Saturday, 11:55 a.m.
The conversation with Richard rattled Olivia, and she’d welcomed it when he’d left her to double-check the files on his computer. As soon as he was gone, Olivia powered up her own laptop, intending to search for a frittata recipe. Instead, she typed in the browser Missing Sacramento girl. She navigated to the video from that morning’s press conference.
The kitchen had once been her favorite room. When Adam was home, the cabinets were cherrywood, there’d been a brick arch behind the oven, and copper pans dangled overhead. The last time they’d been together here, she’d somehow convinced him to make banana bread with her—he’d snuck in chocolate chips when Olivia turned to get the pan—and he’d been in such a hurry, he’d slopped batter over the side of the bowl onto the dark granite countertops veined red.
After he went missing, Olivia had remodeled. The countertops were now white marble, the walls white too. The glossy cabinets had been switched out for a natural dark wood. The air was thick with the scent of pine cleaner, the sink empty and dry. No fingerprints smudged the refrigerator. Olivia once loved to cook, but it now felt like a chore, the kitchen mostly a place for grabbing a snack or plating takeout. How long had it been since she’d baked banana bread here?
On the screen, a photo flashed. It was the one posted with all the earliest news reports. Ellie Byrd, brown hair secured in a ponytail, wearing a purple-and-white soccer uniform. She looked closer to twelve than sixteen. Olivia understood her parents’ impulse—when the deputy had asked for a photo of Adam, she’d given him one of her favorites: Adam at thirteen during his floppy-haired phase, when she’d had to bribe him to get a haircut, with a grin so wide that Olivia’s heart seized even thinking of it now. At that age, Adam had been more boy than man. In the photo, the collar of his T-shirt was stretched because he hadn’t yet cared about those things, his cheek smudged because he still played in the dirt. It was the last photo Olivia had from the time before Grace.
The deputy had looked at her with sympathy and asked, “Do you have anything more current?”
On her laptop, new photos joined the first, and Olivia thought she might be wrong about the first picture being old. Maybe Ellie still looked that way. Innocent. Trusting.
Then a new photo flashed, and Olivia slammed the laptop shut.
My God, she looks just like Grace.
Chest suddenly tight, Olivia caught movement at the edge of her vision, and when she turned to the window, she spotted Rocky at the end of the driveway. He gave her a nod and gestured toward the empty house next door. He knew there were no private conversations inside the Duran house.
Thank God he’d gotten there so quickly.
She slipped away to the Miller house before her husband could return, the photo from the press seared on her retinas.
Oh, Richard, what have you done?
Olivia had first suspected Richard of having sex with other women a few years after Adam disappeared. As a sales rep for a medical-device company, Richard often traveled—a day in Reno, an overnighter in Sacramento, a couple of days in San Jose. But that tour of the Midwest had lasted three weeks, and in the background of one of his calls from Milwaukee, Olivia heard the shower running. When she asked him about it, he’d claimed the hotel room had a broken toilet—kept him up half the night thinking he needed to pee, he’d joked—and she pretended she believed him.
In her marriage, Olivia was willing to tolerate a lot. She’d never been the type to be irritated by empty toilet paper rolls, for example, or dishes left in the sink. When Richard put down the deposit on the house in Ridgepoint Ranch, she’d started shopping for a warmer jacket and hiking boots. If they’d lost all their money, she would’ve happily lived with Richard in a seedy one-bedroom apartment. If he’d needed nursing or forgiveness, she wouldn’t have hesitated to offer either.
In most cases. But from the start, she’d made clear the exception: Richard wasn’t to cheat. No months-long affairs. No onetime lapses of judgment. Not even one flirty text that might lead to something more. She and Richard were not going to become her parents.
But when the moment came that he did cheat, she froze. And she’d never stopped hating herself for that.
While Richard was away, Rocky trimmed the hedges and mowed the small patch of grass out back. When the Durans’ garbage disposal stopped working, he’d replaced it. He’d also installed new security lights over the garage.
The day Richard called to extend his trip another week, Rocky had offered to make her dinner, and she’d asked if he knew how to make Bolognese sauce.
His answer: “Doesn’t everyone?”
The sauce was watery and oversalted, and Olivia had been able to choke down only half. She’d blamed it on a large lunch, but he’d laughed.
“Yeah, it’s pretty awful,” he’d said.
She’d gratefully accepted a second glass of pinot to cleanse her tongue of its salty coating. The wine pairing he’d gotten exactly right. “Then why did you say you could make it?” she asked.
He’d responded: “I could never tell you no.”
