An Anonymous Girl (34 page)

She’s busy with a customer, so I inspect a rack of blouses organized by color.

“Looking for anything special?” a saleswoman greets me.

“Just browsing,” I say. I flip over a price tag and wince: The long-sleeve, sheer top is $425.

“Let me know if you want to try anything on,” she says.

I nod and continue pretending
to consider the blouses, while I keep an eye on Lauren. But the customer she’s with is buying multiple items for last-minute Christmas gifts, and she occupies Lauren by asking for her opinion.

Finally, after I’ve made a slow lap around the tiny store, the customer heads to the cash register. Lauren starts to ring her up.

I grab a scarf off an accessory table, figuring it will be one of
the less expensive items. By the time Lauren hands the customer a glossy white bag with the store’s logo—an oversize sketch of a pair of closed eyes with long, thick lashes—I am at the register waiting.

“Would you like this gift-wrapped?” she asks.

“Please,” I say. It’ll buy me a few more minutes of her time, so I can gather my courage.

She slips the scarf into tissue paper and ties
a pretty bow around it while I swipe my credit card to cover the $195 charge. If I can get the information I need, it’s a small price to pay.

Lauren hands me the signature bag and I notice she’s wearing a wedding band.

I clear my throat.

“I know this sounds kind of weird, but is it possible to talk in private for a minute?” I ask. I feel the cold metal of my rings and realize I’m running
my thumb over them. According to Dr. Shields’s file on me, that’s one of my tells when I’m anxious.

Lauren’s smile disappears. “Sure.” She draws out the word, almost like it’s a question.

Lauren leads me to the back of the shop. “What can I help you with?” she asks.

I need her first, instinctual response. I learned from Dr. Shields that’s usually the most honest one. So instead of
saying anything, I pull out my phone and turn it around so Lauren can see the photo of Thomas I’ve cropped out from the wedding picture he texted me. It was taken seven years ago, but the picture is clear and he basically looks the same.

I keep my eyes on her. If she refuses to talk to me or just tells me to leave, her initial reaction is all I’ll have. I have to be able to read her expression,
to decipher any signs of guilt or sorrow or love.

It isn’t what I expect.

There’s no strong emotion in her face. Her brow furrows slightly. Her eyes are quizzical.

It’s as if she recognizes Thomas but can’t quite place him.

“He looks vaguely familiar . . .” she finally says.

She meets my gaze. She’s waiting for me to fill in the blanks.

“You had an affair with him,” I blurt.
“Just a couple of months ago!”

“What?”

Her cry of surprise is so loud that her coworker turns around: “Everything okay, Lauren?”

“I’m sorry,” I sputter. “He told me, he said—”

“It’s fine,” Lauren calls back to her colleague, but her voice has an edge, like she’s angry now.

I try to gather myself; she’ll probably throw me out in a minute. “You said he looks familiar. Do you
even know him at all?”

My voice cracks and I force back tears.

Instead of recoiling like I’m crazy, Lauren’s face softens. Are you okay?”

I nod and wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.

“Why in the world would you think I had an affair with that man? she says.

I can’t come up with anything to say other than the truth. “Someone told me you had . . .” I hesitate, then force
myself to continue. “I met him a few weeks ago and . . . I’m worried he might be dangerous,” I whisper.

Lauren rears back. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but this is nuts. Someone told you I had an affair with him? I’m married.
Happily
married. Who told you that lie?”

“Maybe I got it wrong,” I say. There’s no way I can go into all of this with her. “I apologize, I didn’t mean to insult
you . . . Could you just look again and see if you can remember if you’ve ever seen him before?”

Now Lauren is the one studying me. I wipe my eyes again and make myself meet her gaze.

She finally stretches out her hand. “Let me see your phone.”

As she gazes at the photo, her face clears. “I remember him now. He was a customer.”

She looks up at the ceiling and bites her lower lip.
“Okay, it’s coming back to me. He walked in a few months ago. I was just putting out some items from the fall line and he was looking for some special outfits for his wife. He spent quite a lot of money.”

