help her. I didn’t know it was April. Lydia only ever called her Subject 5.” Thomas lets out a harsh laugh that seems to encapsulate all the snarled, complicated feelings he must hold. “I didn’t realize April and Subject 5 were the same person until a private investigator contacted Lydia about her file.”
I’m barely breathing. I don’t want to interrupt him; I’m desperate to hear what else he knows. But I’m also acutely aware of the phone against my leg. I’m waiting for the buzzing to start up again.
“I’ve had some time to piece it together,” Thomas finally says. “And my best guess is that April figured out who my wife was. Then she signed up for the study because it was a link to me. Or maybe she felt like Lydia was her competition and she wanted to learn more about her.”
My head jerks to the right, toward the window. What was it that commanded my attention? Maybe a muffled noise, or a movement on the sidewalk or street outside. The blinds are angled, so I can only catch shards of the view. I can’t tell if Noah is there.
Whatever danger I’m sensing does not appear to be emanating from Thomas. I believe his story: He wasn’t in contact with April in the weeks before her death.
It isn’t just blind faith or my instincts that tells me this, however. I’ve read April’s file a half dozen times by now. And I’ve learned a key piece of information about the relationship between Dr. Shields and April: I know some of what happened between them on the night that April died.
Dr. Shields wrote about it in script that looks more jagged than her usual graceful handwriting. Their final encounter is documented on a page in the file right before April’s obituary, the one I looked up online. And I captured it all in photographs on the phone in my pocket, the one that feels unusually warm right now. The one I keep expecting to erupt again at any moment.
You disappointed me deeply, Katherine April Voss, Dr. Shields wrote. I thought I knew you. You were treated with such warmth and care, and you were given so much—intense attention to your well-being, carefully selected gifts, even encounters like the one tonight when you came to my home and perched on a kitchen stool, sipping a glass of wine while the slim gold bangle I’d taken off my arm and given to you slid down your wrist.
You were invited in.
Then you made the revelation that shattered everything, that put you in a completely different light: I made a mistake. I slept with a married man, just some guy I met at a bar. It only happened once.
Your big eyes filled with tears. Your lower lip quivered. As though you deserved sympathy for this transgression.
You were seeking absolution, but it was not granted. How could it be? There is a barricade that separates moral individuals from immoral ones. These rules are very clear. You were told you crossed that barrier, and that you would never be welcomed into the town house again.
You had revealed your true, flawed self. You weren’t the guileless young woman you initially presented yourself to be.
The conversation continued. At the conclusion of it, you were given a farewell hug.
Twenty minutes later, all traces of you were gone. Your wineglass was washed and dried and replaced in a cabinet. The remnants of the Brie and grapes were tipped into the trash can. Your stool was realigned into its proper position.
It was as if you’d never been here at all. As if you no longer existed.
I hadn’t even skimmed Dr. Shields’s written words the first time I’d seen them. I was too worried about getting out of her town house before she arrived home. But later, in the safety of my apartment, I’d read them again and again.
Dr. Shields’s notes don’t indicate that she knows the married man April confessed to sleeping with was Thomas. She seems to believe that April entered her study with no ulterior motives, when it’s obvious to me now that April was obsessed with Thomas, obsessed enough to find a way into Dr. Shields’s research project. Then she seemed to grow attached to Dr. Shields. April was a lost girl; she seemed to be searching for someone or something to hold on to.
It seems strange that April revealed she had an affair with an unnamed married man to Dr. Shields, that she tiptoed up to the brink