Page 35 of You'll Never Know
Our house rises in front of me, dusted orange by the late afternoon sun. I’m doing seventy as I rip down County Road 250, my eyes glued to the clock on the dashboard. It’s 4:28 p.m., a mere two minutes before the deadline. When I hit the driveway and sprint for the door, it’s exactly 4:30. It’s an absolute miracle I made it without being pulled over. After I got off Red Mountain Pass, I sped the entire way back, tearing past car after car like a madman in an effort to get here on time.
“Avery! Avery! Are you here?” I shout, pushing inside.
The only response that comes is silence.
I search our master bedroom. Sticky beads of perspiration line my forehead as I bang into the bathroom and tear through the closet. There’s nothing out of the ordinary inside. I race into the kitchen and check the pantry, then the living room. I frantically scan the space for anything different or out of place. Something I can latch onto that will let me know what I’m supposed to do next—a note, a phone, a package. Anything. But there’s nothing. Which means I’m missing something.
I start over and go through the rest of the house at a slower pace. I scour the basement and the living room. I tear through every single bedroom and all of the bathrooms. I do the same with theentertainment room and the loft and find nothing that gives me pause or hesitation. The garage and the tool shed in the backyard offer more of the same—not a damn thing. The house is exactly as we left it.
By the time the clock hits six, I’m running on fumes. I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast. And even though I’m still not hungry, I head into the kitchen and pour myself a bowl of cereal. I don’t have the energy to make a proper meal. But I need to eat because I need the calories to think. Every bite of cereal feels like swallowing splinters.Grant, we’re going to have a baby.
I’d given up on the idea of becoming a dad. Sure, I’d flirted with the concept in my late twenties and early thirties. I’d considered what it would be like to start a family and live the standard American two-and-a-half-kids, white-picket-fence dream. Hell, I’d even played out thoseHey, Honey, I’m home!fantasies a few times in my head, but I’d never truly considered it a possibility because I’d never met the right woman. I hadn’t met Avery.
We were eating breakfast at Rupert’s, our favorite greasy-spoon spot downtown when she told me why that could never happen. A chubby-cheeked toddler had wandered in with his parents. The kind of kid who looked like he’d been dropped from a cartoon into real life. A towhead with neon blue eyes and plump cheeks. The kid was a force of nature, pulling the tablecloth, grabbing the syrup, the saltshaker, wriggling and flinging his body back against her in a full, stage-effect flop. When I turned back to Avery, I expected her to be cracking up with me.
She wasn’t.
She had her gaze aimed squarely at her plate, looking like she was about to splinter and crumble apart. Her expression paralyzed me for a second, it was that out of place. She looked so rattled and broken. I remember sitting there with veins of ice cutting through my chest, thinking she was about to tell me she had a few months left to live. I was certain the next sentence that came from her mouth would be,I’m dying, Grant. I have cancer.But then she told me why she was so upset. “I can’t have kids, Grant.”
She had endometriosis. I’d never heard of the disorder, but I nodded along as she explained how scar tissue prevented sperm from traveling up the fallopian tubes. That wasn’t the real problem, though. Plenty of people got pregnant despite endometriosis. There were solutions. The real problem for Avery was her diminished ovarian reserve. She didn’t produce enough eggs, and the ones she did make weren’t exactly viable, so even if her anatomy were perfect, it would still be difficult to conceive. Having both conditions made it next to impossible.
Still, when she told me all of this, I felt a wave of relief. I thought,That’s it? That’s all?I could live with this.Wecould live with this. And if Avery wanted children badly enough, we could adopt—not that I told her that right then and there. I knew that wasn’t what she needed to hear. Look, I won’t pretend to know exactly what she was feeling in that moment, or how she half-expected me to respond. I think maybe she was waiting for me to push back from the table and tell her we were through. I’m pretty sure she expected me to storm out the door. But it truly didn’t matter to me.
“Avery, I don’t care about that,” I’d told her. “You’re all that matters.”
The way her face brightened when I said that, the way she looked at me with such intensity, like maybe she was seeing me for the first time—therealme—filled me with such a ridiculous amount of emotion, I couldn’t speak. And neither could she. We both just sat there, staring at each other, the whites of our eyes dusting pink, sharing the same thought. If something this significant didn’t divide us, nothing would.
The memory feels so distant now—like it belongs to another life and another man. The room blurs and I wipe my eyes. This shouldn’t be happening. Avery and I should be eating dinner at the Brickhouse 737 in Ouray right now while discussing baby names. We should beguessing if we’re going to have a boy or a girl and talking about what color to paint our child’s room.
Instead, I’m alone and Avery and our baby are gone along with all of our savings. The question hits again, crashing through my skull. Why is this happening? Why haven’t they returned her? I paid them millions. I complied with their every demand outside of meeting an impossible deadline, and Istilldon’t have my wife.
Because she’s dead.
It’s an echo of the thought I had on the way back here, the one I’d immediately silenced. But I have to consider it at this point; there’s no reason to believe Avery is still alive. If she was, they would have dumped her at the quarry instead of tossing a stranger out of the van. Which would make sense if it wasn’t for the note from the courier. If Avery is dead, why are they continuing to string me along? Why risk interacting with me at all? It doesn’t compute.
I bring the faces of “officers” Gunn and Holston to mind. Gunn’s cut-from-granite features and Holston’s squared-off chin and empty eyes—both of them actors in a show I didn’t know I was in until now. I don’t have their real names, but I have their faces. I could go to the police,shouldgo to the police. Outside of the note, there’s no reason not to. But the note is exactly why I can’t.
If there’s even a sliver of a chance Avery is still okay, I have to play along. Rushing to the cops right now feels like turning that sliver of possibility into a death sentence.
I limp to the liquor cabinet and retrieve a bottle of Macallan from the cupboard along with a highball glass. I pour two fingers of the straw-colored liquid over ice. I can’t get drunk right now, but I can’t stay completely sober either. Not with my nerves frying so hard I can practically smell them cooking. I need to take the edge off.
I take a long sip and then settle in at the kitchen table. The whiskey burns down my throat in a welcome trail of heat. I take another sip and then hammer back the rest. At this point, I don’t know what elseI can do but sit here and wait for someone to contact me. The note the courier gave me said something about playing a game. At this point, I feel like I’m already playing it—a sick fucking game with rules I don’t understand. A game I have no choice but to play until I know whether Avery is still breathing or not.
Feeling shaky, I set the glass down and wait.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
I whip my head up and grind my palms into my eyes. My gaze snaps to the clock on the wall. It’s half past four in the morning. When I last looked at it, it was a few minutes before three. I must have nodded off at some point.
What did you hear?
I take in the room. The kitchen looks no different, a shower of jaundiced light bleeding from the ceiling over the countertops and floor. My highball glass sits empty in front of me on the table, the ice turned to an inch of cloudy water. Beyond it, the windows are black with night, everything the same.So, what woke you?
I’m not sure. I must have imag—
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The front door rattles. Three heavy thuds that send me shooting to my feet. My chair whips backward and cracks off the floor. I stand frozen for a millisecond and then I rush from the kitchen, through the living room, and toward the entryway. I don’t hesitate, don’t peer through the window, simply yank the door wide open and step outside to—