She nearly slept with him that night in retaliation. The only thing that stopped her was the thought of ceding the moral ground to her cheating husband. What would’ve happened had she made a different choice?
As Olivia let herself into the Millers’ house, she forced air into her lungs and the tension out of her body. When she found Rocky in the kitchen, she said, “Richard knows we erased the recordings.” She looked around, then lowered her voice even though there was no one but them to hear: “He says he has backups.”
She knew she shouldn’t have involved Rocky, but she’d panicked, certain she’d overlooked some files. And now it seemed she might have.
Rocky shook his head. “He doesn’t have backups.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I helped him install the system. He’s testing you.”
Thea had started getting curious about the cameras and the laptop her dad kept in his nightstand drawer. Olivia wished she shared Rocky’s confidence that there was no longer anything for Thea to find.
“There’s no way to recover the files, right?”
His face grew more serious. “What was on those recordings, Olivia?”
The morning before, Olivia’s only concern had been to protect Thea, and Rocky hadn’t asked questions. Apparently, that was over. “Richard’s cheating again.”
How had Richard been stupid enough to have sex with a sixteen-year-old girl? One who was now all over the news.
“Do you know with who?”
She nodded but couldn’t bring herself to say the girl’s name. Olivia and Rocky were close, but Richard and Rocky were family.
The silence grew heavy as he waited for her to give a name.
Finally, she said, “Ellie Byrd.”
To Rocky’s credit, the shift in his expression was subtle enough that someone else might have missed it, but Olivia recognized it for what it was. Doubt.
“I saw her, Rocky. In our bedroom.”
Olivia’s first thought had been My husband’s sleeping with a child, which in her mind meant the girl was nineteen or twenty, and her second thought was that she looked vaguely like Grace Clarke.
Rocky looked confused, as if he thought he’d heard the words wrong. “She was in your house?” At Olivia’s nod, his nostrils flared. “Where was Thea?”
“I don’t know. With Richard, I think. I wasn’t supposed to be home.”
The damn radiator. If Olivia’s car hadn’t overheated, she would never have known about his infidelity.
No, not infidelity. Crime.
“What did he say when you confronted him?”
Her cheeks flushed with shame. “I didn’t,” she said. “He doesn’t know I was there.”
Unless he really did back up those video files.
Olivia thought of how easily he’d passed off the running shower as a broken toilet all those years before, and she imagined the excuses he might’ve tried this time.
I don’t know that girl. I have no idea why she was in our room.
Oh, she called me by name? I meant I didn’t know her well.
Why was she in our bedroom, then? Poor girl was exhausted. She asked if she could lie down.
Of course I didn’t mean to keep it from you or the deputy who canvassed the neighborhood. I did tell them I saw her.
You’re being ridiculous. You know I love you.
Maybe Richard wouldn’t even have tried to make an excuse. Maybe he would’ve said, I thought you were in Reno for the day. Or maybe he would’ve blamed her: You’re so obsessed with finding Adam that you haven’t really been there for me lately.
At his sides, Rocky’s hands balled into fists. “What if Thea…” His voice trailed off, but Olivia could guess at the direction his mind wandered. What if Thea had been the one to walk in on the young woman in their bedroom? What if she’d found the recordings before Rocky had helped Olivia erase them?
Expression as stony as his voice, he said, “We should go back further. Check out the recordings of the past few weeks, the days you and Thea were both gone.” He unclenched his fists, but she could still sense his frustration. “If we’d had more time…”
Even though she’d thought the same, she shook her head. “He would’ve erased anything incriminating. Especially now that he suspects I know something.”
Still, her thoughts drifted to Richard’s laptop in that unlocked drawer next to their bed.
After several beats of silence, Rocky said, “You don’t think he had anything to do with her disappearance?”
“Of course not!” Olivia mustered as much conviction as she could.
She tried not to think of Ellie’s vague resemblance to Grace and what that might mean. She went through the details of that night and, for the first time, asked herself: Could Richard have done something to Grace? He would never hurt Adam, of course, but he’d always had a soft spot for the elder Clarke daughter. Had Olivia been so lost in her grief that she’d missed something important?
She said, “If the police find out, though, this will look bad for him.”
Rocky’s brow knit, and she could read his thoughts as easily as if he’d spoken them: That’s exactly why we should tell them.
He lifted his hand as if to reach for hers, but he quickly dropped it. “Don’t do anything that puts you at risk, okay?”
Olivia noted the time on the clock in the kitchen. She’d been gone too long. Richard would be wondering where she was.
“I won’t,” she said, though by being there with Rocky and by sharing what she knew, she suspected she might already be in danger.