“You were my only friend all those years ago. You don’t have to thank me. This is me, thanking you,” she says. “It’s your turn to be happy.” She tightens her towel around her body, and I can see the flash of her smile through the steam.
I can’t believe this is the last time we’ll sit here. The last time we’ll talk. This room has been like a sanctuary, dark and quiet, with just our whispered voices, plotting my escape. Who will sit here tomorrow with her? Or the day after that?
I feel the finality of my departure looming, how absolute that ending will be, and I wonder if it’ll be worth it. If it’ll be better. Soon, Claire Cook will cease to exist, the shiny pieces of her facade cracked and discarded. I have no idea what I’ll find underneath it all.
Thirty-three hours until I’m gone.
Claire
Monday, February 21
The Day before the Crash
I meet Danielle outside the Center Street Literacy offices, fifteen minutes late. “Not a word,” I warn her, though I know she’s probably already texted Rory three times.
She trails me through the doors and into the large common area they use for book talks and writing workshops. The room is busy at this hour, filled with students and tutors. I imagine how different it would be if Rory were passing through, the wave of excited murmuring, starting at the front and rippling backward as he made his way into the space. But no one gives me a second look. Without Rory, I’m just another face, there and gone. Unremarkable. Which will be my advantage very soon.
I pass through and up a set of stairs to the second floor, which houses the Center Street administrative offices, and into the small conference room where everyone is already assembled.
“So nice to see you, Mrs. Cook,” the director says with a warm smile.
“You too, Anita. Shall we get started?” I take my seat, Danielle directly behind me. The meeting begins with a discussion of the annual fundraiser coming up in eight months’ time. I can barely bring myself to feign enthusiasm for an event that will occur long after my disappearance. I amuse myself by imagining what the next meeting will be like. Quiet talk about how I left Rory, how I never let on there was any trouble, that I smiled through this meeting and then vanished. Where did she go? A person doesn’t just walk out of her life and disappear. Why can’t anyone find her? Which one of them will be the first to bring up Maggie Moretti? To whisper the question that every single one of them will wonder, if only for a moment: Do you think she really left him, or do you think something happened to her?
* * *
Rory had told me about Maggie Moretti on our third date.
“Everyone always asks me what happened,” he’d said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs. “It was a tragedy, from beginning to end, and I still don’t think I’m completely over it.” He picked up his wine and swirled it in the glass before taking a sip. “We’d been fighting nonstop, and Maggie wanted us to get away for a quiet weekend. To reconnect and really talk without the distractions of the city. But nothing was different there; we were just rehashing the same old stuff, except in a new location.” His voice had grown quieter, the sounds of the restaurant receding. The way he spoke—the emotion in his voice—felt so raw and real. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he could possibly be lying. “Finally, I got fed up and left. I jumped into my car and drove back to Manhattan. Several hours later, our neighbors upstate called 911 and reported the house was on fire. They found her crumpled at the base of a staircase. I had no idea anything had happened until the police contacted me the following morning. It wasn’t in the papers at the time, but the coroner found smoke in her lungs, which meant she was alive when the fire started. I’ll never forgive myself for leaving when I did. I could have saved her.”
“Why did they think you’d been involved?”
He’d shrugged. “It makes for a better story. I get it, and I don’t begrudge the media, although my father never forgave the New York Times. It was a blessing my mother wasn’t alive to see it, to worry about what it would do to her polling numbers.” His bitterness surprised me, but he covered it quickly. “The real shame is what it did to Maggie’s memory. Because of me, the whole world knows her name for all the wrong reasons. For how she died, not for who she was.” He looked out the window next to us, lost in regret. Beyond it, the New York street sparkled in a soft drizzle, the lights glittering like jewels in the dark. Then he pulled himself back and drained his glass. “I don’t resent the police for doing their job. I understand they did what they felt they had to do. I was lucky that justice prevailed, because it doesn’t always. But the experience shook me.”
The waiter had approached, clearly waiting for a break in the conversation to slip the black sleeve containing the bill in front of Rory, who’d smiled that warm, charming smile that cracked my heart in half, wanting more than anything for him to feel for me what he once felt for Maggie Moretti.
* * *
“Mrs. Cook, would you be willing to chair the silent auction again this year?” Anita Reynolds, the director of Center Street Literacy, looks down the long table at me.
“Absolutely,” I say. “Let’s meet on Friday and figure out who we can start approaching for donations. I’ve got a quick trip to Detroit, but I’ll be back by then. Two o’clock?” She nods and I enter the appointment in the shared Google calendar, knowing it will pop up on Danielle’s iPad right behind me and Rory’s computer at home. These are the details I have to remember—scheduling appointments, ordering flowers, making plans for a future I won’t be living. Details that will cover my tracks and keep everyone believing I’m a devoted wife, committed to the many important causes championed by the Cook Family Foundation.
Thirty-one hours.
* * *
When I return home, I head upstairs to change my clothes and see that Danielle has repacked my bag while I was at the gym. Gone are the trendy clothes that I prefer, replaced with the more conservative suits and three-inch heels Rory likes me to wear.
I lock the bedroom door and step into my closet, reaching into a tall pair of boots and pulling out the nylon backpack I paid cash for at a sporting goods store last week. Flattening it, I slip it beneath the zippered lining of my suitcase. One piece at a time, I remove the clothes I plan to take with me from their hiding places and pack them. A form-fitted down jacket, several long-sleeved T-shirts, and an NYU baseball cap I bought the other day to hide my face from hotel lobby security cameras. I pull my favorite pair of jeans from their place on the shelf and slide everything beneath what Danielle packed for the event. Just enough to get me through the next day or two. Not enough for anyone to notice items missing from my drawers or closet. I zip the bag closed and place it by the door and sit down on the bed, relishing the solitude of a locked room.