Chương 7 - The Apartment Search
The apartment was too quiet when I unlocked the door.
Jenna stood half a step behind me in the hallway, her coat still on, Kyra's phone held tight in her hand. I'd kept the keys in my pocket the whole drive downtown from the ballroom, and my palm was damp around them. Elise had left that morning with her dress bag and her makeup case, and the place still smelled faintly like her perfume and dry shampoo. The living room lamps were off. Street light came in through the blinds in thin lines.
"Don't touch anything you don't have to," Jenna said quietly.
I nodded. I didn't want to. This was my apartment, but walking in with Jenna beside me instead of Elise made it feel like I was entering someone else's.
We didn't turn on the overhead. I clicked the floor lamp by the sofa. That was when I saw it.
The sofa was a charcoal gray sectional Elise had picked out in March, with three big back cushions and two square lumbar pillows we'd kept on the corners. Now there was only one. The right corner was bare. The fabric where the pillow should have been was darker, pressed down in a perfect rectangle, the nap flattened. You could still see the faint indent of the tasselled edge.
Jenna saw it the same time I did. She didn't say anything at first. She just exhaled slowly.
"That's the one from Kyra's video," she said.
I walked over and crouched. I didn't pick it up or smooth the cushion. The indent was fresh. Dust hadn't settled in it. The throw blanket Elise always folded over the arm was bunched up on the floor like she'd been in a hurry.
"She didn't even try to replace it," I said. My voice sounded flat to me.
Jenna was already lifting her phone. "I'm going to photograph the room before we go anywhere near the closet," she said. "So there's no question about what we found first."
She took two steps back and framed the whole sectional, then came in closer for the empty corner. I heard the soft click of the shutter. She checked the screen and showed me — the time stamp bright in the corner, 9:42 p.m.
"Okay?" she asked.
I nodded. "Okay."
The bedroom door was closed. I hesitated with my hand on the knob. Part of me still wanted there to be nothing behind it. A different pillow. An explanation that would make Kyra wrong and make me not a fool for the last four months. Jenna waited. She didn't push.
Inside, the closet light was off. Elise's side was the left side, mine the right. Her dresses hung in a neat line, then her coats. The floor had shoe boxes stacked two high. And behind the winter coats — the long wool one and the camel trench she never wore — there was a bulge that shouldn't have been there.
Jenna hung back in the doorway while I reached for the light cord. The bulb clicked on, warm and yellow.
I didn't move the coats. I just used the back of my hand to nudge the sleeve of the trench coat an inch to the side.
The pillow was there.
It was the exact one from the sofa — cream linen, with the little knotted tassels on the corners that Elise had thought were so cute when we bought it at that shop on Grand. It was folded in half lengthwise and wedged vertically behind the coats, pressed up against the closet wall. In front of it, half-slipped off a hanger, was a beige shapewear piece, the kind with the thick elastic band, folded like she'd tried to hide it with the pillow.
My stomach dropped. I had to steady my hand on the door frame.
"Adam," Jenna said softly from behind me.
"I see it," I said.
She stepped closer but didn't cross the threshold. "Can you angle it so I can get it without moving anything?"
I held the coat sleeve back. Just enough. Jenna leaned in with her phone. Her hand was steady. She took one photo of the whole closet with the coats still mostly covering the pillow, then a tighter one where the tassel was visible against the shapewear, then one more close enough that you could see the fabric weave.
The shutter clicks sounded loud in the quiet room.
She pulled back and checked them. The timestamps read 9:44, 9:44, 9:45. In the corner of the last photo, the shapewear's tag was just visible.
"I didn't move anything," she said, more to herself than to me. She turned the phone so I could see. "Look. You can see the closet rod, the coats where they were, the pillow exactly as she left it. And the sofa from before. That's chain of custody. No one can say we staged it."
I stared at the images. Next to the video Kyra had taken — Elise in this same closet, pulling that same pillow out and tucking it under her dress in front of the mirror — it wasn't a question anymore. It was two pieces.
I let the coat fall back. The pillow disappeared again behind wool and cotton, but I could still see the outline.
"What do we do with it?" I asked. My voice was lower than I meant it to be.
"We leave it," Jenna said immediately. "We don't touch it. We don't take it. We leave everything exactly like this and we go back. That way Elise can't say we moved it or you hid it to trap her."
She slipped Kyra's phone into her coat pocket and pulled out her own phone, tapped quickly, and I heard the chime as the photos AirDropped. She checked that both sets were there — video and photos together, both timestamped, both on her device where they'd been from the start.
I clicked the closet light off. For a second we just stood there in the dim bedroom, the street light cutting across the bed we hadn't made that morning.
"I didn't want it to be there," I said.
Jenna looked at me. Her expression wasn't angry or satisfied. It was just tired and careful.
"I know," she said. "But now you know."
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I locked the bedroom door behind us and then the front door, double-checking the deadbolt. In the hallway, Jenna held her phone tight against her chest, like it was something fragile. We had the indent on the sofa and the pillow behind the coats and the video to match them, and neither of us had moved a single thing.
We had proof. And I still had to drive back to the ballroom and face what that proof meant.
