Mary Kubica: The Good Girl: An addictively suspenseful and gripping thriller

“I’ll get you the address,” Mrs. Dennett offers.

“I would like to check it out, if you don’t mind. See if any windows are broken, signs of forced entry.”

Mrs. Dennett’s voice quavers as she asks, “You think someone broke into Mia’s apartment?”

I try to be reassuring. “I just want to check. Mrs. Dennett, does the building have a doorman?”

“No.”

“A security system? Cameras?”

“How are we supposed to know that?” the judge growls.

“Don’t you visit?” I ask before I can stop myself. I wait for an answer, but it doesn’t come.

Eve

After

I zip her coat for her and pull a hood over her head, and we walk out into the uncompromising Chicago wind. “We need to hurry now,” I say, and she nods though she doesn’t ask why. The gusts nearly knock us over as we make our way to James’s SUV, parked a half-dozen feet away, and as I reach for her elbow, the only thing I’m certain of is that if one of us falls, we are both going down. The parking lot is a sheet of ice four days after Christmas. I do my best to shield her from the cold and the relentless wind, pulling her into me and wrapping an arm around her waist to keep her warm, though my own petite figure is quite smaller than her own and I’m certain I fail miserably at the task.

“We go back next week,” I say to Mia as she climbs into the passenger seat, my voice loud over the clatter of doors slamming and seat belts locking. The radio shouts at us, the car’s engine on the verge of death on this bitter day. Mia flinches and I ask James to please turn the radio off. In the backseat, Mia is quiet, staring out the window and watching the cars, three of them, as they encircle us like a shiver of hungry sharks, their drivers meddlesome and ravenous. One lifts a camera to his eye and the flash all but blinds us.

“Where the hell are the cops when you need them?” James asks no one in particular, and then blares the horn until Mia’s hands rise up to cover her ears from the horrible sound. The cameras flash again. The cars loiter in the parking lot, their engines running, vivid smoke discharging from the exhaust pipes and into the gray day.

Mia looks up and sees me watching her. “Did you hear me, Mia?” I ask, my voice kind. She shakes her head, and I can all but hear the bothersome thought that runs through her mind: Chloe. My name is Chloe. Her blue eyes are glued to my own, which are red and watery from holding back tears, something that has become commonplace since Mia’s return, though as always James is there, reminding me to keep quiet. I try hard to make sense of it all, affixing a smile to my face, forced and yet entirely honest, and the unspoken words ramble through my mind: I just can’t believe you’re home. I’m careful to give Mia elbow room, not quite certain how much she needs, but absolutely certain I don’t want to overstep. I see her malady in every gesture and expression, in the way she stands, no longer brimming with self-confidence as the Mia I know used to be. I understand that something dreadful has happened to her.

I wonder, though, does she sense that something has happened to me?

Mia looks away. “We go back to see Dr. Rhodes next week,” I say and she nods in response. “Tuesday.”

“What time?” James asks.

“One o’clock.”

He consults his smartphone with a single hand, and then tells me that I will have to take Mia to the appointment alone. He says there is a trial, which he cannot miss. And besides, he says, he’s sure I can handle this alone. I tell him that of course I can handle it, but I lean in and whisper into his ear, “She needs you now. You’re her father.” I remind him that this is something we discussed and agreed to and how he promised. He says that he will see what he can do but the doubt weighs heavily on my mind. I can tell that he believes his unwavering work schedule does not allow time for family crises such as this.

In the backseat, Mia stares out the window watching the world fly by as we soar down I-94 and out of the city. It’s approaching three-thirty on a Friday afternoon, the weekend of the New Year, and so traffic is an ungodly mess. We come to a stop and wait and then inch forward at a snail’s pace, no more than thirty miles per hour on the expressway. James hasn’t the patience for it. He stares into the rearview mirror, waiting for the paparazzi to reappear.

“So, Mia,” James says, trying to pass the time. “That shrink says you have amnesia.”

“Oh, James,” I beg, “please, not now.”

My husband is not willing to wait. He wants to get to the bottom of this. It’s been barely a week since Mia has been home, living with James and me since she’s not fit to be on her own. I think of Christmas day, when the tired maroon car pulled sluggishly into the drive with Mia in tow. I remember the way James, nearly always detached, nearly always blasé, forced himself through the front door and was the first to greet her, to gather the emaciated woman in his arms on our snow-covered drive as if it had been him, rather than me, who spent those long, fearful months in mourning.

But since then, I’ve watched as that momentary relief shriveled away, as Mia, in her oblivion, became tiresome to James, just another one of the cases on his ever growing caseload rather than our daughter.

“Then when?”

“Later, please. And besides, that woman is a professional, James,” I insist. “A psychiatrist. She is not a shrink.”

“Fine then, Mia, that psychiatrist says you have amnesia,” he repeats, but Mia doesn’t respond. He watches her in the rearview mirror, these dark brown eyes that hold her captive. For a fleeting moment, she does her best to stare back, but then her eyes find their way to her hands, where she becomes absorbed in a small scab. “Do you wish to comment?” he asks.

“That’s what she told me, too,” she says, and I remember the doctor’s words as she sat across from James and me in the unhappy office—Mia having been excused and sent to the waiting room to browse through outdated fashion magazines—and gave us, verbatim, the textbook definition of acute stress disorder, and all I could think of were those poor Vietnam veterans.

He sighs. I can tell that James finds this implausible, the fact that her memory could vanish into thin air. “So, how does it work, then? You remember I’m your father and this is your mother, but you think your name is Chloe. You know how old you are and where you live and that you have a sister, but you don’t have a clue about Colin Thatcher? You honestly don’t know where you’ve been for the past three months?”

I jump in, to Mia’s defense, and say, “It’s called selective amnesia, James.”

“You’re telling me she picks and chooses things she wants to remember?”

“Mia doesn’t do it—her subconscious or unconscious or something like that is doing it. Putting painful thoughts where she can’t find them. It’s not something she’s decided to do. It’s her body’s way of helping her cope.”

“Cope with what?”

“The whole thing, James. Everything that happened.”

He wants to know how we fix it. This, I don’t know for certain, but I suggest, “Time, I suppose. Therapy. Drugs. Hypnosis.”

He scoffs at this, finding hypnosis as bona fide as amnesia. “What kind of drugs?”

“Antidepressants, James,” I respond. I turn around and, with a pat on Mia’s hand, say, “Maybe her memory will never come back and that will be okay, too.” I admire her for a moment, a near mirror image of myself, though taller and younger and, unlike me, years and years away from wrinkles and the white locks of hair that are beginning to intrude upon my mass of dirty blond.

“How will antidepressants help her remember?”