the heels of her exciting news.
A beat. “I’m sure Eleanor’s fine, Hana. She’s a smart girl. And very private. If she had to get away for a minute, she may not want us to know the reason.”
Woman, I thought. She’s a smart woman.
“You know, everyone says that: She’s so private, she’s so guarded, look at her running a lifestyle blog but hardly ever sharing anything about her own life.” I stood and crossed to the kitchen, fumbled in the cabinet for a water glass. “People think they’re opposite poles: You can be all TMI and post a million no-makeup selfies, or you can be like Eleanor and only post about your professional life. But it’s not any different. Eleanor doesn’t have more secrets than the woman who posts four hundred times a day. She just invests less time in hiding them.”
A long silence. “I like that she’s private,” he said, because he didn’t get it, not at all. “She just does cool shit and lets her work speak for itself.”
“That’s one way to think of it.” I took a sip of water. “Anyway, I’m gonna call your brother.”
“Good luck with that.”
I dialed anew, listening to the rings without much hope. After a few, a cheerful robot lady told me that this user has a voicemail that has not been set up yet, goodbye.
I was out of things to do and that meant I had to face it again: Eleanor missing, Eleanor gone without a trace, Eleanor most likely, most rationally, most reasonably dead in a ditch somewhere, because why else wouldn’t she have contacted us? Cosmo stood and leapt off the bed, annoyed by my shaking breaths.
I was about to switch off my phone when Mikki texted: “I’ve been thinking about this a lot.”
No. No. No. No.
I tensed my shoulders, squinted my eyes, bracing as her second text came through.
She wrote: “I think we need to tell them.”
CHAPTER 10
Katie
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 9:30 P.M.
Eleanor. I kept going over the last time I’d seen her the night before. I’d just drained my mocktail, a purply thing called the Botanist, and I was eager to get home and jot down some details from my experience: the music, the energy, the member I’d met who was the first nonbinary model to grace the cover of Vogue. A general loveliness I wanted to capture. I’d glanced over at Eleanor and debated grabbing her arm to say good night, but she’d been Eleanoring hard, working the room, and so I’d slipped into the elevator and told myself I’d see her in the morning.
But I hadn’t seen her since then—what if I never would? There was still a small part of me clinging to the idea that she had, inexplicably, skipped town. But Eleanor’s career was everything; she wouldn’t destroy it. And her friends were a close second, and leaving would be a betrayal of sorts, with all of us panicking in her wake. But no, I had to believe that that was the case, because the alternatives were awful: kidnapped, taken, drugged, maybe hurt, possibly even…
I leaned back against my pillows. My phone was still on my lap, headphones tossed on top. My call with Erin had been almost an out-of-body experience. Though sworn to secrecy, she was thrilled. (Agent-client privilege, she kept saying, as if that were a real thing.) She was trying to hide it, trying to make sympathetic noises and ask appropriately kind questions, but I could sense it. I was freaking out on the phone, attempting to keep my voice steady, but in an odd, horrible way, her excitement had been the tiniest bit infectious. I was worried sick but also thrumming, like an amp that’s just been switched on, emitting a hollow buzz.
Perhaps because now I could do something, I could help. The cops were unimpressed, unenthused, unmotivated: Now that they knew Eleanor and her husband weren’t monogamous, they likely thought she’d absconded voluntarily. Adrenaline shot through my limbs, and with it a desire to figure it out, to know, to pound at the door or the wall or the muscly chest of whomever knew the truth: What happened to Eleanor?
Ted. He was the low-hanging fruit, as Eleanor had said, presciently. We’d chatted earlier tonight at the presentation—him smiling as he untangled cords and unpacked equipment—but only for a minute before Hana had texted in a tizzy. He’d given me his card on Friday, as we were leaving the Herd, and now I found it in a heap of