Brad Aarons was a cardiothoracic surgeon at the end of his fellowship at Waverly Memorial Hospital. He was somewhere in his late thirties, and half the female students fawned over him, but Haley had no interest in that. He’d been teaching at the University of Yarrow ever since he graduated from its medical school, and Haley didn’t know much else about him except that he was married to a woman named Priya, who’d once been a successful artist. “Note the way the brachiocephalic artery splits into the right subclavian artery and the right common carotid artery,” Brad was saying. His messy red-blond hair was an inch too long and a shade lighter than the stubble blanketing his face, but even doctors could get away with a mussed look in a town like Waverly, because here they valued ideas, academia, and compost piles. Maybe it was because of the university hovering on the wooded outskirts, but Waverly didn’t preoccupy itself with the kinds of things most wealthy New York City commuter towns did, and Haley wasn’t sure whether that made it better or worse. Elitism was still elitism, even when you packaged it as being smart and noble.
As Haley moved on to the right subclavian artery, she thought about how much her sister would have hated this class. Emma would have barfed at least a dozen times by now. She probably wouldn’t have even liked to know the cadavers existed on Yarrow’s campus when she went to school here. But even though there wasn’t a scientific bone in Emma’s body and she never would have taken one of Brad’s classes, Haley was sure Brad knew exactly who Emma was, and who she was, too: the sister of the undergrad who went missing. Everyone knew. Haley remembered the way Brad’s eyebrows lifted when he read her name aloud the first day in class, and the way he’d taken off his black reading glasses to glance up and see her face, searching it for similarities. She knew he’d found the similarities when his eyes widened, and part of her enjoyed it. Emma’s sister: if she was anything, it was that. Brad had tried to cover up the awkwardness by quickly resuming his roll call, barking out names, taking a few moments to get back on track. He’d been weird with her ever since, but that was nothing new. So many people were.
Emma went missing her junior year at Yarrow, when Haley was a sophomore at Waverly High School. There was no official explanation for her disappearance. The police had closed the case after investigating for months, interviewing everyone who was at the party that night in the woods with Emma, and sweeping the river—Never a guarantee to find a body that way, they kept reminding Haley and her parents. They never did find Emma’s body, and they were convinced, just like most people in Waverly, that Emma had flung herself into the river from the cliffs behind Yarrow, where she’d last been seen.
But Haley knew in her bones that that was impossible. Emma had her dark side, but she wasn’t suicidal. Haley believed Emma had been killed and that the police were too naive to figure it out, and once she realized her theories were falling on deaf ears in Waverly—including at the police department—she had to get out of there. She chose Stanford for college, far away from the dark and cold East Coast that had claimed her sister, and a plane flight from the parents who were trying so hard to keep it all together. At the airport Haley’s parents warned her over and over to stay safe, but their warnings were hollow. Emma’s disappearance made it too obvious that they didn’t have control over anything.
It didn’t take long for Haley to realize that California had been a mistake. She missed her parents and felt too removed from Waverly and where she’d lost Emma. Some magical-thinking part of her was certain she was the only one who could get to the bottom of her sister’s disappearance, so after undergrad, Haley moved back east, to New York City, to be closer to her parents. That’s where she met Dean, her fiancé, the only person besides her mother who’d ever believed her theories that her sister had been killed by someone else who was at the party that night. Her own father was convinced Emma might have just run away or been taken alive, and even Haley’s friends at Stanford had nodded along when she got drunk enough to talk about Emma, clearly feeling very sorry for her, but also seeming not to believe her. You’re too close to see things clearly, one of her roommates had said late one night, and Haley wondered if she just didn’t have the right language. Disappeared, missing, dead: words Haley used interchangeably about what could have happened to her sister that night, the truth existing somewhere in the dark spaces between them.
Dean had supported Haley when she accepted an offer from Yarrow’s medical school, and now here they were, back in Waverly where it had all started. Haley knew it was crazy. To want to live in the town she’d grown up in, where her parents still lived, and to walk the campus where they’d experienced their worst nightmare. To fall in love with Dean, who’d also attended Yarrow. But her grief was like a part of her body now, and she felt a visceral need to stay connected to her roots and her pain, and to her sister.
Haley looked down at the slim platinum ring she could just make out beneath her rubber gloves. An engagement. Dean had proposed a few months ago, and Haley knew something needed to change if she was supposed to start a new family. Because how could she move forward when the person she loved could be stuck, buried somewhere underground, her disappearance still a mystery?
TWO
Priya
Priya stared down at her phone to see Josie’s text. Need to talk. She knew that she absolutely, positively shouldn’t reply. She could practically hear Dr. Baker’s voice telling her that it was time to put the phone down . . . break the pattern . . . do something else . . . but the phone was so warm and inviting in her hand, and she couldn’t seem to keep herself from typing.
Please, stop contacting me, she wrote, but then she deleted it. She tried to breathe, to get the air all the way into her lungs like Dr. Baker had taught her to, but wouldn’t Josie already know she’d started a text response because of those ellipses that phones displayed when the other person was replying?
Just breathe, Priya.
In, out, in, out . . .
Her cognitive behavioral therapy sessions with Dr. Baker were never far from her mind, all his tips and tricks for changing her anxious trains of thought, to rewire neural pathways, as Dr. Baker explained it all those years ago. Priya thought about the gift certificate for the sessions that her husband, Brad, had presented to her early one Christmas morning, and the way the smooth, embossed envelope had felt in her hand. Brad loved giving gifts, especially jewelry, but Priya thought the gift certificate was even better because it was what she really needed. She hadn’t been right since Elliot was born. She loved him beyond measure, but she was so anxious, and the week before that Christmas, she’d had a very public panic attack in the parking lot outside Elliot’s music class. She’d had to sit down and clutch her baby while she hung her head between her knees and tried to breathe, right there on the frozen pavement for all the other parents to see. When a well-meaning mother tried to pull Elliot from her arms, Priya lunged at her like a wild animal. After that morning it was even harder to make friends. And even now, nearly a decade later, Priya could never seem to stop the recurrent nightmare that someone would deem her an unfit mother and take away Elliot.
Leave me alone, Josie, please, Priya wrote in the text box, and then pressed send. Her fingers trembled against the phone as she tried even harder to recall the breathing techniques taught to her by Dr. Baker all those years ago. Priya was always trying harder. She knew how lucky she was to have someone as wonderful as Elliot, and though Brad wasn’t perfect, at least he tried to help her. Those sessions were just one of the many examples of his devotion to making her better. In the early days of their marriage he’d seemed so hopeful that he could actually do it. Priya had always wondered if that was the hardest part of his career as a doctor: the frustration that he’d never be able to fix his own wife.