Харлан Кобен - Run Away

Eileen took out her phone, her fingers dancing on the screen. She nodded when it was done.

“How about her academics?” Simon asked. “What classes was she taking?”

A father should know that, of course, but before all this, Simon had prided himself on not being one of those helicopter parents. He didn’t know her classes, even in high school. Some parents checked an online program called Skyward every day, to make sure their child did their homework or was keeping up with their grades. Simon didn’t even know how to log on. He had smugly thought back then that that made him a better father.

Stay out of the way. Trust your child.

And it had been easy with Paige. She was self-driven. She excelled. Oh, what satisfaction Simon had felt back then, what foolish superiority over those overbearing and overinvolved parents he’d felt, bragging that he didn’t even know his Skyward password like that asshole at the party who brags about not owning a television.

What arrogance before the fall.

Eileen wrote down the names of Paige’s classes and the professors who taught them. She handed him the slip of paper and said, “I really have to go now.”

“Do you mind if I walk with you?”

She said that would be fine, but she said it grudgingly.

Simon read the class list as they headed for the door. “Does anything jump out at you?”

“Not really. Most of the classes were pretty big. I don’t think the professors will really remember her. The only exception would be Professor van de Beek.”

They started across that bright, green quad.

“What did van de Beek teach?”

“That genetics class I told you about.”

“Where can I find him?”

Still walking, Eileen pecked something out on her mobile phone. “Here, this is him.”

She handed him the phone.

Professor Louis van de Beek was young, probably not yet thirty and — not to be that father — he looked like the kind of professor that made young co-eds swoon. His so-black-it’s-blue hair was a touch too long, his skin a little too waxy. He had good teeth, a nice smile. He wore a tight black T-shirt in the picture, his toned arms folded over his chest.

What the hell happened to professors with tweed sport coats?

Under his portrait, it read “Professor of Biological Science.” It also listed his office address at Clark House, his email address, his website, and finally, the classes he taught, including Introduction to Genetics and Genealogy.

“You said he was an exception.”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Simon asked.

“For one thing, Genetics and Genealogy was a small class,” she said. “So we got to know the professor pretty well. But for Paige, he was something more.”

“Like what?”

“Professor van de Beek ran that Family Tree club I told you she got obsessed with. I know she visited him during office hours. A lot.”

Simon frowned again. Eileen must have spotted it.

“Oh no, nothing like that.”

“Okay.”

“When Paige got here, she didn’t know what to major in. Like the rest of us. You knew that, right?”

He nodded. He and Ingrid had encouraged that. No need to lock yourself down, they’d told her. Explore. Try new things. You’ll find your passion.

“Paige talked a lot about her mom and her job.” Then she quickly added, “Not that she didn’t talk about you too, Mr. Greene. I mean, I think she found your job interesting too.”

“It’s okay, Eileen.”

“Anyway, I think she sort of hero-worshipped her mom. Professor van de Beek is also the freshman counselor for students who want to go into medicine.”

Simon swallowed. “Paige wanted to be a physician?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

The revelation crushed him anew. Paige had wanted to be a doctor. Like her mother.

“Anyway,” Eileen continued, “I don’t think this has anything to do with her meeting Aaron, but Professor van de Beek was a big part of her life here.”

They crossed in front of Ratner dormitory, where Paige and Eileen had lived freshman year, walking right across the spot where Simon had hugged his daughter goodbye a lifetime ago.

The painful hits just kept coming.

When Eileen spotted some friends in front of the Isherwood building, she told Simon that her class was inside and bid him a quick goodbye. He waved as she left and then headed over to Clark House. When he entered the front foyer, an older woman with a face that had seen it all before the Eisenhower administration sat behind the desk and scowled at him.

A small nameplate read MRS. DINSMORE. No first name.

“May I help you?” Mrs. Dinsmore said in a voice that indicated any help would come very reluctantly.

“I’m looking for Professor van de Beek.”

“You won’t find him.”

“Pardon?”

“Professor van de Beek is on sabbatical.”

“Since when?”

“I’m not at liberty to answer any additional questions on the matter.”

“Is he around or is he traveling?”

Mrs. Dinsmore had a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck. She put them on now and frowned with even more disapproval. “What part of ‘not at liberty to answer’ did you find confusing?”

Simon had Louis van de Beek’s email from that web directory. That seemed the more prudent way to go. “You’ve been a delight, thank you.”

“I aim to please,” Mrs. Dinsmore replied, head down, writing something down.

Simon headed back toward his car. He called Yvonne and heard yet again how nothing with Ingrid’s condition had changed. He wanted to ask a million questions, but an odd memory came to him. Early in his relationship with Ingrid, Simon worried about the overseas markets and political upheaval and upcoming earnings reports — anything that could affect his clients’ portfolios. That was natural enough, part of the job on the surface, but it actually made him a less focused and less effective financial analyst.

“The serenity prayer,” Ingrid had told him one night. She’d been sitting at the computer, wearing one of his dress shirts, her back to him.

“What?”

He came up behind her and rested his hands on his beautiful wife’s shoulders. The printer whirred. She reached for a sheet of paper and handed it to him.

“Put this on your desk,” she said.

He should have been familiar with the prayer, of course, but he wasn’t. He read it, and odd as this sounds, it changed his life almost immediately:

God, grant me the SERENITY to accept the things I cannot change,

The COURAGE to change the things I can,

The WISDOM to know the difference.

No, Simon wasn’t religious in the least and the prayer was short and obvious. Yet it resonated. And more than that, it resonated with Ingrid. He couldn’t change Ingrid’s condition. She was comatose in a hospital, the pain of that constant and ripping, but he had to let it go because it was foolhardy to think he could change that fact now.

He couldn’t.

So accept that. Let it go. Change the things that he could.

Like finding his daughter.

When Simon reached his car, he called Elena Ramirez.

“Anything?” he asked.

“You first.”

“Paige came to Aaron, not the other way around. I always thought that they met near Lanford College. But she sought him out.”

“So she knew him before?”

“Somehow.”

“Probably met online. A dating app or something.”

“Why would she have been on a dating app?”

“Why is anyone?”

“She’s a college freshman, all caught up in her studies and new friends. And that’s not my Dad goggles talking.”

“Dad goggles?”

“You know. Bias. Seeing your kids through Dad goggles.”

“Oh, right.”

“This was what Paige was like, according to her roommate, not me. Did you talk to the guy at the tattoo parlor yet?”