“A little girl. Seven years old.”
The hallway seemed to tilt sideways. “What happened?”
“There’s an active investigation.”
“Into Ben? Was it his fault?”
Arnold looked directly into my eyes, unblinking. “No.”
“Then why is he hiding?”
“He isn’t hiding from the investigation,” Arnold paused, choosing his words with care. “He’s hiding from you. I think he was terrified you would leave him.”
Ben’s Letter
My thumb slipped beneath the paper flap, tearing it open. Inside was a single folded sheet of paper covered in Ben’s messy handwriting:
My love, If you are reading this, then I wasn’t brave enough to tell you myself. You have spent eleven years believing I was working too much because I loved my job more than our family. The truth is much worse. For the past eleven months, I have been trying to save someone who cannot be saved.
My breath caught.
There is a patient upstairs. Her name is Emily. She is not our Emily. Her parents died in a car accident eleven months ago. She survived, but she has a rare, congenital condition that requires expensive treatments almost no hospital will provide without a massive financial deposit upfront. I promised her mother before she died that I would not let Emily become another number on a bureaucratic waiting list. So I started paying for her treatment myself, using whatever resources I could manage.
Tears were streaming freely down my face.
I didn’t tell you because I knew you would want to sell everything we own to help me. But then things became complicated. Someone discovered what I was doing. Someone who did not want Emily treated. If anything happens to me, don’t trust—
The sentence ended abruptly in an empty white space at the bottom of the page.
The Disappearance of Emily
“Where is Ben right now?” I demanded.
“Room 814.”
I didn’t hesitate. I turned on my heel and started walking down the hall, though Arnold tried to stop me with a final warning: “Ben hasn’t slept in three days. Emily disappeared this morning, and he was the last person seen with her.”
As the elevator doors closed, I noticed a tiny scrap of paper on the floor: She knows who took me. And underneath it, in capital letters: BEN.
