I reached into the back of the drawer, feeling behind the hanging folders where things sometimes slipped when the drawers were overstuffed. My fingers brushed the cold steel floor of the cabinet, finding only dust and an old paperclip.
I opened the middle drawer, then the top drawer, pulling out three-year-old tax returns and utility bills from the winter we lost the furnace. The green folder containing the printed phone logs of Jordan’s missed child support payments was gone.
Those logs showed every date he had promised to send the check and every date the account had remained empty, forty-two pages of neat, black-and-white proof.
I stood up and began lifting the stacks of mail on the desk, checking under the dictionary and inside the empty leather blotter.
The screen door in the kitchen creaked open and shut, followed by the heavy, rhythmic thud of Mara’s running shoes in the hall.
I stepped out of the study and met her near the stairs. She was wearing her gray sweatshirt, her face flushed from her morning run, her dark hair damp around her temples.
“Mara, did you move some papers off my desk this week?” I asked.
She stopped on the bottom step, her hand resting on the wooden banister. She looked at my face, then down at my hands, which were still damp from the dishwater.
“What kind of papers?” she asked, her voice high and quick.
“The green folder from the bottom drawer,” I said. “The one with the phone records from the lawyer.”
Mara reached up and pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail, her fingers twisting the black elastic band three times. Her hand was shaking against the fabric of her sleeve, a small, rapid tremor she tried to hide by tucking her thumb into her palm.
