Marin can’t do to someone what has just been done to Frances, and what might one day be done to her.
She returns to the bathroom and sinks back into the tub. It’s completely full, which means there’s more than enough water to drown herself.
Chapter 22
Of course, Marin won’t do it.
But she thinks about it. She thinks about it all the time. She just doesn’t say it out loud, because the last time she let it slip, Derek panicked and put her in the hospital again, where she was stuck for two days until they were sure she wasn’t going to hurt herself.
She can’t blame Derek, or the doctors. She had attempted suicide before, after all. A month after Sebastian went missing, when the FBI informed them that the search was going nowhere, she had swallowed a bottle of benzodiazepines with a bottle of wine. She doesn’t remember Derek finding her, trying to revive her, the paramedics, the ambulance ride, the stomach pump. She only remembers waking up early the next morning in a hospital room, Derek slumped in a chair in a corner, trickles of light coming in through the window blinds. Her first coherent thought was, Shit, it didn’t work.
A few months ago, there were news reports of a child’s body found in the woods beside the dismembered remains of a young woman who wasn’t his mother. Marin was at work when she read the article, but when she got home, she started drinking immediately and waited for the phone to ring. She was certain the FBI would call to confirm that it was Sebastian. It wasn’t, thank god. But by the time the deceased’s identities were released, she had finished an entire bottle of merlot and was digging through the bathroom cabinet on Derek’s side of the vanity. She found what she was looking for—a brand-new package of razor blades meant for her husband’s Merkur safety razor, hidden under a pile of old rags—and was just about to tear it open when Derek came home.
He walked into the bathroom just as she was shoving the pack of razors back into the cabinet. If he noticed she was drunk, he didn’t comment on it; all he did was ask her if she was okay. He’d seen the same news reports she had. His day had been rough, as well. They spoke for a few minutes, their shared horror at the news reports briefly uniting them after months of disconnect.
Derek had saved Marin a second time that night. He just didn’t know it.
This is her life now. It’s made up of good moments, terrible moments, and all the numbness in between.
Her skin is pink like a newborn baby’s when she gets out of the bath thirty minutes later. After wrapping herself in a terrycloth robe, she makes the call she’s been dreading, the one she’d rather do anything else than make.
She exhales when it goes straight to voice mail, as she anticipated it would. She isn’t sure she can stay strong speaking to Frances right now. Marin leaves a message, asking her to call back whenever she feels up to it.
“I love you,” Marin says into the dead air of Frances’s voice mail. “I’m here for you, for whatever you need, day or night. I’m so sorry, Frances. I am so, so sorry.”
She ends the call, feeling as helpless as she’s ever felt. But offering support is all she can do. It’s all anyone can do. Nobody could possibly understand the unique cocktail of emotions that Frances is feeling right now, that probably change minute to minute. Nobody knows what she truly needs. There’s no how-to manual for this shit.
Marin tosses her phone onto the bed. The razor blades are still buried under the rags in the cabinet. She could get back into the tub. She could.
But she won’t. There are other ways she can hurt herself.
Still in her robe, she takes her laptop from the charger and sits on the bed, logging in to a site she hasn’t looked at in a while. She’s not supposed to. She promised Dr. Chen she wouldn’t. She could go to prison. The dark net is illegal, and there’s a reason it takes a bunch of rerouting and passwords, and more rerouting and more passwords, before you can get to the sites where the children are.
Sebastian has a small, dark pink birthmark the shape of a crescent on his right inner thigh. In the months after his disappearance, Marin became obsessed with searching