The Game You Played Read Online Free Page B

themselves it was a type of adoption. The other endings for Tommy were worse. Being murdered by a paedophile or psychopath.
    It was all talk. I was bone weary of the talk. No one knew anything. It was all what if and what could be . It was all continuing investigations and leads . In the end, it was just all goose chases and finger pointing and gossip.
    All I remembered of the minutes before Tommy went missing was a strange sense of dread and the stop of transmission in my mind. But was that because of what was about to happen to Tommy or something else?
     
     

5.    LUKE
     
    Tuesday night
     
    I GAVE PHOEBE A CALL AT six, to remind her about the dinner tonight.
    As I predicted, she’d forgotten.
    There was never any guarantee she’d remember what we had scheduled on any day. And even if she did remember, she might have worked herself up into too much of a state to do anything but to sit and stare into space.
    She answered the phone and told me she’d been planting lettuce seedlings out in the garden. I breathed out relief. That meant it was one of her better days. We only had the tiniest courtyard, but I’d paid for a wall garden to be installed a couple of months back. Cost me a packet. It had a mix of flowers, herbs, and vegetables. Phoebe seemed to like it. She watered it and fiddled about, planting things. Before the garden, I’d bought her a puppy—one of those poodle-mix fluff balls that the breeder told me you need to keep inside. I thought it could be company for her. Phoebe promptly gave it back. I can’t take care of anything, she’d told me.
    “Phoebe,” I said, “I’ll be home at six thirty, and we’ll head out to the restaurant at seven, okay?”
    Silence for a few moments. “Isn’t this the night we have Thai?”
    “Yeah. But tonight we were going out for dinner. Remember?”
    “Oh. That’s right. I haven’t got much of an appetite. Is it okay if I skip it?”
    “No, babe, it’s not okay. These dinners are not about dinner. It’s networking. You know that.”
    “Yeah, I know . . .”
    “So, you’ll go?”
    “I’m really kind of tired.”
    “Feeb, it’s really important to me. You’re my wife. I’d like you by my side sometimes.”
    “It’s business, Luke. Not a social occasion.”
    “But it’s all couples who’ll be there. It’s that kind of thing. And you have to eat anyway, even if you’re not that hungry. You need to eat. The doctor said so.”
    I heard her softly sigh.
    “All right, I’ll go,” she told me.
    “You will?”
    “Yes.”
    It could have easily gone the other way. She almost always refused to leave the house.
    I drove home at exactly 6:15. Any earlier, and Phoebe might say I was rushing her. Any later, and she might say she thought that the plan had been changed and that dinner was off.
    She was wearing all pale grey—a thin wrap top and wrap skirt that both tied at the back. Her long hair was in a sleek knot, and she had a bit of colour in her face for a change. She looked incredible. Bemused by the expression I must have had plastered on my face, she asked me to fix the ties of her outfit.
    Somehow, the outfit was exactly Phoebe. Like her, it looked fragile.
    She didn’t say much on the drive to the restaurant. But she was with me and making an effort, and I hadn’t been able to ask for more than that for months.
    The restaurant was new and expensive. It had a no-children policy, and I’d chosen it deliberately for that alone. I hated to watch Phoebe staring forlornly at the toddler of some other couple. Also, it made the parents uncomfortable when she stared. Sometimes, it was me staring at lookalike Tommys. If people didn’t like Phoebe staring at their kid, they even less liked some strange guy staring.
    My business partner Rob and his wife Ellie were already there with the two couples who were among our best clients: Cindy and Grant Clofield and Mirima and Orlando Suez. The clients were in their midthirties, with a multitude of properties