her, the length of his naked body pressed up against the length of hers. Automatically, her legs parted. They’d already had sex, but he was ready again. He looked right into her eyes.
“I like that you don’t know that part of me,” Derek said. “I like that you only know me as the person I’ve become, and not the person I used to be. It’s nice to not have history with you.”
She understood that. Completely. She gets what it’s like to want to reinvent yourself, but it’s not always easy, especially when family and old friends take it personally.
“I don’t have twenty years of mistakes with you,” he whispered, and she could feel him sliding into her again. She parted her legs farther, placing her hands on his ass, guiding him as far as he could go. “You’re a blank slate, and you don’t know how much I need that.”
It wouldn’t take a psychologist to understand that Kenzie’s an escape for him. Their relationship has always been highly compartmentalized. When Derek is with her, he doesn’t have to think about his wife, or his missing son, or this house, or any of the things he feels obligated to, and responsible for.
The problem is, it’s near impossible for Kenzie to understand why anyone would want to escape from this. You poor, sad, wealthy man. The house is gorgeous. Ten-foot ceilings, gleaming hardwood floors, light fixtures that probably cost more than her rent.
It even smells like money in here.
She wonders if the bathroom is near the mudroom, but there’s only a laundry room, and it’s the fanciest one she’s ever seen in real life. There’s an oversize washer and dryer, and built-in cabinets for everything unsightly, like detergent, dryer sheets, cleaning products. What a luxury it must be to have a laundry room that isn’t shared with a hundred other tenants, especially one as nice as this one.
In the mudroom, there are three cubbies. They’re labeled with hand-painted wooden signs. The one on the left reads MARIN. The one on the right reads DEREK. And the one in the middle reads SEBASTIAN.
Sebastian. Wow. His coat is still hanging there, his rubber boots lined up neatly beneath it, and in the basket below is a small backpack covered in cartoon dogs. Paw Patrol. She finds herself reaching out to finger his coat, then yanks her hand back. No. She shouldn’t touch it. It wouldn’t be right.
Her bladder threatening to burst, Kenzie exits the mudroom and continues on her self-guided tour, getting lost in imagining what she would decorate differently if she were living here with Derek. Truthfully, not much. Marin has excellent taste.
As she heads up to the second level, she pauses on the curved staircase to look at the framed photos mounted on the wall. They’re all of Derek and Marin’s son, depicting him at all different ages.
The last one, closest to the top step, must be the most recent. In it, Sebastian is wearing the exact reindeer sweater that he was wearing in his Missing Child poster, but in this photo, he’s sitting on Santa’s lap with a huge grin on his face. It hits Kenzie how horrific this whole thing really is. It’s easy enough to not think about it when Derek refuses to talk about it, but here, in their house, there’s an entire side to Derek she’ll never know or see.
He’s a father. Who lost his child. Who’s married to a mother. Who lost her child.
Kenzie stares at the photo, reminded that Sebastian disappeared on the last Saturday before Christmas. They would have had a tree up, probably in the front living room, where it would shine in the window for the neighbors to see. They’d probably finished all their Christmas shopping, most of the presents wrapped and ready, with a few hidden away to be revealed on Christmas morning.
But instead of waking up to the sounds of little feet thundering in the hallway and down the grand staircase, and then the whoops and shrieks at the sight of all the bounty under the tree, there would have been silence. No little boy was in the house to open those presents. No little boy has been here since.
It makes Kenzie feel sick, and she takes a few seconds to breathe.
On the wall at the top of the stairs is an 8-by-10 black-and-white photo of Derek and Marin on the beach on their wedding day. She’s wearing some kind of bohemian-chic wedding dress. He’s wearing light-colored pants and a