Chapter 2 — Barefoot in the Lobby

I did not stop to put on shoes.

I ran, barefoot, down the corridor and into the elevator and across the cool marble of the hotel lobby, some animal part of me still hoping that there was an explanation, that they were downstairs at breakfast, that I would round the corner and find my daughter in a high chair smearing fruit across a tray.

The lobby was quiet.

The receptionist behind the granite desk looked up at me, a barefoot woman in her sleep clothes, with a carefully guarded, professional caution.

“Mr.

Vance completed checkout procedures at four-fifty this morning, ma’am,” she said, when I asked, my voice not quite steady.

“He departed with his mother and his daughter.

The shuttle took them to the airport.” And a hollow, desperate laugh escaped me, standing there on the cold marble, because the full architecture of it was arriving all at once.

My entire existence, my whole ability to function in the world, my banking apps and my two-factor authentication and my flight itineraries and my contacts and every practical means I had of getting myself home, all of it was locked inside a phone that was, at that moment, flying east across the Pacific Ocean in my husband’s pocket, six thousand miles from the barefoot woman it belonged to.

They had not left me.

That was the thing I understood, laughing that terrible laugh in the lobby.

You leave a person and they still have their phone, their passport, their way home.

This was not leaving.