Apples Never Fall

She was here to make a deal.

Chapter 34

“Who can explain the difference between active and passive listening?” Logan asked his Wednesday-afternoon class.

Passive listening: that word again. Was that the way he’d listened to Indira? Passively?

A motley mix of students sat at the semicircle of desks surrounding him: teenagers straight out of school, women looking to get back into an unrecognizable workforce after years spent raising children, older men who had worked all their lives in industries that no longer existed.

“Active listening is the way I listen to my husband,” said star student Rani. “Passive listening is the way he listens to me.”

A few women chuckled. The teenagers glanced up briefly from their phones and then instantly dropped their heads again as if there were magnets on their foreheads.

Rani was only a few years younger than Logan’s mother, and she was retraining to get back into the workforce after she and her husband had lost all their money to a charming, fraudulent financial adviser now doing prison time.

“We thought this man was the bee’s knees,” Rani had said in her “about me” presentation at the beginning of the semester. “We mortgaged our home to invest with him. It was like we were under his spell.”

Rani’s sparkly demeanor reminded Logan of his mother, and Logan wondered now if Joy might one day describe Savannah as someone they once thought of as “the bee’s knees.” His mother was spellbound by her, or at least by her cooking, but Joy was astute when it came to money. There was no way she’d mortgage the house for Savannah. Or would she? In return for a roast chicken lunch?

As Logan’s class brainstormed techniques for active listening (verbal affirmations like “Yes, I see” and nonverbal affirmations like nodding your head) he thought about how Amy had said their mother was furious when she heard of Logan’s doubts about Savannah’s story. Logan was kind of furious with Amy. Telling their mother was not the plan.

“You were going to ask Savannah out for a drink,” Logan reminded her.

“I know,” said Amy. “But she gives me the heebie-jeebies. She didn’t want to even let me in the door! It was like she was their carer.” Logan had forgotten that you could never rely on Amy to stick to a plan.

“To be fair, she does make excellent minestrone,” Amy had said. “Simon and I had two bowls each.”

Simon, it transpired, was Amy’s flatmate, and for some unexplained reason he had been at their parents’ house too. Simon was going to help Amy do a “deep dive” on Savannah.

“A full-on background check,” Amy told Logan. “Like the FBI would do.”

“Right,” said Logan.

“Because he’s an accountant.”

“How does that help?” said Logan.

“He’s very thorough,” Amy said, and then she’d chuckled suggestively, and Logan had hung up and called Brooke, who said not to waste any more time with Amy and that she herself had begun preparing a “dossier” on Savannah weeks ago and she’d come back to Logan with some proper information soon. She said the word dossier with a lot of satisfaction.

Troy hadn’t returned anyone’s calls, and for all anyone knew might have been out of the country, so he was no help. In the meantime, their mother had taken Savannah shopping last week and bought her a whole new wardrobe, which was upsetting for Amy and Brooke, not because they wanted to go shopping with their mother—they couldn’t think of anything worse—but what with Savannah’s incessant baking and her tiny feet, the girl was clearly intent upon transforming herself into their mother’s “dream daughter.”

“Let’s role-play some active and passive listening,” said Logan to his class. He didn’t ask for volunteers. He chose Brian, an Irish automotive worker who had lost his job of thirty years when Holden closed its doors, and Jun, a bright, bubbly hairdresser who wanted her boss’s job because her boss was “a real b-i-t-c-h.”

“Tell Jun a story, Brian,” said Logan. “About anything. And, Jun, I want you to be a passive listener.”

Brian launched into a story about a grossly unfair parking ticket, which Jun found impossible to listen to passively, because she’d been booked at the exact same intersection near the college (so had Logan). Brian’s Irish accent became more pronounced the more excited and upset he became, and Logan was reminded of Savannah’s similarly Irish-accented boyfriend, sitting up in bed, reaching for his spectacles, the terror on his face.

He stopped dead and banged the whiteboard marker against his palm.

The source of truth. Or at least another version of the truth.

He’d go talk to the little Irish fucker.

* * *

Later that afternoon Logan stood at the apartment building where Savannah had lived with her boyfriend. He remembered the apartment number because his birthday was on the twenty-fourth, so he’d always had a fondness for the number.

“Hello?” said an Irish-accented voice.