An Anonymous Girl (35 page)

Now I’m in a situation that feels eerily similar.

And I’m paralyzed again.

But Thomas merely walks around his desk and sits in the leather rolling chair.

He looks surprised
when I remain standing.

“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing to a chair facing him. I sink into it, trying to steady my breathing.

“My boyfriend is waiting outside,” I choke out.

Thomas raises an eyebrow. “Okay,” he says, sounding so nonplussed that I know he isn’t planning to do anything harmful to me.

My terror continues to ebb away as I take in Thomas’s appearance: He looks exhausted.
He’s wearing an untucked flannel shirt, and he’s unshaven. When he takes off his glasses to rub his eyes, I notice they’re red-rimmed, the way mine always get when I haven’t slept enough.

He puts his glasses back on and steeples his hands. His next words come as a surprise.

“Look, I can’t make you trust me,” he says. “But I swear, I’m trying to protect you from Lydia. You’re already in
so deep.”

I break eye contact with him and glance around the room, trying to get clues about who Thomas is. I’ve been in Dr. Shields’s office and the town house, and both of those places reflect her cool, remote elegance.

Thomas’s office is so different. Beneath my feet is a soft-looking rug, and the wooden shelves are overflowing with books of all shapes and sizes. On his desk is a clear
jar filled with butterscotch candy in yellow wrappers. Beside it is one of those coffee mugs with an inspirational quote wrapped around its perimeter. I stare at the two words in the middle of the quote:
love you.

It sparks a question. “Do you even love your wife?” I ask.

He dips his head. “I thought I did. I wanted to. I tried to . . .” His voice sounds a little ragged. “But I couldn’t.”

I believe him; I was entranced by Dr. Shields, too, when I first met her.

In my pocket, I feel my phone vibrate. I ignore it, but I imagine Dr. Shields holding her sleek, silver phone to her ear, waiting for me to answer. The tiny lines in her exquisite face, the face that appears carved from flawless white marble, are deepening.

“People get divorced all the time. Why didn’t you simply
end it?” I ask.

Then I remember what he told me:
You can’t just leave someone like her.

“I tried that. But to her, our marriage was perfect, and she refused to see that we had any problems,” Thomas says. “So you’re right, I did make up the affair with that woman from the boutique—Lauren. I picked her almost on a whim. She seemed believable, like someone I’d want to sleep with. I deliberately
texted Lydia and pretended it was meant for Lauren.”

“You sent your wife a fake text?” How desperate he must have been, I think.

Thomas looks down at his hands. “I thought for sure Lydia would leave me if I cheated on her. It seemed like an easy way out. She wrote a whole book titled
The Morality of Marriage.
I never believed she’d insist on trying to repair our relationship.”

He still
hasn’t answered a basic question: Why didn’t he just admit he had the affair with April?

So I ask him.

He picks up his mug and takes a sip, his fingers covering up most of the words in the quote. Maybe he’s trying to buy time.

Then he puts it down. But the words facing me are different because he twisted the position of the mug when he moved it:
take is equal.

Like a jigsaw puzzle
coming together, the entire line blooms in my mind:
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

I was right: Thomas must have sung that line by the Beatles to April on the night when they were together. That’s how she discovered the song she listened to with her mother.

“April was so young,” Thomas finally says. “I thought it might be hard for Lydia to know I’d chosen
a twenty-three-year-old.” He appears even sadder now than he did when I first came in; I swear I can see him fighting back tears. “I didn’t know at first how damaged April was. I figured we both wanted a one-night thing . . .”

He looks at me meaningfully, and I know what he isn’t saying:
Like you and I did.

I feel my cheeks grow warm. Inside my pocket, my phone vibrates again. Somehow
it feels more insistent now.

“How did April become subject 5?” I ask, trying to ignore the buzzing against my leg. My skin feels prickly, like the vibration is spreading out across my entire body. Like it’s trying to consume me.

I glance to my left, at the closed door to Thomas’s office. I didn’t see him lock it. I don’t recall him bolting the main door to the suite after he let me in,
either.

Thomas no longer feels like a threat to me. But I can sense danger lurking nearby, like the curl of smoke from an approaching fire.

