Page 63 of Little Secrets
But she won’t. There are other ways she can hurt herself.
Still in her robe, she takes her laptop from the charger and sits on the bed, logging in to a site she hasn’t looked at in a while. She’s not supposed to. She promised Dr. Chen she wouldn’t. She could go to prison. The dark net is illegal, and there’s a reason it takes a bunch of rerouting and passwords, and more rerouting and more passwords, before you can get to the sites where the children are.
Sebastian has a small, dark pink birthmark the shape of a crescent on his right inner thigh. In the months after his disappearance, Marin became obsessed with searching for it online, scrolling through picture after terrible picture, looking for any evidence that her son might be one of these children. She never found him, but in the process of searching, pieces of herself were destroyed. No human can look at photographs like these without parts of themselves dying.
This is a place meant only for monsters.
But she needed to look. She wascompelledto look. If her son was one of these horrifically abused children, the least she could do wassee.
The more she looked, the more she drank. The more she drank, the more pills she took. This went on for months, up until her last therapy appointment, when she’d finally confessed her secret to Dr. Chen. He’d reacted strongly to her admission about her dark net activity.
“If you ever feel you need to look, you must take a moment and ask yourself what’s causing you to feel this way,” her therapist said. “And accept that it’s your anxiety lying to you, telling you that you need to do this in order to feel a sense of control over a situation that’s whollyoutof your control. Anxiety can be very convincing. Don’t believe what it’s telling you. Because looking at these imageswon’t help your anxiety, Marin. It will only make it much, much worse. What you’ve been doing is an act of self-harm, and I am very, very concerned.”
Dr. Chen is half right. Anxiety does lie. But the situation isn’t out of Marin’s control, and as her computer finds its way, she examines her hands. Hands that look normal; hands that are strong; hands that can wield sharp shears, turning hair into something beautiful; hands that can cook, clean, hold, squeeze, caress, and show love; hands that gesture when she’s emotional; hands that protect.
Hands that let go of her little boy in a busy, crowded market on the Saturday before Christmas.
She’s thought about the horrors that were likely to have befallen Sebastian in the hours after he was led away by Santa Claus. She’s read the stats, and she knows that children his age—if they’re not found within twenty-four hours—are likely to be dead. And if they’re not, surely there are more horrors awaiting.
It’s Marin’s fault. All of it. Including everything that’s come after.Her goddamned hands. She’d been tempted to slice them off a few nights ago, but then Derek came home with an anniversary card, and asked if they could try again.
“You came home,” was all she’d managed to say.
“I always come home,” her husband said. “And I alwayswillcome home.”
Derek has never punished her for grieving the way she grieves. Maybe she shouldn’t punish him for grieving the wayhegrieves.
The thoughts never leave her, though. But they’re only thoughts, and she’s better at keeping them to herself; otherwise, people becomeconcernedand feel the need tointervenefor fear that she mightself-harmdue to her fragileemotional health.
After her hospital stay, she promised Derek she would never try it again. And at her last appointment with Dr. Chen, she promised her therapist she would no longer visit these sites.
She’s going to break one of those promises now.
She starts scrolling, searching for the birthmark, the crescent. Searching for her son. She doesn’t know these children, but she cries for them, she cries for their mothers, and later, she’ll cry herself to sleep.
Sometimes, in her dreams, Sebastian is with a new family. Some poor woman who was desperate to have children took him from the market and is raising him with all the love that Marin and Derek would have given him. And with every passing day, Sebastian forgets about them, about Marin, and he grows to love his new mother. He is fine, he is safe, he is whole.
And sometimes, in her dreams, Sebastian is screaming for her. And no matter what Marin does, she can never get to him in time. Her little boy simply vanishes, like a puff of air, there one moment, gone the next, snatched by a face she can’t see and brought to a dark place where the monsters hide.
“See? There are no monsters in Mommy’s house,” she had once said reassuringly to her son when she finished reading himThe Monster at the End of This Book. It was one of her favorites as a child, and it stars lovable Grover fromSesame Street, who’s terrified about a monster he’s certain will appear at the end of the book, only to discover that the monster is actually himself. “And just because someone looks like a monster doesn’t mean he is.”
And just because someone doesn’t, doesn’t mean he isn’t.
If Marin ever gets the call that Frances got, she will kill herself. She’s made a lot of promises to a lot of people.
This is the one she’s made to herself.
Chapter 23
When she gets to work the next morning, there’s a voice mail on her phone from Vanessa Castro.
Marin’s first instinct is to drop everything and call Derek at work, so they can find out the horrible news together, but then she remembers. Derek still doesn’t know about the private investigator. In hindsight, the distance in their marriage might not all be coming from him. Marin is full of secrets, too.
She needs a minute to gather herself before calling the PI back, and she shuts the door to her office so nobody will disturb her. She thinks about dinner the night before. When Derek got home after work, there were no steaks on the counter ready for grilling, no Brussels sprouts roasting in the oven. He came upstairs to find her sitting on the bed staring at her laptop, and he watched without comment when she slammed it shut. He didn’t ask what she was looking at. He took one look at her hollow, tearstained face and seemed to understand instantly that his wife was having a rough evening. He didn’t ask why, because he knew why, even if he didn’t know the details.
Instead, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Indian, Greek, or Thai?”
“You pick,” she said. She was about to apologize for forgetting the steaks, but he was on the phone calling for takeout before she got the chance.
