Visiting Hours

Chapter 3

Josh doesn't mention the badge on Tuesday, or on Wednesday, or at all, and somehow that's worse than if he'd dragged me into his office and demanded an explanation. Instead, he's kind. On Tuesday, he brings me a kolache from the Czech bakery on Westheimer, the one with the line out the door, and sets it on my desk without a word. On Wednesday, he tells the CFO that I'm the only person in the building who actually knows what's going on, and the CFO laughs, and I laugh, and the whole time I wonder whether he means it as a compliment. He asks how my weekend was and whether I'm sleeping okay, and he tells me to take a long lunch.

I take a short one instead, in my car in the parking garage, with the doors locked and my laptop balanced on the steering wheel. The email domain leads nowhere, which I already knew it would. It's registered through a privacy service in Arizona, the kind of company that exists to make sure nobody can find anybody. I search the sender's string of letters and numbers forward and backward and get nothing. Then I search Calloway and Alvin and Tessa Romero the way I have a hundred times before, at two in the morning, scrolling through the same three news articles until my eyes burn: Local teen dies at graduation party. Alvin football star charged in classmate's death. Calloway pleads guilty, sentenced to twenty years.

There's a photo with that last one. Jim in an orange jumpsuit, eighteen years old, looking at the floor with his hands folded in front of him like he's praying, or like he's trying to hold something in. I've seen it so many times I could draw it from memory. I close the laptop and sit in the dark of the garage, wanting to call him, knowing I can't. You don't call someone in prison. They call you, and Jim only calls on Wednesday nights at 8:15, for fifteen recorded minutes. There's no way to say your brother saw my visitor badge or someone is threatening me on a line like that.

So on Wednesday at 8:15, when the automated voice tells me I have a call from an inmate at a Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility, I press one and say, "Hey, you," and he says, "Hey, Ellie," and we spend fifteen minutes talking about nothing. A book he's reading. The weather. A guy on his block who's trying to learn Spanish from a dictionary with half the pages torn out. He makes me laugh twice, and I don't tell him anything. Right before the call cuts off, he says I sound different, and when I tell him I'm just tired, he says I've been saying that a lot. Then the line goes dead mid-breath, the way it always does, like someone pulled the plug on a heartbeat.

I find out Lauren Pike is dead the same way everyone else on the twenty-second floor does, from a push notification at 2:15 on Thursday afternoon. I'm on my fourth round of fixing the fonts in Josh's board deck, because fonts are the one thing in my life I can actually fix, when my phone buzzes against the desk.

Woman dies in fall from River Oaks high-rise.

I almost swipe it away, because Houston is a big city and people die every day. Then someone two desks over whispers, "Oh my God," and someone else says, "Wait, isn't that the girl who had Eloise's job?" The office goes quiet in a ripple, the way a room does when news travels faster than people can talk. Heads lift over partitions, phones come out, and somebody in accounting says Lauren? in a voice that cracks in the middle.

The article opens with a photo of the building, the Kirby Arms, which I've driven past a hundred times. It's all limestone and glass and wrought-iron balconies, the kind of place where the doormen know your dog's name and the garage is full of cars that cost more than houses. Then there's a photo of her. I never met Lauren. HR said she resigned for personal reasons, in the tone people use when they want you to stop asking, and all she left behind was a dying pothos in a blue ceramic pot, a mug with coral lipstick on the rim, and a desk that still smells faintly of her perfume, something warm and expensive with vanilla in it, whenever the air conditioning kicks on. I'm sitting in her chair right now.

She's blonde in the photo and pretty in the polished way that takes an hour every morning, with pearl earrings, a white blazer, and a careful smile, like someone used to being looked at. She was thirty-one. The article is short. She fell from her seventeenth-floor balcony at about 11:40 on Wednesday night and was pronounced dead at the scene, and police say there are no signs of foul play at this time. I read that last line four times. At this time. I know exactly how fast a death can be explained away. I know how a story gets told once, by the right people in the right voice, and then hardens into the truth like concrete.

Priya appears at my partition with huge eyes and her phone clutched to her chest. She says it's awful, that Lauren was so young, and then she glances at Josh's closed door and drops her voice to a whisper. "Can I tell you something? You can't repeat it." I've learned that when people say that, what they really mean is please react, so I nod.

"There were rumors," she says, tipping her head toward the door, barely, as if the walls might hear. "About her and him. I mean, nobody knows for sure. But she was always in there with the door closed, and she went with him everywhere. Midland, Dallas, that conference in Aspen. Then one day she was just gone. No goodbye email, nothing. Marcus said security walked her out."

When I ask if she's sure, she says that's what Marcus told her, and then she bites her lip and says she feels terrible for gossiping about a dead woman. I tell her she isn't, because comforting people is a reflex for me, like blinking. But she is, and I'm listening to every word. After she drifts back to her desk, I sit there with my heart hammering, thinking about a woman being walked out of this building by security and then, a few months later, falling seventeen floors in the middle of the night.

It takes me less than a minute to find her i********:. It's mostly what I expected: brunch, a little white dog with a bow, sunsets in Galveston, a trip to Napa, the kind of curated life I'd post if I posted anything. But there's one picture from last spring, at a gala, with Lauren in a silver dress holding a champagne glass. She cropped it, badly. Whoever was standing beside her has been cut out of the frame, but not cleanly enough to hide the man's hand resting on the small of her back, or the heavy steel watch on his wrist. I know that watch. I picked it up from the jeweler myself in March, when the clasp needed fixing.