Page 91 of Wrong Mail

It isn't the fat summer rain of home. This is thinner and more determined, rain that means to stay all day. It turns the interstate into a long gray mirror, and the tires start making the sound I can't stand, that wet tearing sound of rubber losing its grip.

I close my eyes, and it gets worse.

I open them and watch the wipers instead. I do the thing Kane taught me. Name five things I can see.

I get to three before my mind drifts back to Henry.

To the things Henry shared, back when I still thought he was the one giving me the truth.

A man like that doesn't stop because he's finished, Henry said. He stops because something stops him. He's caught. He's dead. Or something in his life closes over the need for a while and holds it down. Then that life cracks open again. The marriage ends. The money runs out. The boredom gets too loud. And the need comes back even stronger. He thinks he remembers how to be careful. But the hunger is older than the caution. So he makes mistakes again.

The Oregon murders stopped a little over two years ago. Henry told me that like it was a fact he was sad about. The Cascade Killer went quiet, and the counties exhaled, and the podcasts moved on.

Two years ago. That was around the time David closed up his life in Oregon, met a broken woman in a hospital bed, married her, and took her north for a fresh start and a promotion.

I make myself stop.

It's becoming an obsession. I know that. I know what a real pattern looks like, and I know how easy it is to force one where there isn't one.

But this one won't leave me.

Two people are dead on my road, drugged and arranged too neatly for rage. Julia is gone. Every question I ask keeps turning me in the same direction.

South.

Toward Portland. Toward David's old life. Toward the night that took my memory and left me with this.

It dawns on me that I don't even know where Chris is from. Did he ever live in Portland? I can't answer that either. That frightens me too. How little I know about any of the men in my orbit. How much have I taken on trust?

I squint out the window.

Oregon Health & Science University sprawls across Marquam Hill above Portland in the rain, a cluster of pale buildings overlooking the city. The aerial tram crawls up from South Waterfront through the wet.

Once I’m inside, it takes me twenty minutes and David's name to get where I'm going.

I tell Richard Thomas’s office I’m David Grant’s wife, and that it’s urgent—personal. Something in that gets me a fifteen-minute window, then a bench outside the surgery waiting area on the ninth floor.

He comes out in scrubs with his cap still on. He’s in his mid-forties. I can tell he’s wary before he sits down.

"Thank you for seeing me."

“Not a problem. So…Mrs. Grant," he says.

"Please. Call me Mallory."

He nods. "You've come a long way."

I nod.

"Is David all right?"

"Not exactly," I say, because it's true, and right now the truth is all I have.

"I don't quite know how to put this. A woman on our road went missing two days ago. She's a close friend of mine. Before she disappeared, her boyfriend accused David of having an affair with her. I didn't believe him. I still don't know what I believe."

Richard doesn't move.

"But there have been things in my marriage that don't make sense anymore. Things David won't explain. His ex-wife called me and said you might be able to fill in some of the blanks."