She comes home looking forward to spooling out her success for Graham. The reviews of the play have been mostly terrific. (One from a theater site was so critical, though, it set everyone off their pins until they agreed to gently set it aside as a peculiar outlier, a singed edge on their success.) Two print reviews singled out Cate’s sets for praise. Molly and Lauren want to talk with her about something new. She’s coming in on a high, but also agitated. She needs Graham’s gravity and Sailor’s happiness just for her being happy.

But Sailor isn’t swishing back and forth on the other side of the apartment door, and doesn’t come out from Graham’s room. She goes in to look. The room has been cleared out. Cleared. The stupendous bed is gone, the folding tables and rolling office chair. The Ikea bureau. The garments that had been hanging in the closet. There’s a surgical look to the scene. He probably wiped his DNA off the light switch.

A note is stuck to the door.

Sailor’s at Eleanor’s.

Can you pick him up soon?

Thanks for everything.

Her cell announces a new message, this one on the latest encrypted app Graham installed on her phone. She opens it; it’s a photo of him, an old picture she took during an early stretch of their marriage. A farm field in Michigan where they stopped once for him to pose in front of a creepy rural oddity. A brick right triangle poking out of the ground, a door on its high end. Clearly an enclosure covering the steps of a staircase going down into the ground, ground situated in the middle of nowhere.

And then the photo dissolves and the message never existed.

vue du lac

At the toll plaza, she takes Sailor out for a quick spin, puts him back in the car. “I will be three minutes, tops,” she tells him. “Don’t start barking like a maniac.”

In the ladies’ room, she’s washing her hands when she feels a swift sliver, a whippy little breeze touching what she has come to think of as her new exposure. She checks to see what’s reflected in the wall’s length of mirrors. Regular women, one old but dressed like a teenager, one with two small kids she’s trying to fit into a stall with her because they’re too young to be left alone. So, all in all, a normal roadside population.