After dinner, he drove back to the motel room, where he couldn’t stand the thought of sitting back on the bed and watching more television as though nothing had happened. It just seemed disrespectful, somehow. So he sat in a chair in the dark and tried to think of places Kate might be. The hospital staff had seemed so convinced that she was still in the building, but he just couldn’t picture her hiding out in a closet or under a bed. Walter had never known Kate to hide from anything. Maybe she had fallen asleep, but he somehow doubted that, too. If Kate had just woken up from a coma in the hospital, the last thing she would want to do would be to lie down again and sleep. Then again, Walter would have also said that the first thing she would want to do is see her family, and clearly he had been wrong about that. Still, it just didn’t make sense for her to still be in the building. Kate hated hospitals. The only logical explanation was that she was gone.

But where?

Walter has asked himself that question so many times before, during the early years of their marriage when she used to disappear just like this. Maybe if he had pushed her then to tell him where she had gone, he would have some idea of where she might be now. As it is, he has only come up with completely ridiculous ideas, like Antarctica, a place that Kate had once called “the last place to be first at anything.”

Of course, there is always Paris. Walter knows more about Kate than she remembers him knowing about her – a few details spilling out over a bottle of wine, a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes whenever a Sly and the Family Stone song comes on. He knows Kate fell in love in Paris, although he doesn’t know with whom, or what happened. But whenever he brought up the idea of the two of them travelling there together, she completely shut down. If she is in Paris, she doesn’t want Walter there with her.

“Okay,” Steve says. “We’re ready.”

The family – minus Frank, thankfully – poses in front of the railing, smiling. Walter brings the camera up to his eye. When he peers through the viewfinder, for a second he sees his own family: Kate, coaxed out from behind the camera for once, standing next to him in the back, Nicki and Finn and Shawn in front, flicking each other, pulling on hair, giving each other wet willies while a stranger patiently waits for them to get it together. The girls are maybe twelve or thirteen; Shawn is just about to graduate from high school. This will be the only photo they have of the five of them together.

“On three,” the stranger says.