When Emily disappeared, the world changed overnight, not just his life, not just his world, but the very world itself, as if the known universe intersected with another that was unknown, and in that quiet collision, an infinite number of subtle changes occurred. He could not define what was different, could not enumerate the many tweaks and twists, though he could feel the truth of them by the way the world loomed strange around him, by events that were too bizarre for the cosmos as it had been, but that unfurled in this new reality without seeming to amaze or disturb anyone but him.

For perhaps two days he had been in denial, certain that she would be found or would walk through the door with some bright story of comic adventure. On the third day, he realized he would never see her alive again. That he had loved her was not a belated discovery, nor that he had loved her more than he loved himself. They were so young, however, that he had never contemplated—or even imagined—the loss of her. He felt hollowed out and for weeks could not get warm. In his dreams, she wandered fields and forests; he glimpsed her on far hills or between trees, and though she called his name, she never seemed to see him, and she moved always farther away.

They had been together for five years, since he was twenty-two and she was twenty. He had achieved his success with her at his side, because she was at his side, because she centered him. In the wake of her disappearance, he couldn’t understand why they had not married. They were of a generation that often delayed marriage or even felt it wasn’t essential to shaping a life together. But when he had no hope of wedding her, he wanted her to have been his wife, to be able to say that by sanctification they had been as one. He felt that he had failed her by not committing in that fashion. Worse, he found himself lying awake, wondering if being married would have changed their actions, so that she would not have been alone that night and therefore would not have gone missing and, surely, to her death.

When Ronny Lee Jessup had been arrested three years later and his hideous labyrinthine cellar had topped the news, David waited in dread for the coroner to report that one of the nine cadavers the killer had crudely mummified was hers. But she remained missing.

Perhaps he should have found hope in the fact that she wasn’t among the living and dead women in those subterranean rooms, but after three years, his capacity for hope had been exhausted. She wasn’t out there alive, waiting to be found, not in this strangely altered and steadily darkening world. Like a grotesque insect in human disguise, Jessup stowed her poor body in some secret niche as if it were a chrysalis from which she would in time emerge, her beauty reborn, to submit to his brutality once more.