Simon didn't answer his phone on the second day, and by the third, Lydia had stopped telling herself it was carelessness.
She sat in the underground office with his contact information open on her screen, the little gray timestamp beside his name climbing steadily past any window that could reasonably be explained by a dead battery or a long shift, and felt something settle into her chest that she recognized, distantly, as the particular grief of losing someone who wasn't dead, only gone, which was its own specific flavor of loss she'd had entirely too much practice with over the last four years.
She'd known, in some careful, unexamined corner of her mind, that this was possible from the moment he'd stood in her doorway and drawn his line about the girl. She had simply not let herself sit with the possibility fully, the way she hadn't let herself sit with a great many things over the years, compartmentalizing with the same discipline that had once made her a good scientist and now made her, she was aware, something considerably harder to name.
She ran the calculation anyway, because running calculations was the only thing that had reliably kept her upright since Elise. Either Simon had fled somewhere private, ashamed and frightened and unwilling to be found by either side of this, or he had gone to them—the friend, the wife, whatever careful network of people Jake Miller had assembled around himself in the last two weeks. She thought, turning it over with the same rigor she'd once brought to a null result she badly wanted to explain away, that the second possibility was more likely. Simon had always been a better person than the version of himself he let anyone see, herself included. He had come back to her three years ago out of guilt, not conviction. Guilt, unlike conviction, had a way of eventually pointing itself in the other direction.
If he'd talked, they knew about the compound now, or would soon. They knew about the clinic, if he remembered enough of what she'd told him to be useful. They likely knew, or were close to knowing, exactly where she was.
She should have felt fear at that thought. She noted, with the same detached clinical interest she'd once reserved for anomalous data, that what she actually felt was closer to relief.
She stood and crossed to the small filing cabinet in the corner of the office, the one she'd never shown Simon, and drew out a folder considerably thinner than the ones marked PHASE TWO or JAKE MILLER — a folder with nothing written on its tab at all, because she had never quite let herself name what was inside it, even to herself, in the private language she used for everything else.
A single photograph. Elise on her twenty-fourth birthday, the last one she'd gotten to see, candles reflected in her daughter's eyes, laughing at something Lydia herself had said, some small unremarkable joke that Lydia could no longer, four years later, actually remember the content of, only the sound of the laugh it had produced.
Twenty-nine. Elise would have turned twenty-nine on the fourteenth. Lydia had built the entire architecture of the last several months, without ever fully admitting it to herself in so many words, toward that date, the way a compass needle points toward a pole it never actually reaches, simply orients around.
She had told herself, in the early planning, that the date was a container. A place to put the ending, whatever shape the ending eventually took, so that grief had a destination instead of simply expanding forever into every day equally. She understood now, sitting with the photograph in the quiet of a room three floors below street level, that she had never actually decided what was supposed to happen inside that container. She had built momentum toward a date and trusted, with a faith she would have mocked in any of her own graduate students, that the shape of the ending would simply reveal itself when she arrived close enough to see it.
Simon's absence had taken away the luxury of that kind of drift.
She thought about Jake Miller's voice on the phone, unsteady in a way she hadn't fully expected, saying you're not trading grief for grief, you're just making more of it, and found, turning the sentence over now with four fewer days of certainty than she'd had a week ago, that she no longer had a clean rebuttal for it. She had told herself, at the start of all this, that watching him understand the weight of what he'd done would feel like something closer to justice than it currently felt like. It had felt, this past week, like exactly what he'd named it. More grief. Redistributed, not resolved. A larger circle of people now carrying some piece of what she'd been carrying alone, none of them lighter for the sharing of it, herself included.
She was not going to stop. She made herself hold that clearly, the way she'd once held a hypothesis steady against inconvenient data, because stopping now, with everything already built and already costing what it had cost, felt like its own kind of betrayal of the fourteen years and the daughter both. But she understood, closing the folder and setting the photograph carefully back inside it, that whatever came next needed to actually be decided, deliberately, by her, rather than continuing to drift toward a date and hoping the ending assembled itself out of momentum and grief and the vague, unexamined shape of a container she'd built without contents.
She picked up her phone and typed a message she did not send, deleted it, and typed another.
I know you're looking for me. I know roughly how much time that buys me and roughly how little. I am not interested in a standoff, and I am not interested in hurting anyone else's daughter, whatever you may have been told to fear. I want one conversation with him. In person. Before your warrant, or your patrol cars, or whatever machinery you've assembled makes that impossible. After that, I will not fight what comes.
She read it twice, sitting alone in the quiet hum of the building's ventilation, and did not send it yet, because she had not yet decided, even now, even this close to the only date that had ever mattered to her, whether she meant every word of it, or whether some smaller, more dangerous part of her was already planning something the message deliberately failed to name.
She closed her laptop, put the folder back in the drawer where it had lived, unnamed, for longer than she wanted to admit, and sat a long while in the dark, doing the only thing left that felt honest: waiting to find out, along with everyone else, what she was actually going to do.