Chapter 1 — Figure It Out Yourself

I woke up in our hotel room in Thailand to a silence that was wrong before I even understood why.

The bed beside me was empty and cold, which was not, in itself, alarming; my husband, Julian, was an early riser, and we were three days into a family holiday in Phuket, and there were a hundred ordinary explanations for an empty bed at dawn.

But the silence was too complete.

No shower running.

No murmur of my mother-in-law’s voice from the adjoining suite.

No small sounds of my two-year-old daughter, Maya, stirring.

I sat up in the gray early light, and I felt, before I had any evidence for it, the specific dread of a person who has just realized she is alone in a way she was not supposed to be.

And then I saw the note, propped against the lamp on the nightstand, in my husband’s handwriting.

Three words. Figure it out yourself. I read it, and I did not understand it, and then a cold began to spread through me, deeper than the hotel air-conditioning, and I threw back the covers and tore through the room.

My phone, which I had left charging on the nightstand, was gone.

My handbag was there, but lighter than it should have been.

And when I dug to the bottom of my luggage, to the concealed waterproof pouch where I kept my passport and my emergency cash, the pouch was gone too.

My phone.

My passport.

My money.

All of it, gone, taken while I slept, quietly, deliberately, by the people I had flown to the other side of the world with, the people who were supposed to be my family.

And on the nightstand, three words in my husband’s hand, telling me, with a casual cruelty I could barely comprehend, to figure it out.