Norway. She had never even seen a single photograph of Charlie’s first wife. He kept postponing going through the belongings that were supposedly in storage, but wouldn’t a father leave out a single photograph of his daughter’s mother so Riley might remember her?
“Maybe you can try his sister,” her mother said. “Rachel picked up the last time you called.”
Her mother’s suggestion—at that specific moment—allowed her to see what she had been blocking out mentally. She replayed the sound of Louie’s voice when he said Rachel was at the apartment all the time, the doorman sounding almost sympathetic.
She heard Riley’s cute little voice the morning of their wedding, asking if she could find her daddy in the bucky-ord, adding that she wished her mommy could be there. All those other days that Neil reassured her it was normal for Riley to say that she still talked to her mommy all the time.
It was all so clear now. “What if Rachel’s not his sister?”