“April got really attached to me, for some reason,” Thomas continues. “She called and texted a bunch of times. I tried to let her down gently . . . She knew from the beginning I was married. A couple weeks later, it stopped as abruptly as it all started.
I figured she’d moved on, met somebody new.”

He pinches his forehead between his thumb and index finger, like he has a headache.

Hurry,
I think to myself urgently. I can’t identify why, but my instincts are telling me to get out of this office quickly.

Thomas takes another sip from his mug before he continues. “Then Lydia came home and told me about this new subject in her study, a
young woman who’d had a traumatic reaction to the experience. We talked about how the survey must have triggered something, perhaps a repressed memory.
I
was the one who encouraged Lydia to talk to her in person, to 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 of an explosive disclosure. But I kind of get it, given the magnetic pull Dr. Shields exudes.

Maybe April was seeking absolution, the same way I sought it from Dr. Shields when I told her my secrets. Perhaps April also thought that if the woman who spent
her career studying moral choices offered her a pardon, then April wasn’t so flawed after all.

“I’ll text you the missing pages,” I say to Thomas. “Can you answer one more question, though?”

He nods.

I think about the night I watched them under the restaurant awning. “I saw you with Dr. Shields one evening. You seemed so in love. Why did you act like that?”

“Her file on April,”
he says. “I wanted to get in the house so I could see it. If there was something April said that could link her to me, I was worried Lydia might realize it later and it could send her over the edge. But I could never find it, not until I saw it on her desk.”

“There’s nothing in there that ties you to April,” I say.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

But that may not be true, I realize. There’s
one tiny detail, floating just beyond the edge of my consciousness. It’s like a helium-filled balloon dancing on a high ceiling. I can’t grasp it no matter how hard I try. It has something to do with April; it’s an image or memory or detail.

I glance at the window again as I pull my phone out of my pocket. I’ll go back and study her file afresh once I leave here, I think. Now I just need to
get out.

I look down at my phone to pull up the final five photographs of April’s file. That’s when I see the missed calls are from BeautyBuzz. There are four, including two voice mail messages.

Did I forget about a job? I wonder. But I’m certain I’m not scheduled to work until five
P
.
M
.

Why would the company be so frantic to get ahold of me?

I quickly tap on the missing photos
and text them to Thomas. “Now you have everything,” I say as I stand up. He’s already bent over his phone, intently studying them.

I play the message from BeautyBuzz. My eye is drawn back to the window. I think I can see the shadows of people passing by again, but I’m not sure.

The voice mail isn’t from the program coordinator, like I thought. It’s from the owner of the company, a woman
I’ve never spoken to before.

“Jessica, please call me at once.”

Her voice is clipped. Angry.

I press
Play
to listen to the second one.

“Jessica, you are being terminated, effective immediately. You need to return this message as soon as possible. We’ve learned you have violated the noncompete clause you signed when you joined our company. We have the names of two women you recently
solicited as freelance clients while using the BeautyBuzz name. Our lawyers will file a cease and desist if you continue.”

I look up at Thomas.

“She got me fired,” I whisper.

Dr. Shields must have called BeautyBuzz and told them about Reyna and Tiffani.

I think about my rent that’s due in a week, Antonia’s bills, my father’s job loss. I imagine Becky’s sweet, trusting face as she
learns the only home she has ever had is about to disappear.

The walls are closing in on me again.

Is Dr. Shields going to get me sued if I don’t do what she wants?

I think about what she wrote in her notes on me:
You belong to me.

My throat is tight, and my eyes are burning. A scream is trapped in my throat.

“What happened?” Thomas asks as he rises from behind his desk.

But I can’t answer him. I burst through the office door and then into the empty waiting room, and I tear down the hallway. I need to call the owner of BeautyBuzz and try to explain. I need to talk to my parents and make sure they’re still safe. Could Dr. Shields do something to them? Maybe she isn’t planning to pay for their trip after all; she could have found out my credit-card number and used
it for the deposit.

If she so much as
touches
Becky, I’ll kill her, I think frantically.

I’m gasping and crying by the time I throw open the main door of the building and run outside. The icy winter air feels like a slap against my face.