It was Mike who eventually called Tim on it, a couple of months before the wedding. He walked into Tim’s office, shut the door, leaned his back against it and folded his arms. His whole posture shouted, We have to talk.

Someone reported that, through the glass, you could see his knees shaking.

   The discussion was amicable at first. Tim got up from behind his desk and paced. Mike stayed with his back to the door, talking.

Then things started to get heated. There was shouting, although we couldn’t make out the words. At one point Tim picked up the framed picture of Abbie on his desk and waved it at Mike.

“Tim force four?” someone suggested, watching.

“Five,” someone else decided.

There were a couple of newbies around who had never seen a full Tim eruption before. “Watch and learn,” we told them. “This is what it used to be like all the time.”

But actually, this was like nothing we’d ever seen before. It escalated beyond a five to a six, a seven, and even beyond. Eventually the door of Tim’s office crashed open. He was gesticulating at Mike. “Get out,” he was shouting, amid a stream of profanities. “You’re fucking fired!”

“Fine,” Mike yelled back. “But when you realize I was right, don’t ask me back.”

From which we deduced that Mike’s pep talk hadn’t gone so well.

“Listen, you fucking creep,” Tim spat. “She’s worth a dozen of you. And that sexless stick insect you married.”

It was only then we realized they hadn’t only been arguing about the company. They’d been arguing about whether Tim was doing the right thing marrying Abbie.

59

   After Tim drops you back at the house, you use the burner phone to do an online search for graduated electronic decelerator. The links take you to a news story about a mother who sued Meadowbank for assaulting her eighteen-year-old son. There’s footage of him strapped to a board, being shocked thirty-one times. It’s disturbing to watch him scream “No!” over and over, jerking in pain as the electricity hits his body.

That film was made five and a half years ago, you notice. Only a short time before Abbie’s disappearance.

Did the footage spark a disagreement between her and Tim? Had she only then realized exactly what sending Danny to Meadowbank would entail? Could that have been another factor in what happened?

* * *

—

You find yourself thinking about the period of Danny’s diagnosis. Your memories of that time are hazy—almost as if they happened to someone else. Which of course they did, in a sense. They happened to her, to Abbie, and like all her most personal memories left little trace on social media for Tim’s algorithms to reconstruct.

   Even so, the terror of that time is embedded deep in your brain.

You realized quite quickly something was wrong, of course. You just didn’t know what.

“Danny?” you called one day. “Lunchtime.”

Normally that would have been enough to bring him running to the table. But not that day. You knew he was in the playroom, playing with a dinosaur he’d been given for his birthday. When he still didn’t come after you called a second time, you put your head around the door.

“Danny!”

He didn’t look up. The dinosaur was on the floor, and he was staring at it. Just staring.

“Lunch,” you repeated. Still he didn’t look up.

You took a step forward, concerned. Then suddenly he turned to look at you, and his familiar toothy smile lit up his face.

* * *

—

“I think Danny might have glue ear,” you told Tim that evening. “He seems to find it hard to hear me sometimes.”

Tim frowned. “Danny?” he called.

At the sound of his father’s voice, Danny looked up. “Yef?”

“Seems all right to me.” Tim turned back to his BlackBerry.

“It varies,” you said defensively. “Anyway, I booked an appointment with the audiologist.”

“My grandpa used to have a saying,” Tim said mildly. “There’s none so deaf as them who don’t want to hear.”

“I’m so sad I never met Grandpa Scott. He always sounds so much fun.”

“He was a miserable old bastard,” Tim agreed.

You pointed silently at Danny.

   “Sorry—miserable old person,” Tim said. “My point is, what was the consequence of Danny not paying attention to you? Did his lunch go in the trash?”

“Of course not.”

“Hmm.” Which was shorthand for a whole debate you and Tim had on a regular basis. For him, parenting was a subdivision of engineering, a collection of design processes that merely had to be applied with total consistency in order to produce a well-mannered, efficient outcome. For you, it was a relationship, and half the fun was seeing what happened when you threw the rule book out the window.

You’d never have admitted it to Tim, but you secretly encouraged Danny to climb into bed with you at first light every morning. Feeling your son’s warm, perfect body wriggling alongside yours was the best part of the day. Even his rare outbreaks of naughtiness seemed like cause for celebration, proof he was going to be an independent thinker, his own man, a creative not a suit. Sometimes, when he got angry or defiant with you, it was all you could do not to cheer him on.

When, later that week, the very expensive audiologist diagnosed glue ear and told you it would most likely clear up over time, you felt quietly vindicated.

* * *

—

You’d managed to place Danny in the local Montessori. It was a compromise between Tim and you: You’d rather Danny stayed home, Tim wanted a “proper” preschool.

“Research shows that children who start school earlier do better,” he told you more than once.

“Better at what, exactly?”

“Better at school.”

“But do we really care if he’s academic?” you wondered aloud. “I can teach him to paint better than any classroom assistant.”

   “Better socially and academically,” Tim said patiently.

In the end it was the fact that the preschool was just a few blocks away that persuaded you. Plus, if you were honest, you were seduced by the sheer beauty of the Montessori teaching materials—handcrafted from pale Scandinavian oak, not a plastic toy among them.