Sinfully His

Gone

She was home by seven thirty.

She showered with the water turned up hot, changed into clean clothes, made coffee she didn't taste, and was out the door by nine fifteen. She had a debrief with Mrs. Udie at ten and three vendor invoices to process before noon and a site visit in the afternoon for a corporate Christmas party that was four months away but already complicated.

She had things to do.

Mrs. Udie received her in a sitting room that smelled like gardenias and money and declared the evening a triumph. She signed the final payment authorization without being asked twice, which had never happened before in Amara's experience of her. Then she picked up her phone and made three calls, one after the other, and recommended Amara's company to each person she spoke to by name.

It was everything. It was genuinely, actually everything she had worked toward for the past two years.

Amara smiled and said thank you and meant both of those things and was also, underneath them, entirely hollow.

She drove home on autopilot. Sat in the parking garage for a few minutes before going inside for no reason she could have explained.

~

Jade called at eight that evening.

"So," she said, and the single syllable contained an entire interrogation.

"It was just a drink," Amara said. She was unpacking her work bag at the kitchen counter, not looking at anything in particular.

"Amara."

"We talked. I came home."

A pause. "That's it?"

"That's it."

Another pause, longer. Jade knew her well enough to know when she was being managed. Amara knew that Jade knew. They had been friends for eleven years and there were no real secrets between them, only the ones Amara needed to keep for a little while before she was ready to let them go.

"Okay," Jade said finally, in a voice that meant this conversation was not over, just postponed.

"How are the roses from the donation drop?" Amara asked, and they moved on.

~

She was fine.

She was completely, genuinely fine and she knew it because she was functioning at full capacity and she had three new client inquiries from Mrs. Udie's referrals and she was sleeping adequately and eating regular meals and there was truly nothing wrong.

She spent the next three days like that. Busy and forward-moving and fine.

On the fourth day she told herself she was not looking for him. She was just on her laptop, doing research, and it happened to occur to her that she had a first name and a partial company name and that was technically searchable information.

William. H-something. She thought it had been two syllables. Maybe three.

She tried six combinations over the course of an evening. A man named William Harrington who was sixty three and ran a shipping company in Ohio. A William Holt who appeared to be a real estate agent in Phoenix. A tech startup with an H logo that had no Williams anywhere on its team page.

She closed the laptop at eleven thirty.

That was that.

She was not disappointed because she had not been looking.

~

The weeks moved the way weeks moved when you kept them full enough — quickly and without much space for anything you weren't ready to look at. She took on two of the referrals from Mrs. Udie and started planning a fortieth birthday party that had a bigger budget than her first car. She hired a part-time assistant to help with admin. She reorganized her whole filing system on a Saturday afternoon because it needed doing and not at all because the apartment was too quiet.

Jade made her go on a date. The man's name was Damien, he worked in finance, he was pleasant and good-looking and made appropriate conversation over an appropriate dinner and Amara felt absolutely nothing the entire time. Not dislike. Not boredom exactly. Just — nothing. Like trying to tune into a frequency that wasn't broadcasting.

She came home before nine thirty and told Jade it had gone well.

"Did you feel anything?" Jade asked.

"He was very nice," Amara said.

Jade made a sound.

"The risotto was good," Amara offered.

Jade made a worse sound.

Amara threw herself into the birthday party planning and stopped thinking about a man in a black mask with green eyes and a voice like something unhurried and warm. She was good at stopping thinking about things. It was practically a skill set.

She almost meant it, the not thinking about him. Most days she did.

It was only sometimes — a man in a dark suit on the other side of a coffee shop, the hotel visible from the corner near her Tuesday client meeting, the particular quality of silence at three in the morning when sleep wouldn't come — that it surfaced. Brief and uninvited. Gone again before she could do anything with it.

She was fine.

~

Five weeks after the ball she started being tired in a way that was different.

She was always tired. That was just her life, the baseline condition of running a small business alone. But this was something else — heavier, closer to the bone, a weariness that was still there in the morning after a full night's sleep and did not improve with coffee the way tiredness was supposed to.

She blamed the schedule. The two new clients. The time of year.

Then she noticed the other thing.

She did not let herself think about what it might mean for six more days. She was very good at not thinking about things when thinking about them was too large to do all at once. She kept working and kept functioning and kept being completely fine.

On the seventh day she drove to a pharmacy three neighborhoods over from hers, which made no logical sense and which she did not examine.

She stood in the relevant aisle for four minutes. She counted them on the clock at the end of the aisle because that was the kind of thing her brain did when it was managing something difficult. Four minutes, reading the same two boxes without really reading them.

Then she put both of them in her basket and went to the register and looked at the display of lip balms near the checkout the entire time and did not make eye contact with the cashier.

~

Her bathroom.

The edge of the bathtub.

The test in her hand.

She had been sitting like this for — she checked the clock on her phone — seven minutes. She had stopped really seeing the small white stick somewhere around minute four. She was looking in its direction but what she was actually seeing was nothing, just a kind of blankness that her brain had decided to offer her instead of whatever it was actually thinking.

Two lines.

She looked up at the mirror.

The woman looking back at her had her face and her eyes and the expression of someone working very hard to stay on the right side of calm. She looked like someone sitting very still so nothing would tip over.

Her phone buzzed on the edge of the sink.

Jade: are you still coming to dinner? I made pasta

Amara looked at the message. Looked back down at the test.

Two lines. Still two lines. They had not changed in the past seven minutes and they were not going to.

She thought about what she knew.

His name was William. Just William, because neither of them had offered anything more than that and she hadn't thought — she hadn't thought she would need anything more than that.

She thought about the company name she'd searched for and not found. The badge she'd half-seen and barely registered. She thought about a man who had been gone before she woke up and had left nothing behind, not a note, not a number, nothing.

Somewhere in this city — or not in this city, she didn't even know that much — a man named William was walking around completely unaware.

And she was sitting on the edge of a bathtub holding the thing that was going to change everything.

She had no idea how to find him.

Her phone buzzed again.

Jade: hello? the pasta is getting sad

Amara set the test down carefully on the edge of the sink. She picked up her phone. She put it back down.

She sat there a little longer in the quiet.