Page 7 of Over Her Dead Body

A small amount, just at the hairline. He thinks I haven’t noticed.

People are always very committed to the idea that their bodies are discreet.

“Your daughter,” I say. “Westfield, isn’t it? Room 514, Alcott Hall. Fifth floor. She has a view of the quad. She’s been walking home from the library at 9:47 every night this week. Alone. She favors the path behind the chapel because it’s faster. It’s also unlit. I wouldn’t recommend it, but she doesn’t ask me.”

His face goes white.

“What do you want me to do?” he says. It isn’t a question.

I tell him. It takes twenty seconds.

He doesn’t like it. That’s fine. He doesn’t have to like it. He only has to do it, which he will. Daniel has spent ten years making small compromises in the service of larger fears, and he is very good at it by now. This is simply the next one. He’ll tell himself it’s the last. I won’t correct him.

He leaves without looking back. They never look back. Looking back would mean acknowledging what just happened, and men like Daniel survive by not acknowledging things until the thing is so large it swallows them whole.

I sit for a moment after he goes.

Then the day continues, as days do, with an insulting lack of interest in what has just happened.

There are other matters requiring my attention. People who need answers. People who need permission. People who believe urgency makes them interesting. I give a signature. I refuse another. I listen to a man explain a problem he created as though narration might absolve him of authorship.

It does not.

Through all of it, I keep thinking about Emma Calloway.

Not constantly. I am not sentimental.

But she returns.

At the edge of a sentence. In the pause before an answer. In the small, polished spaces the day leaves open.

I picture her at the airport. Coffee in hand. Carry-on beside her. Vienna ahead of her. Her work waiting. Her life continuing along the rails it took years to lay.

Emma is good on rails. She would hate that description, which does not make it less true.

By the time the first message comes, I have almost convinced myself there will be nothing to know.

That is usually when there is something to know.

Calloway did not board.

I read it once.

Then again.

For a moment, I do not move. A person who moves too quickly reveals what matters.

I ask the next question.

The answer takes longer than I like.

Lisbon.

Then I make three calls.

The first call goes well. The second goes better. The third is the one that matters.

“It’s me. Calloway missed Vienna. She bought a ticket to Lisbon thirty minutes before departure.”