But I definitely did not blog about how Sean was so much taller and better looking and more attractive than I remembered. To be honest, I felt disloyal for even noticing.
He said he’d thought she’d been in Minnesota, but now he wondered if she’d said she was going to Milwaukee.
“I’m sorry, I’m English,” Sean said. Meaning he couldn’t be expected to tell one Midwestern location starting with an M from another? I got the sense that he pulled that “Sorry, I’m English” routine whenever he hadn’t been paying attention. His wife was in some Midwestern “M” place, but he didn’t know which one.
Which is all to say that I wasn’t predisposed to like him. But since Emily disappeared, I’ve begun to sympathize with and respect him. It feels good to talk about Nicky. I like knowing that Sean trusts me enough to ask what I think about how his son is doing, about what we should tell Nicky. It’s a compliment because it must mean he admires how I’m raising Miles.
There’s something sexy about being in a state of perfect harmony and understanding with an extremely handsome single dad. What makes it less sexy is that this is not some random dad but the husband of my disappeared best friend.
If I want to be able to live with myself, if I want to keep thinking of myself as a decent human being and not a monster, I will have to do everything possible to ignore, to resist, to not even acknowledge the spark of something between us. Which is also sexy, in its way. So there’s a dilemma, one of those things you don’t blog about—not if you’re in your right mind.
I guess that’s why I keep thinking about the day Chris showed up at my mom’s, why being around Sean reminds me of the day my half brother entered my life. There’s that same jolt of attraction to someone inappropriate. Someone very inappropriate. That tingle of pure excitement.
I’d been attracted to the guy in my parents’ wedding photo. And now I was drawn to the husband of my friend. I wouldn’t have picked these men, but there it is. Does that make me a pervert or a criminal? Or simply a bad person?
9
Stephanie's Blog
One News Flash after Another
Hi, moms!
First of all, I want to thank moms everywhere for your words of sympathy, love, and support. It’s in times of crisis like this that we have each other’s back and make our voices heard. The quiet moms who have been reading the blog and clicking through the comment threads without posting are now writing to say that their prayers are with me and Sean, Nicky, and Miles. In this sad time, it would seem gross and vulgar to tell you how many distinct hits on the site I’ve gotten in the last weeks.
Meanwhile I feel like the bad friend who flakes out when you need her or when you’re worried about her and you want to know what’s happening. I haven’t posted in a while, though I know how concerned you’ve been. But my life has been in chaos as I’ve struggled to keep up the search for my friend and to work alongside her husband to make sure that their little boy feels as safe as he can under the circumstances.
I know from your messages that many of you were following Emily’s story when it was in the news. Sean and I drew the line at trying to interest one of those creepy TV “investigative reports.” It would be too traumatic for Nicky in case he ever found it on YouTube. Still, we know those shows have sometimes located a missing person.
Some of you may be thinking that I am writing this now because of what you may have been reading lately in the tabloids or seeing on TV. I mean now that a new element (money!) has made the authorities more interested in our case than they were when it was just a story about a beautiful wife and mother who left for work one day and never came home.
As some of you have probably heard, just one month before Emily’s disappearance, a two-million-dollar life insurance policy was taken out in her name, payable to Sean.
Moms, do you see what’s happening here? Real life is starting to sound like one of those ripped-from-the-headlines TV shows, a script you probably can’t get made anymore because it’s been done too often. Husband takes out mega-insurance policy. Wife disappears.
Before they found out about the policy, the police questioned Sean. Briefly. Standard procedure. The husband is always the prime suspect, as everyone who owns a television knows. But his alibi checked out completely.
He’d been in England, where practically every moment of your day is monitored and recorded on CCTV. His snooty hotel was reluctant to cooperate, but when someone from the embassy there insisted, they surrendered the footage that showed Sean entering and leaving his hotel room. On the night Emily vanished, there’s footage of Sean having a drink in the hotel bar with a couple of the real estate developers he’d gone to the UK to meet. And then he went off to bed. Alone.
That Emily’s life insurance policy took so long to surface shows you the level of efficiency we are dealing with here, which you moms already know if you have ever tried to file a health insurance claim or register your child for pre-K. When the policy finally came to light, the cops came back for another (suspicious) look at Sean.
The truth is that the policy slipped Sean’s mind because he’d been under such stress. Which in my opinion proves he’s innocent. What kind of cold-blooded wife killer takes out a policy and then forgets about it? Seriously? But the police have it backward. They believe this suggests that he is guilty, that he’s pretending to have forgotten because the truth looks bad. So what are they thinking? That Sean took out the policy and hired someone to kill his wife? That he and I are in this together?
None of that happened.
Perhaps you moms will forgive me for not having posted for so long now that you know how much has been going on in my life, starting with this unfortunate and maddening development. The police have twice picked up Sean and held him without charging him. Is there justice in this country? Don’t we have laws against this? Even when you know your rights and have enough money and an excellent lawyer, as Sean does, and a Wall Street firm behind you—even that isn’t enough to scare some old-fashioned common sense into these small-town detectives.
Each time Sean is taken down to the police station, Nicky—who has been a brave little soldier until now—becomes nearly inconsolable, and I have to drive over to their house, whatever the hour of the day or night, and pick him up and bring him home and rock him to sleep on my lap and put him in Miles’s bunk bed. Sometimes I stand in the doorway of Miles’s room and watch them sleep and listen to their sweet, snuffly snoring, and I think how angelic our children are, how much they trust us, and how—try as we might—there’s no way we can protect them from the horrors that life may have in store for them.
Anyhow, this seems like a good moment to get back to blogging and tell the moms community that an innocent man is being persecuted and harassed. It’s hard for me to explain how I know he is innocent. But I do. I know it with every cell of my body. During this anxious time that Emily has been gone, Sean and I have worked together to maintain our morale, to keep up the search, and most importantly to bolster the spirits of a courageous little boy.
You moms will understand that this hasn’t been easy for Miles. Knowing that his best friend’s mother could vanish into thin air has (naturally!) made him a little clingy. He’s reluctant to be left for a sleepover with Nicky. But once he gets past the separation anxiety, he loves it.