AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Defense: Where did she go?
Olivia Moore: I don’t know the answer to that.
Defense: She didn’t tell you where she was going?
Olivia Moore: Not exactly. She just walked out one night…and didn’t come back.
FIVE
Eight Months Before
June 2018
One month after Anne followed her husband for the first time, she was ready to go again. It had taken her several weeks to build up the confidence to return to the chase. But now that her confidence was raring to go, Anne could hardly wait to get answers. In a twisted way, she was almost looking forward to it.
Anne hadn’t taken control of her life in far too long. She’d let herself become complacent, a victim to motherhood, mediocrity, and busyness. In taking charge of her situation—by demanding answers— Anne had awakened a layer of defiance in herself that she hadn’t exposed to oxygen in years.
For the past fourteen years, she’d been Mark Wilkes’s wife. A devoted wife to a decorated cop, second only to her title of loving mother of four rambunctious children. She was homemaker, support system, chef, maid, and shoulder to cry on. But that was about to change.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” Anne told her mother. “I was supposed to meet Mark for dinner, but he’s working late. I’m meeting a mother from playgroup instead.”
Beatrice Harper had flown in two days before, and Anne was deviously planning to use the built-in childcare to fuel her new amateur detective hobby. It was fair, really. Payback for her mother’s visit.
Beatrice only came to visit her daughter at Christmas and at Easter. This special trip was disguised as a checkup for Anne, and Anne didn’t appreciate it. She was fine. Fine, fine, fine. She wouldn’t be surprised if her mother and husband had colluded to babysit Anne, and that was ridiculous.
As Anne bid goodbye to her mother, she donned her trusty purse and scooped up the car keys to her old soccer-mom van. Glancing back at the house she and Mark had scrambled so desperately to afford, she wondered if it had all been worth it. They’d saved and saved, cut corners and budgeted. Worked overtime and begged loan officers for better news.
When they’d finally purchased the house, it hadn’t had a lick of furniture for a month. Anne and Mark had wanted to buy everything new, everything together—start their married lives with bright, fresh furniture.
They’d made love on the floor the first night in their house. They’d moved from the living room to the kitchen counter to the carpet in the walk-in bedroom closet. They’d giggled, dreaming of the furniture they’d someday buy. And when they’d bought the bed and the couch and the kitchen table, they’d made love on all of them, too.
With four kids, it was expected that the romance would eventually slide. But Anne hadn’t lost the gut-twisting love she had for Mark; it just came out in different ways. When he brought home sunflowers—her favorite—from the farmer’s market, it gave her butterflies. When he held the twins on his lap and read them silly books in silly voices, her heart melted. So why was he throwing it all away?
Tonight was the last night she’d wonder. Unbeknownst to her husband, she’d installed a tracking app on his phone. This whole evening had been planned, step by step. Anne would know her husband’s secrets no matter the cost.
_______________________________
This is it, Anne told herself. She could feel it in her bones. Call it motherly intuition or a wife’s instinct, but Anne was convinced she’d found the root cause of her husband’s disappearing act.
The dot on the map that signified the location of her husband’s phone had left work an hour ago, then beeped in a line across Los Angeles to a small nook in Culver City where it had come to a stop.
Anne had plugged the coordinates into her own GPS and followed the directions across the city. She passed bustling Culver City, a quaint little town complete with cutesy book shops and newfangled Mexican fusion restaurants. A Trader Joe’s had recently popped up, and a Whole Foods was rumored to be moving in across the road.
The street where Anne found her husband’s car was not part of this up-and-coming neighborhood. It was part of a neighborhood riddled with overflowing trash cans and vehicles parked every which way, making two-lane streets a one-lane obstacle course. Police didn’t bother handing out parking tickets around here. They had bigger problems.
Anne watched a possum crawl out of a garbage can and skitter through the darkness into overgrown bushes that had made the walkway to one apartment complex all but impossible to navigate. It was with a jolt of surprise that she spotted Mark approaching that very building. He strolled to a stop and perched against the gate to wait.
Tucking her minivan behind a moving truck a few blocks back, Anne settled in to watch. She could see Mark clearly (the binoculars helped with that), but unless Mark was really looking, he wouldn’t see her in return. Anne’s theory was tested as Mark ran a hand through his hair and cast a quick glance toward the road. His attention was focused back on the apartment complex before Anne could blink.
Even from her hiding spot, she could tell he was wearing his favorite pair of jeans—the ones stained by jelly from when Gretchen had thrown a fit a few months back and slapped her toast on her father’s lap. Anne had worked on the stain for hours. Nothing had helped, and still, Mark had refused to throw them out. He said the stain was a badge of honor, and Anne had found that adorable.
Anne’s patience was finally rewarded when a woman appeared at the gate to let Mark inside. The woman was…not a woman. She was a girl. Maybe eighteen? Definitely not older than twenty-two. Anne’s insides blistered with betrayal.
The woman—girl—wore loose-fitting cotton sleep shorts and a sweater that hung off one shoulder to reveal a swatch of pale skin around her collarbone. The sort of outfit that looked casually sexy on today’s youths with their pert little bodies and big, bright eyes. On Anne, the outfit would look laughable.
The girl unlatched the gate, then looked up at Mark with a smile. There was definite familiarity in her gaze. The two knew each other, a fact that was only confirmed when they embraced. She moved away first, a bounce to her step as she opened the gate farther and gestured for Mark to follow behind her. Anne watched, her throat growing dry, as her husband followed another woman into an unfamiliar apartment.
It was only when the door marked by a crooked number nine closed that the finality of the situation hit Anne. She expected to be hurt, devastated, appalled at the confirmation of her worst fears. Her husband was dating a child!
