I sigh. At least she spoke to him, I suppose. At least she gave him some reassurance before vanishing into the ether. But I’m just not sure how much that reassurance counts for right now, and I guess Sam’s starting to feel the same.

Something she needed to find out about herself. Does that actually mean something? Or were they just empty words to make her feel better about all this?

“So she didn’t tell you anything about where she was going?” I say.

Sam sighs like it’s painfully clear we’ve been over this ground.

“No.”

We sit in silence a moment.

“Okay,” I say. “Well, we should tell your father, Sam. I think everyone’s been pretty angry with your mom for disappearing without a word. Especially without a word to you.”

Sam’s shoulders slump.

“He won’t be angry,” I say. “It wasn’t your responsibility to make her stay.”

“Can you tell him?” he asks.

I study his face. “I can, if you want me to.”

He doesn’t look up at me. I clear my throat. “Sam…I know this is all a bit mysterious about your mom, and it’s not fair of her to expect us all to be so patient. But what’s not a mystery is how much she loves you. You know that, right?”

He steals a quick look at me, then shrugs.

I sigh internally.

“Want to help me break into my late-night cookie stash?” I ask. “We have a few hours before dinner to spoil our appetites.”

*

As we snack in front of the television, I find myself going over Sam’s account again; over those words of Abigail’s. Oliver would probably scoff at it all, reminding me that “there’s something I need to find out about myself” is probably just a loftier way of saying “I’m leaving my marriage.”

But still it goes around in my head like a refrain, the “finding out” and the needing to “learn more”, and soon I’m back to doubting this whole affair theory. A nasty thought worms its way into my mind. She couldn’t be ill, could she? Some world-upending diagnosis; one of those slow, debilitating diseases—Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, something like that…

And then something else flickers into my mind. Not a memory exactly, but a half-memory. Those Ancestry.com vouchers we had lying around for weeks…I’d left them on the console table in the hall; I pretty much flogged them to anyone who came to the house, knowing that otherwise they’d go in the recycling. Didn’t Abigail comment on them when she came over a couple of months ago, that strange visit of hers that I found so odd at the time? Did I try and foist those vouchers on her, too? And if I did, did she take them?