* * *

—

   “He wouldn’t let her simply divorce him,” you say. “She had to be punished. Shamed. For something that was only in his head in the first place.”

“He put her on dating sites,” Mike says. “Or at least, a chatbot version of her. He thought it was funny. He made the chatbot tell those men all the degrading things she wanted to do for them. In Abbie’s voice, with Abbie’s profile picture. It was childish and pathetic. But Tim thought it was hilarious. He could listen to it for hours.”

From Madonna to whore, you think. Just like it said in that book.

“I suppose I should thank you, then. For helping her get away.”

There’s a long silence. Then Mike shakes his head. “I didn’t, though. I wish I had. I would have, if she’d asked me. But she never did.”

“I don’t believe you. I found a picture of you at the Haven Farms fundraiser. If you didn’t help Abbie disappear, who did?”

“Me,” a voice says from the doorway.

You both turn.

“That would be me,” Jenny repeats.

72

   “Mike tells people he didn’t like Abbie. I guess he told you that, didn’t he?”

The three of you sit around a table in a meeting room. No one’s turned on any lights. Even so, Jenny keeps her gaze on the table, not meeting either your eyes or Mike’s.

“The thing is, he’s lying. He loved her. Right from the moment he met her. I always knew he did.” Mike flinches, but she ignores him. “Perhaps love isn’t the right word. But infatuation doesn’t begin to cover it. He went…goofy over her. That’s the only way I can describe it. Something in him just kind of melted whenever she was around. Whereas me…”

She shrugs. In her Nirvana hoodie, she’s so tiny and boyish. So unthreatening. Androgynous, almost sexless. That was how she’d survived in this toxic environment, you realize: At some point, she’d simply turned into one of the guys.

At least, on the outside.

“As it went on, the fact she was taken—by Tim—I think that was part of the attraction, actually. The relationship between him and Mike…it’s pretty screwed up. When all’s said and done, my husband’s the beta to Tim’s alpha. I got used to that. But it would have been good to see him stand up to Tim, just occasionally.”

   “Jen,” Mike says softly. “I love you. You know that.”

“Oh sure. Marriage, date night, picking out curtains, even sex…We can do all that. But sometimes, just sometimes, it would be nice to be adored.”

“I do,” he says desperately. “Believe me, Jen. I do.”

“I saw the way you looked at her. Abbie did, too. She might even have gone to you in the end. For help, I mean. She was desperate to get away, you were desperate for anything you could get from her…” She shrugs. “So I guess you missed your chance.”

“When did you start helping Abbie?” you ask.

Jenny’s eyes flick briefly in your direction, then back to the table. “I used to see her at company socials. I could tell there were problems. Well, of course there were. It was amazing Tim had been able to keep up the pretense so long, really. Things were getting even worse here…I remember one time I sent him an email about a problem I’d spotted in the coding. He sent it on to a developer, but he accidentally copied in the whole math group. He’d written: Someone sew up this bitch’s vagina and tell her to quit whining.”

She’s silent a moment. “I didn’t go to HR. I knew if I did, there was only one way it could end. A payoff, an NDA…and no job. So I ignored it, just like I always did. You know what was so damn ironic? The fact is, I had sewed up my vagina. I always knew I couldn’t have kids and be a world-class coder, too, at least not in a company like this one. And bad as this is, others are worse.

“So I started inviting myself around to Abbie’s house for coffee, and gradually it all spilled out. She wanted to leave, to take Danny away from that horrible school Tim had chosen and start over somewhere different. Somewhere kinder.”

Another flashback. The continuing fights over Meadowbank—such incredible fights. Tim surprised to find his usually laid-back wife so stubborn. But equally, refusing to give ground himself.

   Fights that turned increasingly from the theoretical to the personal.

“You’ve had your chance with Danny, and what’s the best you could come up with? Fucking kinesiology and head massages. It’s time we did this properly.”

And then, the most devastating exchange of all.

“I’m his mother. Surely I know what’s right for him?”

“A mother who bore me a defective son. What does that say about you?”

You’d stared at him, heartbroken. Because, whether he really meant it or not, there was no going back now.

“Abbie knew Tim would fight her every inch of the way,” Jenny continues. “She had this insane plan to just take off…It wouldn’t have worked, not in a million years. He could have tracked her down in hours. And then he’d use what she’d done to take Danny away from her. I told her, if she really wanted to do it like that, she had to do it properly.”

“And then you thought you’d get your husband back,” you say softly.

She nods, then glances at Mike. “Didn’t quite work out like that, though, did it?”

“Why not?” you ask when he doesn’t reply.

“Anyway,” she says, not answering you directly, “it took two months of planning. First, we had to research suitable places for Danny. Julian was out of the question, of course—he was the first person Tim would have looked for. That picture you found, of the fundraiser? It was me who found that organization, me who went to look around one of their sites and shot footage on my phone for Abbie to look at. I’m not saying they’re perfect, but they ticked most of Abbie’s boxes. They focused on making people with autism happy, not making them better. Tim’s preference was always the other way around.

“Eventually we got to D-day. That was what we called it, in case Tim was spying on us—Abbie always suspected he’d bugged her phone. D for disappearance. D for Danny. But as it turned out, maybe D for something else as well.”

   “Why? What went wrong?”

“After all that planning, it was the stupidest thing. Danny was on a school trip that afternoon. That stupid bitch Sian hadn’t thought to tell anyone. So Abbie got to the school with some story about needing to take Danny for an eye appointment, and he wasn’t there. Everything else was in place…Abbie figured she’d just have to come back for him next day. So she went back to the beach house.” Jenny’s silent, her short unpolished nails picking at the seam of her hoodie. She sighs. “And that was the last I ever heard from her.”