I drop my phone to the ground and smash it. I smash it in one quick motion, kicking it hard with my foot, as hard as I’ve ever kicked anything.
And I open the bathroom door. I open the bathroom door to get Bailey and grab our things and get the hell out of Austin. Not in five minutes. Not in five seconds. Now.
“Bailey, we need to get out of here right now,” I say. “Just grab what you’ve already packed. We’re going.”
But the hotel room is empty. Bailey is no longer there.
She is gone.
“Bailey?”
My heart stars to race as I reach for my phone to call her, to text her. And I remember that I just smashed my phone. I have no phone.
So I run into the hallway, which is empty, save for a housekeeping cart. I run past it and toward the elevator bank, the staircase. She isn’t there. No one is there. I take the elevator down to the hotel lobby, hoping she went to the hotel bar to get a snack. I run into the hotel restaurants, each of them, into the Starbucks. Bailey is not there either. Bailey is not anywhere.
You make a hundred decisions. You make decisions all the time. And the one you don’t think of twice shouldn’t get to determine what happens to her: Go into your hotel room, double bolt the door. You think you’re safe. But then you head into the bathroom. You head into the bathroom and trust a sixteen-year-old to stay on the bed, stay in the room, because where is she going to go?
Except she is terrified. Except there is that. Except she told you she didn’t want to leave Austin.
So why did you believe she would go without a fight?
Why did you believe she would listen to you?
I race back into the elevator, race back down the hall. I am enraged at myself that my phone is broken on the bathroom floor, that I don’t have it to text her. That I don’t have it to turn on locations and track her.
“Bailey, please answer me!”
I head into the hotel room and look around again—as though she will be hiding somewhere in those 580 square feet. I search the closet, search under the beds anyway, hoping to find her huddled in a ball, crying. Needing to be alone. Miserable, but safe. How quickly I would take that! Miserable, safe.
The door swings open. I feel temporary relief. It is a relief I have never felt before, thinking Bailey is back, thinking that I just missed her when I did my frantic search in the hotel—that she did, after all, just go down the hall to get a bucket of ice or a soda. That she went to call Bobby. That she found a cigarette and went outside to smoke it. Any of it, all of it.
But Bailey isn’t standing there.
Grady Bradford is.
Grady is standing there in his faded jeans and backward baseball cap. His stupid windbreaker.
He drills me with an angry look, his arms crossed over his chest. “So you certainly went and made a mess of everything now,” he says.
— Part 3 —
Rotten wood cannot be carved.
—Confucius
When We Were Young
The U.S. Marshals’ office in downtown Austin is on a side street, its windows peering in on other buildings, peering in on the parking garage across the street. Most of those buildings are now dark and closed for the night. The parking lot is mostly empty. But Grady’s office—and his colleagues’ offices—are lit up and bustling.
“Let’s walk through this again,” Grady says.
He sits on the edge of his desk as I pace back and forth. I can feel his judgment but it’s unnecessary. No one is judging me more than I’m judging myself. Bailey is missing. She’s missing. She is out there, alone.
“How’s this helping to find Bailey?” I say. “Unless you arrest me, I’m going out there to look for her.”
I start to walk out of the office, but Grady hops down from his desk and blocks my exit.
“We have eight deputies looking for her,” he says. “What you need to do right now is go through it all again. If you want to help us find her, that’s the only thing to do.”