Chapter 2
Mike Reardon had dated Lily for almost two years and had ended things eight months ago in a way that Lily had described to me as him being threatened by her ambition, which I had halfway believed because it was the kind of sentence Lily delivered with enough certainty that you tended to accept it before you examined it. Mike had said once, briefly, carefully, that things in Lily's apartment were harder than she admitted. I had not asked follow-up questions because I did not want to be the older sister who interfered, who triangulated, who made herself the center of a story that was not hers.
He picked up on the second ring.
I told him what was on my doorstep. He did not sound surprised. He was quiet for a moment, the quiet of someone processing a thing they had been expecting, and then he asked one question.
"Did Emily bring the purple backpack?"
I went back to the bags. Under the pink blanket, tucked behind Jack's overnight bag in a way that was deliberate, almost hidden, was a small purple backpack I had not noticed in the first sweep. I unzipped it. Two shirts, both clean and folded. A bottle of children's pain reliever. Copies of birth certificates and immunization records. An envelope with cash that I counted later and totaled eight hundred and forty dollars, which was enough to mean she had been saving it specifically for this.
Mike went silent for longer this time.
"Don't let her know you called me," he said. "She's been telling people she's single. Unattached. She applied to a private music program in Los Angeles three months ago. She's been planning this for longer than last night."
May you like
The police arrived and photographed the doorstep and the bags. The building camera showed Lily arriving at four thirty-one in the morning, placing the children carefully against the wall, ringing the buzzer once, and walking away down the hallway before I had gotten to the door. She did not look back. Not once, not at the camera, not down the hallway, not in any direction that would have included the two people she had just left on a welcome mat before dawn. A social worker named Donna arrived forty minutes after the officers and sat with me in the kitchen while Emily and Jack watched a show on my laptop in the living room, and told me the children could stay with me under an emergency kinship placement pending investigation, and told me specifically not to confront Lily and not to sign anything she sent without running it through the department first.
That warning turned out to matter considerably more than I knew in the moment she gave it.