The chime over the door announces the arrival of a new customer. Lauren glances her way and I know my time here is limited.

“Was that all?” I ask.

Lauren raises her eyebrows. “Well,
he returned everything the next day. That’s probably why I even remember him at all. He was very apologetic but said they weren’t his wife’s style.”

She looks toward the front of the shop again. “I never saw him again,” she says. “I didn’t get the feeling that he was dangerous at all. In fact, he seemed really sweet. But I barely spent any time with him. And I certainly didn’t have an affair
with him.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I’m so sorry I bothered you.”

She turns to go, then looks back at me. Honey, if you’re that scared of him, you really should go to the police.”

Sunday, December 23

In a psychological assessment known as the Invisible Gorilla experiment, subjects believed they were supposed to count passes between players on a basketball team. In actuality, they were being evaluated on something else entirely. What most subjects did not notice while tallying the tosses of the ball was that a man in a gorilla suit had walked
onto the court. Focusing so strongly on one component blinded the subjects to the big picture.

My hyperfocus on Thomas’s fidelity, or lack thereof, may have obscured an unexpectedly shocking aspect of my case study: that you have an agenda of your own.

You have been solely responsible for reporting what occurred during all of your encounters with my husband—from the museum, to Ted’s Diner,
to the most recent rendezvous at Deco Bar. Your interactions with Thomas could not be witnessed because of the danger that he would notice my presence.

But you have proven to be an accomplished liar.

In fact, you snuck into my survey in a move that appeared entrepreneurial but was actually duplicitous.

All of your revelations are reviewed again, this time through a new lens: You lied
to your parents about the circumstances of Becky’s accident. You sleep with men you barely know. You claim that a respected theater director crossed unwanted sexual lines with you.

You hold so many disturbing secrets, Jessica.

Your life could be destroyed if they were released.

Despite your promises of honesty, you continued to lie to me after you became Subject 52. You confessed that
Thomas
did
quickly respond to your initial text suggesting a date right after you encountered him at Ted’s Diner, but that you withheld this information from me. And the twenty-two-minute meeting between you and my husband at Deco Bar, for what should have been a five-minute conversation, remains a loose thread, Jessica.

What did you leave out? And why?

Your desire to go home for the holidays
and remain there seemed quite abrupt. After that attempt was thwarted, you suggested that you might join Lizzie’s family for Christmas. But you lied about that, too, when you falsely claimed that Lizzie had invited you to the family farm in Iowa for the holidays.

Something is deeply amiss, Jessica.

Your motives for wanting to flee must be scrutinized.

You wrote something quite telling
during your very first session. The words form in the mind, one by one, just as they appeared on the screen as you typed, unaware that you were being watched via the laptop’s camera:
When it comes down to it, I’ve only got myself to rely on.

Self-preservation is a powerful motivator, more reliably so than money or empathy or love.

A hypothesis forms.

It
is
possible that the tenor of
your meetings with my husband was markedly different from what you described.

Perhaps Thomas covets you.

You know the truth about your role in this experiment.

Why would you contaminate the results?

You understood that significantly more would be asked of you if you continued in my morality study. Maybe you feel as if it is too much.

You clearly want to be released from our
entanglement. Did you reason that the best way to escape would be by creating a false narrative, one that would provide the resolution you think I want? One that would free you from any future involvement?

You could be congratulating yourself right now on having scored so much—gifts, money, even a luxurious Florida vacation for your family—before cunningly devising a way to move on with your
life.

You might be so focused on your own self-interest that you are ignoring the wreckage you are leaving in your wake.

How dare you, Jessica?

Twenty years ago, my younger sister, Danielle, was faced with moral temptation. More recently, so was Katherine April Voss. These two young women chose poorly.

Both of their deaths can be attributed to direct results of those ethical breakdowns.

You were brought in to serve as a morality test for my husband, Jessica.

