Chapter 2: Park on Linden
I didn’t call him that night. I want to be honest about that.
I didn’t call, because fifteen years of being married to Scott had trained me out of trusting the first thing I knew. I lay in bed next to him while he slept on his back like a man with a clear conscience, and I made a list in my head of every reasonable explanation. Maybe he’d dropped off paperwork. Maybe the Prices were refinancing. Maybe Lily’s bag had ended up in someone else’s car.
Maybe I was crazy.
That’s what gaslighting does. It doesn’t make you believe a lie. It makes you stop believing yourself.
It started small, after my mother got sick. Scott would tell me I’d agreed to things I didn’t remember agreeing to. Dinner with his boss. A new truck. Moving my mom’s piano to storage. “We talked about this, Meg. You said it was fine.” I’d been so tired, driving back and forth to the hospice in Lawrence, that I believed him. Then I started writing things down. Then I started hiding the notebook, because the one time he found it he laughed and said, “You’re keeping receipts on me now?”
By the time Mom died, I had a therapist, a prescription for anxiety and a husband who referred to both of them in every argument.
The perfume was the worst one. Last March, his gym jacket smelled like something sweet and expensive, vanilla and something floral, nothing I’d ever owned. I said so, carefully, holding the jacket out to him in the laundry room. He took it from me, sniffed it, and frowned at me with real concern. “Meg, that’s the fabric softener. You bought it. You picked it out at Target two weeks ago.” He walked me to the laundry shelf and showed me the bottle. It was there. I didn’t remember buying it.
I know now that he bought it the next morning. I found the receipt in his car in November, long after it mattered. But in March, I stood in my laundry room and apologized for smelling something, and he hugged me and said it was okay, that grief does strange things to people.
On Thursday, I went to see Dr. Patel, because I’d promised. I told her about the bag and the map and the address.
She listened. She wrote something down. Then she put her pen down and said, “Megan, I want to ask you something, and I want you to really think about it. When Scott tells you that you’re imagining things, is he usually right?”
I opened my mouth to say yes. Out of habit.
Nothing came out.
“I’ll see you in two weeks,” she said. “In the meantime, I’d pay attention to what you notice. Not to what you’re told.”
I drove home and parked in the garage and sat in my car for a long time. Lily’s soccer bag was on the workbench where Scott had tossed it Wednesday morning. Shin guards, a water bottle that smelled like a science experiment, three hair ties, a granola bar wrapper.
I started cleaning it out because I needed something to do with my hands.
The side pocket had a zipper Lily never uses. It’s where the AirTag lives, sewn into the lining. I unzipped it to check the battery.
Behind the AirTag was a business card.
Glossy. Heavy paper. A photo of a smiling blonde woman in a red blazer and the words JENNA PRICE, REALTOR — Blue Valley Home Group.
I turned it over.
Someone had written on the back in round, confident handwriting, the kind with circles over the i’s. Five words and an initial.
I read it in my garage with the door down and the light off and the bag in my lap, and I understood, finally, why my husband had needed me to be crazy.
Tues. Same time. Park on Linden. —J
