Chapter 14

As soon asshe hears the mechanical whine of the garage door rising, Amy grabs the empty laundry basket from the kitchen counter and hustles into the mudroom. She’s left laundry in the dryer specifically so that she can waylay Rich on his way into the house.

Lately, he’s been coming home and vanishing into his workshop to putter, the home office ostensibly to work (but really to surf the internet), or the basement to play darts with the kids until dinner. Then, while she’s still cleaning up the kitchen, he falls asleep on the couch. She’s convinced he’s avoiding her, but when she finally asks him directly, he swears he’s not. He says work is extremely stressful at the moment, and he needs to decompress when he gets home. Although she has her doubts about how much strain he could possibly be under as one of the two managers of a small mom-and-pop hardware store, she’s given him his space.

But tonight, she needs to talk to him before he pulls his disappearing act. She throws open the dryer door, pulls an armload of clothes out, and piles them on the counter that runs along the wall. She’s folding t-shirts when the garage door opens and Rich passes through the mudroom.

“Hey,” she says brightly, peering around the open laundry room door.

He turns his head toward her, startled. “What are you doing?”

She arches an eyebrow. “Guess.”

He laughs. “Right, dumb question.”

He crosses the short hallway between the mudroom and the laundry room and plants a kiss on the top of her head. He seems subdued. Tired, maybe.

“Are you okay?” She pauses in her folding with one of Ava’s crop tops in her hand.

“I’m beat. It’s been a long week.”

She doesn’t point out that it’s Tuesday. “Are you sleeping okay?” Maybe it’s a medical thing.

He opens his mouth to answer, then furrows his brow and gestures to the top she’s holding. “Is that for a doll?”

She laughs. “It’s stretchy.”

“Still, Aim. She shouldn’t be going out like that. It’s gonna give people the wrong idea.”

“What idea is that? That Ava has bodily autonomy?”

Rich closes his eyes for a beat and releases a long-suffering sigh. “Forget it.”

She lets it go. They were almost on the same page with the boys, so she was surprised when Ava came along, and suddenly, Rich wanted different rules for their daughter. She’s held fast and won most of the battles, but every once in a while, he’ll push back hard. The worst fight of their entire marriage had happened just a few months earlier, when Ava turned thirteen and Amy took her to Sephora and let her pick out makeup. Rich took one look at his daughter and asked Amy if she wanted Ava to run wild like Heather.

She nearly slapped him that night, but at the last second, she dug her fingernails into her palm and walked away. He apologized later, of course. But ever since, she’s wondered what exactly Rich knows about sister that she doesn’t. She hasn’t brought it up yet, but she will. This isn’t the time, although she does need to talk to him about Heather.

“What did you think of today’s podcast?”

He gives her a blank look.

“Diana’s interview aired,” she reminds him.

“Oh, right. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet,” he lies.

She stares at him, her heart pounding. He’s lying. She knows he’s lying because when she queued up the newest episode of The Farley Files on the smart speaker in their bedroom, it started at the very end, not the beginning. Rich listened to it before she did.

She holds his gaze as her stomach sours, and then says as casually as she can muster, “Oh, well, once you do, I’d like to know what you think.”

“Sure, babe.” He smiles and plucks the top from her hands. “Why don’t you go open a bottle of wine to breathe before dinner? I’ll fold the rest of this.”

And just like that, her heart slows and her stomach settles. Rich is a good guy. She knows this. She needs to make sure she doesn’t forget it in all the drama that the podcast about Heather’s disappearance is stirring up.

She brushes a feather-soft kiss over his lips before she leaves the laundry to room to put his suggestion into practice. “Thanks.”

As she pulls a bottle of wine from the rack and uncorks it, her mind goes back to Diana’s interview. She knows that groups of women who stayed in touch since high school are probably comparing notes on the episode right now. But she doesn’t have a group.

Heather’s disappearance was still fresh when Amy left for college. And she threw herself into developing a new persona. Nobody at school knew her as the girl whose sister went missing after a party in the woods. She was just Amy Ryan from outside Pittsburgh. Sometimes she felt disloyal or guilty for not telling her roommate or her sorority sisters about Heather. But those flashes of feeling were fleeting, and most of the time she shoved all thoughts of Heather into a tiny box that she wedged in the far corner of her brain, like Christmas decorations out of sight in the attic for eleven months of the year.

Over the years, she’s told a handful of people when the topic came up naturally. But none of those friends knew Heather. They didn’t live here. It’s not the same. For the first time in nearly thirty years, she wishes she had someone to compare notes with—someone other than Rich or Diana or Kristy. But she doesn’t.

So she’s going to have to wait for Rich to listen to the podcast—correction, wait for him to admit he’s listened to the podcast. She pours herself a glass of grenache, right up to her marker line. She wonders about the lie. It seems like an innocuous one, a stupid one, and a wholly unnecessary one. Why would he lie to her now about something so small? He probably just wants her to relax and not obsess about the podcast. That’s probably what it is. She sips her wine. That’s definitely what it is.