But perhaps it is you who failed it.

Sunday, December 23

I keep coming back to this one question. My gut tells me I have to unravel it until I expose the secret buried at its core: Why did Thomas fabricate an affair with Lauren, the boutique owner, when he’s so desperate to hide the real one he had with April?

I can’t walk away from this, even though I have my file. Dr. Shields isn’t going to let me
go until she’s through with me. All I can do to protect myself is try to figure out what happened to April, so I can keep it from happening to me.

Lauren told me to call the police if I was frightened of Thomas. But what could I say?

I pursued a married man. I even slept with him. Oh, and his wife hired me; she kind of knew about it. And by the way, I think one or both of them might be
involved with this other girl’s suicide.

It sounds preposterous; they’d think I was nuts.

So instead of phoning the police, I make a few other calls.

First I dial Thomas’s cell. I barrel in without preamble: “Why are you pretending you slept with Lauren when all you did was buy clothes at her boutique?”

I hear his sharp intake of breath.

“You know what, Jess? I’ve got Lydia’s
notes on April, and you have Lydia’s notes on you. So we’re even. I don’t need to answer your questions. Good luck.”

Then he hangs up.

I immediately hit
Redial.

“Actually, you only have the first thirteen pages from April’s file. I never sent you the last five. So you do need to answer me. But in person.” I need to be able to read his face, too.

The line is so quiet that I worry
he’s hung up on me again.

Then he says, “I’m in my office. Meet me here in an hour.”

After he gives me the address, I press
End Call
and pace, thinking hard. His tone was impossible to decipher. He didn’t sound angry; there wasn’t even any strong emotion in his voice. But maybe he’s one of those guys who is most dangerous when he seems calm, the way it’s always quiet just before a thunderclap
erupts.

An office seems like a safe enough place. If Thomas wants to hurt me, wouldn’t he pick another location, one that isn’t linked to him? But it’s Sunday, and I don’t know if the building will be empty.

Lauren said she thought Thomas seemed like a nice guy. That was my impression of him, too, both at the museum and on the night we hooked up. But I can’t ever shake the memory of what
happened the last time I was alone in an office with a man who seemed nice.

So I make a second call, this one to Noah, and ask him to meet me outside Thomas’s building in ninety minutes.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” I say honestly. “I have an appointment with someone I don’t know that well and I’d just feel better if you were there to pick me up after.”

“Who is it?”

“His name is Dr. Cooper. It’s kind of a work thing. I’ll explain it all when I see you, okay?”

Noah sounds a little dubious, but he agrees. I think of all the things I’ve done—given him a fake name, told him several times I’ve had weird or stressful days, expressed concerns about trusting others—and I promise myself I really will tell him as much as I can. It’s not just because he deserves
it. I’d feel safer having someone else know what’s going on.

As I feared, the hallway is empty as I approach Thomas’s office at 1:30
P
.
M
.

At the end of the corridor, I find Suite 114. There’s a plaque on the side of the entrance listing his full name, Thomas Cooper, and those of a few other therapists.

I lift my hand. Before I can knock, the door swings open.

I instinctively take
a step back.

I’d forgotten how big he is. His frame fills most of the entryway, blotting out the weak winter sunlight streaming in from the window behind him.

“This way,” Thomas says, stepping aside and jerking his head toward what must be his private office.

I wait for him to go first; I don’t want him behind me. But he isn’t moving.

After a few seconds, he seems to comprehend
my concern and he abruptly turns and strides through the waiting area.

As soon as I’m inside his office, he closes the door.

The space seems to shrink, hemming me in. My body clenches up as panic tears through me. No one can help me if Thomas is truly dangerous. There are three doors between me and the outside world.

I’m trapped, just like I was with Gene.

So many times I’ve fantasized
about what I would do if I could relive that night in the quiet theater, after everyone else had left: I’ve beaten myself up for just standing there, frozen, while Gene got off on my vulnerability and fear.