“How’s the investigation going?” he asks me later. We’re lying in bed at his house, listening to Miles Davis and eating fried eggs and beans on toast. I’m wearing one of his shirts. He’s wearing a pair of trousers and nothing else. I reach out to touch his chest. Conor.
“Slow. They have a few leads. But time is passing. It’s horrifying, what her parents are going through.”
“But the body they found. It’s not Erin, right?”
“No. It’s a German woman who we’re now trying to trace.”
He looks down at me. “A German woman? What does that have to do with Erin?”
“We don’t know.”
Now he’s tracing my C-section scar with his finger. “Lilly?” he asks. There’s something strange and delicious about hearing him say her name.
“Yeah. It was an emergency one. I’d been in labor for hours and hours and her heart rate started dropping and they finally just said she had to come out right away. Her cord was wrapped around her neck.”
“Did you ever think about having another?”
“Not really. I think I knew the marriage wasn’t going to survive. And it was a bitch, trying to work homicide squad and parent in those early days.”
“I bet.”
“How about you?”
“I think we might have. But Bláithín hemorrhaged with Adrien and we felt lucky they both survived. And I think I’d started to have doubts, too.” He says it carefully.
I want to ask more about that, but I’m not ready.
“Tell me about being a professor. Do you like it?”
“I do.” He puts his plate on the bedside table and pulls me over and into his arms. “There’s politics and all that, but I love teaching and I love researching and writing and I get to do those things at least some of the time.”
“What are you researching right now?”
“I’m working on a book about the Arms Crisis.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen seventy.”
“I don’t know about it. What happened?”
“Well, ministers in the government of Taoiseach Jack Lynch were sacked when it was discovered that they were helping to smuggle arms to the north. It set off a power struggle and split Lynch’s political party. One of them was Charlie Haughey, who went on to become taoiseach later. But it kind of showed up this split in opinion in the Republic about how involved we should be in the north.”
He turns out the light and we settle in under the covers. His arms feel good around me. He’s warm and clean-smelling, and he holds my arms tight against him.
“I missed you all day,” he whispers. “I don’t want you to go anywhere.”
I fall asleep curled against him, the length of me against the long, naked length of him, and sometime later I wake to darkness, my phone in the pocket of my jeans ringing and buzzing as though it’s having a personal crisis. I jump out of bed, the cold air hitting my body like a bucket of water.
“Hello?”
“Mom?”
“Hi, Lil,” I whisper. “Is everything okay?” I check Conor’s bedside clock: 4:11.
“Yeah. You didn’t call last night.”
“I was so busy. I’m sorry. I meant to and then I knew you wouldn’t be home yet. And then I was really tired so I went to bed early.” I sneak out into the hallway, trying to navigate the unfamiliar surroundings. I pad down the stairs, whispering, so I won’t wake up Conor, and I sit in the dark at the bottom of the long flight of stairs, smiling when my eyes light on the spot where we tore each other’s clothes off when I first came in.
“How’s school going?”
“Good,” she says. “Play tryouts are next week and I’ve been practicing a monologue from Twelfth Night to do.”
“What’s the play?”
“Little Shop of Horrors, but Mr. Anderson looooves Shakespeare.”
“Maybe you could do it with a big plant on the stage or something.”
“Mom.”
I laugh, trying to keep it down. “I miss you so much, Lil.” I do. I want to tell her about Conor. Tell her I’m in love. But of course I don’t.
“Dad had a job interview today,” she says. “At Shaver’s market. To be a manager or something.” I can hear the hope and pity in her voice. She loves him so much. She wants him to be happy.
“That’s great.”
We chat about school, a movie she saw with her friend Ava.
“I love you, Lil,” I tell her. “Is your dad still awake? I want to just ask him a quick question.” She hands the phone over. “Bri?”
“Yup. Everything okay?”
“Yeah. How’s Danny?”
“He’s holding up. Lilly made some cookies for him and we’ll drop them off tomorrow.”
I take a breath. “Everything’s good? You’re setting the alarm and everything?”
“Yeah. Everything’s quiet.”
“Thanks, Bri. Take care. I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”
I check emails on my phone. There’s one from Emer. She says she called Daisy after our conversation. It was nice to chat, actually, she writes. I asked her if she remembered saying something to me once about Erin thinking someone was following her or after her. I didn’t have it exactly right. She said that she got home and Erin was on the phone with someone. When Daisy came in, Erin got off the phone with whoever it was and Daisy asked her if she was okay—she said she looked annoyed. Erin just said something like, “Oh, some people just don’t know when to stop pushing.” She didn’t seemed scared or anything so Daisy didn’t think she needed to tell anyone. She had kind of forgotten about it. I wish I had more information. I’m sorry. I know it could be important. Anyway, it was lovely to see you again. Please stay in touch. We’d be happy to have you over for a meal!
I sit there on the stairs for a minute. Some people just don’t know when to stop pushing.
I’m scrolling through the rest of my emails when I hear a key in the lock on the front door. I’m about to call out for Conor but then I remember his son and I start to get up to run back upstairs when the lights come on and the door flies open and a woman is standing there, dressed all in yellow, scarves and skirts and a long silk coat and long yellow hair.
For a long moment, she just stares at me and then she says, “Who are you?”
I don’t know what to say and I’m contemplating running past her out the front door when Conor comes flying down the stairs, bare-chested and flustered. “Bláithín, it’s four a.m.”
“He needs the inhaler,” she says. “You forgot to pack it. You didn’t pick up your phone.” Her accent is funny. French, I realize, with a little bit of Irish. She’s gorgeous. There’s no way of denying that. She could be a model.
“Okay. Jaysus. I thought someone was breaking in. Bláithín, this is, uh, this is Maggie D’arcy. Maggie, this is Bláithín Arpin.”
“Hello.” There’s something on her face that makes me think she’s finding this amusing.
“I’m going to go,” I say, looking from one to the other. I wrap the shirt more tightly around my body. I feel exposed, ugly in the harsh light, every line showing, every bit of cellulite on my thighs.