thought maybe she’d hear from Claire soon. She didn’t. They hired a PI in Chicago, and he gladly took their money but turned up nothing. They looked into a missing persons report, but an adult who simply didn’t want to be in touch with you was not missing.
Instead of asking why Fiona hadn’t done more, Arnaud asked, “Was this typical of your daughter? To latch onto different religions?”
“No,” Fiona said. “That was the oddest part. She was always a rebel. She quit Girl Scouts, she quit orchestra, she wouldn’t date anyone longer than a month or two. Until Kurt.”
“Does she have a reason to avoid you?”
Fiona stuck her fork into her omelet and pulled it out, watched the cheese ooze from the four holes. “We’ve had our issues, but there was no big fight.” She could have gone into more detail about their head-butting, about how Claire was always closer to her father but then, after the divorce, was close to no one, about the guilt and second-guessing Fiona lived with every day—but it would only distract from the main point. She said, “Some people are just born difficult. That’s a hard thing to say.”
She didn’t feel great. She was thirsty, but the water they’d given her was sparkling, which she hated. She took a tiny sip and it was worse than the thirst.
“Does the boyfriend hit?” This was from Serge, and although it was a legitimate question, Fiona resented the intrusion into Arnaud’s line of reasoning.
“I don’t think so. Some of the stories we found online, about the Hosanna—it sounded like they hit their children. For discipline. And I’m sure it went beyond that. But I’ve known Kurt a long time. Since he was a kid. He’s good with animals, you know? I don’t think you can hit women and be good with animals. Animals would sense it.”
Arnaud nodded slowly. “Let’s assume she left the cult when she discovered she was pregnant.”
Fiona was impressed. She and Damian had come to a similar conclusion, but only days after she’d found the video, after they’d stayed up past midnight drinking wine in two different cities, planning and theorizing over the phone. The best they’d gotten along in fifteen years, but who cared about that now? Occasionally she’d hear Damian’s wife in the background, and then he’d say, Karen thinks we should do X, but it was never anything helpful.
Karen had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, a treatable kind, and was starting radiation next week—which, along with his class schedule, was the reason Damian wasn’t here too.
Arnaud said, “And the boyfriend’s family? Have they heard from him?”
She said, “I only know his mother. She doesn’t really—she doesn’t want anything to do with him.”
Her chest was tight, and her head was filling with gray noise. She felt Serge’s hand on her arm and realized she was closer to her omelet than she should have been. She had fallen forward.
“She flew just this morning,” Serge was saying.
Arnaud said, “She hasn’t eaten her food.”
“I’ll take her home.”
“I can hear you,” she said. “I’m right here.”
“I bring my motorbike around.”
“No!” she said. “We’re not done!”
Arnaud folded his napkin into a neat triangle, tucked it under the rim of his plate. “But we are. Now what I do is look.”
1985
No one wanted to do much in the weeks after Nico’s memorial. Whoever you called was busy taking food to Terrence’s place, or you yourself were taking food to Terrence. Or people were sick, just regular sick, with coughs brought on by the drop in temperature. Guys with families flew home for Thanksgiving to play straight for nieces and nephews, to assure their grandparents they were dating, no one special, a few nice girls. To assure their fathers, who had cornered them in various garages and hallways, that no, they weren’t going to catch this new disease. Charlie and his mother, being British, had no investment in the holiday, despite Yale’s protests that it was a day for immigrants. British immigrants, in particular! Yale wound up cooking Cornish game hens for himself and Charlie, plus Asher Glass and Terrence and Fiona. Teddy and Julian would drop by for dessert.
Asher arrived first, and after he handed over the loaf of bread he’d baked (still warm, wrapped in a towel), he shoved a manila envelope at Yale. “Don’t let me force this on them till the end of the night,” he said. “Keep it from me. Not till there’s coffee in my hand, okay?” Yale didn’t understand, but he