A handwritten note lay on the kitchen table:

My sweet Davey,

I can’t be with you for a while. It’s too dangerous for both of us in the current atmosphere. I must persuade them, negotiate. Soon, but not yet. Be patient and believe in me. I promised you many wonderful days together, and we will have them perhaps sooner than later. I love you. I live for you. Please wait for me.

She had not signed the note, as though to say that he must decide for himself whether she was Maddison or Emily, or both.

As if the message must be a forgery or a prank, he went through the small house, urgently calling her name, but she didn’t answer.

Only the previous afternoon, she had left her luggage in the bedroom with the intention of moving in for at least a few days. Those bags were no longer there. No clothing of hers hung in the closet. Nothing belonging to her remained in the bathroom.

Had she left voluntarily?

Or had Corley taken her away by force?

Stunned immobile, David stood in the silence of the house, which was alike unto the hush of the ICU cubicle when he had waited there alone with Calista’s lifeless body, the silence of death, the last of all silences, and he waited for a sound that might prove that he wasn’t as dead as he felt, that might start his life moving again.

Part 4

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As he stood in the bedroom, the ringtone broke the sepulchral silence and brought him to life. He withdrew his smartphone from a jacket pocket, his link to life renewed, certain that the caller must be Maddison. However, his editor in New York, Constance, was calling to report that first-pass proofs of his next novel had just been emailed to him and that he had two weeks to read them and correct any errors that had occurred in typesetting.

He forced himself to sit on the edge of the bed and gossip for fifteen minutes, as he and Connie often did. Either he didn’t sound as despondent as he felt or she failed to hear the deep current of discouragement beneath his bright chatter.

When they disconnected, David entered the phone number that Maddison had given him. He was sent directly to voice mail and left a message. “I’m confused. I don’t understand. Call me.”

In the kitchen once more, he read the note she had left, read it a third time. He wasn’t concerned about her warning of danger to him. What obsessed him was the implication that she must be under the thumb of some cruel master, Corley or others whom Corley served, being used in one way or another.

I must persuade them, negotiate.

His heart felt compressed by his breastbone, as though the sense of inadequacy that settled on him had real, crushing weight.