Karen Addelson came in with the doctor. “How’s everything going in here? Patrick? Are you feeling better?”
“What? Oh, yes. Yes.” He grabbed his sandwich like he was playing a part. “This is my daughter. Have you met? Nic, meet the Lady in Charge. Lady in Charge, meet my daughter.”
“Nice to meet you,” both Karen and I said. “Now, Patrick,” Karen went on, “how about we sleep this off? Have your lunch, and the doctor will give you something. We’ll discuss this tomorrow. Okay?”
I nodded encouragingly. Daniel nodded. Dad looked between the two of us and nodded until she left the room. He gripped my wrist. “Promise me, Nic.”
“I promise,” I said. I had no clue what he was asking or what I was agreeing to. I had a feeling it was better for us that way.
* * *
KAREN MET US BACK at the front desk. “We’ll assess him tomorrow. Determine the best course of action. Let’s plan on meeting again next week.” She handed me her card. “We’ll be in touch.”
Daniel and I remained silent, one foot in front of the other, goodbye to the receptionist, thank you to the man holding the door, until we were back in the overheated car, driving with the windows rolled down until the air conditioner kicked in.
“What the hell was that about?” I asked.
“Hell if I know,” he said, both hands circling the steering wheel, the afternoon sun reflecting off the pavement like water.
“Did you really tell him about Annaleise? Or was that just the first thing you could think of?”
“No,” he said. “I really did.”
“That wasn’t smart.”
“No. It really wasn’t.” He sighed, his hard-to-read expression even more impenetrable.
“You were wrong to do that,” I said.
The pink was creeping up his neck as his knuckles blanched white, like the blood was seeping from one spot to the other. “I am fully aware of that, Nic. Fully. I’ll come back tomorrow to check on him.”
“Okay,” I said. “What time?”
He cut his eyes to me, then back to the road. “Don’t worry about it. Get some work done around the house. I’ll bring him the listing papers.”
“The house isn’t ready.”
His jaw tensed. “That’s why you should stay home.”
So much for my momentary swell of emotion for him. This was how we always communicated. In the things we didn’t say. We had developed a habit after our mother got sick, fighting in the space between words about anything other than what we meant.
He was with me the day I scratched Tyler’s truck with the swing of my passenger-side door, the day we met for real. “You never pay attention!” Daniel had screamed, slamming the driver’s-side door. “You parked too close!” I’d yelled back as Tyler looked on.
Nothing about the list of things that needed to be voiced: our dad’s growing distance, the fact that Daniel was dropping out of school, about what would happen to us after Mom died. No, we argued about how close we parked to other cars, about scraped metal and whether I was running late or he was early.
This was how we got through. This was the story of me and Daniel.
“I already called out of work for the day,” he said. “I’ll lend you a hand. Make some progress.”
The meaning underneath: that I had not made any on my own.
* * *
I SAW IT FIRST. That things were not how I’d left them. I stood in the entrance, unmoving, as Daniel brushed by me. “He came in,” I said.
Daniel spun around. “What? Who?”
I slammed the door and leaned against it, my breath coming too fast. “That cop. He came in the fucking house.” I pointed to the dining room table, scattered with chaos, but my chaos. I’d been sorting things into boxes not by item but by time period: things from my childhood, newer things that I’d never seen, and things I could tie to the memory of eighteen—to when Corinne disappeared. And the items I wasn’t sure, scattered across the top of the table.
But those items weren’t grouped how I’d left them. Things had been rifled through and moved. The home renovation book that I’d found in the kitchen drawer, dog-eared, and left on the table, now open to the marked page when I’d left it shut. Receipts with the dates worn off, reshuffled into the wrong piles.
“How can you tell? This place is a mess.”
“He was here, Daniel. Things have been moved. I swear it.”