a person who appears even smaller than she is.
“I’m sorry,” he cries, sobs racking every part of his body. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
* * *
It was a month to the day that Sebastian was taken. One month exactly; thirty-one days of the waking nightmare they could scarcely believe had become their life.
The investigation into Sebastian’s disappearance—despite his photo and the video from the market being all over the national news—had dried up. There were no leads, no ransom demands, no witnesses coming forward after suddenly remembering something they hadn’t a month ago when he first went missing. When Derek called the FBI and demanded to know what else could be done, the agent assigned to them told him that while Sebastian’s case would always be considered “open and ongoing,” they had to redirect their immediate resources to the hundreds of missing children cases that were occurring every week across the country.
It sent Marin into a spiral. She was already in a terrible place, her mind filled with the horrors of pedophiles and sex trafficking and whatever else her imagination tortured her with. But after Derek called to tell her what the FBI had said, she sank all the way to the bottom.
Derek was the one who found her. He returned home from an urgent meeting at the office, a meeting he didn’t trust anyone else to handle, and there was his wife, lying in the bathtub, unconscious. He’d only been gone three hours. He called 911 and performed CPR until the paramedics arrived. They managed to revive her and keep her conscious until she could be properly cared for at the hospital.
“You nearly died.” Derek speaks in a monotone, but the tears are flowing freely down his face. “I thought you were dead when I opened the bathroom door and saw you.”
Marin doesn’t say anything. She’s already apologized a hundred times for scaring him, and Sal, and Sadie, and everybody else in her life who cared about her. She can’t apologize anymore.
“When you were discharged from psychiatric hold five days later, I was afraid to leave you alone. About a week after that, I got an email from an address I didn’t recognize. It came through my work account. There was no subject line. When I clicked on the email, there was a picture of Sebastian. He looked fine; scared, but fine. He was holding up a copy of the New York Times with the date on it. The photo had been taken that day. The email warned me not to call the police; said that if I did, I would never see my son again. They told me someone would call in exactly thirty minutes. If I didn’t pick up, or if they thought the call was bugged, they would kill him.”
Marin closes her eyes. It’s the most excruciating thing to hear, and her mind can’t help but conjure up a hundred different ways it could have been handled.
“I should have called the FBI. But I just … I couldn’t. I was so angry. The investigation had totally stalled, and it felt like everyone had abandoned us. And you had just…” He shakes his head. “I didn’t call them. All I could think about was that it had been five weeks since I’d seen my kid. Five weeks. And if thirty minutes and a phone call could tell me whether or not he was really okay, I wanted to know. I needed to know.”
Yes. She understands that. But she doesn’t want to give Derek the satisfaction of validating his feelings, so she says nothing.
“I went and sat in the car, inside the garage. The phone rang exactly when they said it would. When I answered, it was Bash.”
“What?” Marin’s knees buckle, and it’s her turn to grab the edge of the island to keep herself from sinking to the floor. “You talked to him?”
Derek nods, his face a mask of anguish and exquisite pain. “He said, ‘Hi Daddy, it’s Bash. I miss you and Mommy. When are you coming to get me?’”
“Oh god.” Marin can’t breathe. “Oh god…”
“And I said, ‘Soon, my honey bear. Soon.’ And I asked him if he was okay, and he said, ‘I’m okay. There’s TV here and lots of pizza and snacks.’ And then he asked me again when I was coming.”
Marin is crying so hard she can’t speak, but she nods.
“Then someone took the phone. A man. I didn’t recognize his voice. He said, ‘If you want your