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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CELINE

For a long time, I resist the urge to look anything else up. Whatever happened all those years ago, I have no proof that it has anything to do with what’s happening now.

Maybe I’m just in denial. Maybe I don’t want to believe it. I have all of the pieces to a confusing puzzle, but without actual answers about what happened back then, Matteo Acri’s disappearance in college does not explain why Tate stole our money and disappeared now.

There is nothing concrete that proves it’s connected other than Aaron being shady, and even that could just be coincidence or the cowardly act of someone who hasn’t spoken to my husband in years and doesn’t want to get involved in a criminal investigation.

I don’t want to make a mistake by getting sidetracked, but I also don’t want to give up on a lead that feels promising.

After my parents leave, I lie in bed and remind myself of this over and over and over again. I toss and turn, unable to get the story out of my head. Why wouldn’t Tate have told me his friend went missing in college? Wasn’t that the sort of thing that came up once in a while?

Maybe Daphne was right, though. Maybe they weren’t actually all that close. Maybe he just happened to be there when they were taking a picture, and the boys didn’t want to be rude so they included him. I wish I had the ability to ask the rest of them, that there was anyone still around who might be more helpful than Aaron.

I should probably bring this information to the police, but really, what information do I have? A bunch of disconnected pieces to a puzzle that doesn’t match. Even with several of them missing or dead, none of it means anything unless I find a connection deeper than a friendship from a decade ago. Everything I’ve brought to the police so far has been dismissed. I don’t want to distract them with things that aren’t certain when they need to be focusing on Tate.

When I can’t bear another second of the silence and the raging questions in my head, I roll over and grab my laptop from the nightstand, searching the internet for Matteo’s name again.

I have to scroll to the fifth page of results before I find something new, and it’s a single mention of him in another article.

I click on it and read through, shock flooding my system.

In the days after Matteo’s disappearance, the police were called to campus after a few students found a body they believed could be Matteo’s. It was charred beyond recognition—that’s the actual word the article used, charred . But it later turned out to be a professor. A female professor named Aubrey Vance. Between Matteo’s disappearance and Professor Vance’s murder, two crimes happening so close together on the same campus, the atmosphere on campus had begun to get unsettling, and students and families alike were feeling unsafe. The article doesn’t say anything else about whether they discovered what happened or caught the culprit.

When I search her name, I find several memorial articles about her, mentioning what a wonderful professor she was. Though it was just her first year teaching, it looks like the school dedicated a library to her after her death, but as far as I can tell, her killer was never caught.

On a whim, I look up the writer of one of the articles, and when I find an email address for someone I believe to be him on LinkedIn, I send him an email, letting him know I have some questions about her and would love the chance to chat with him.

I spend the next hour looking for anything that might help me figure out if Tate had anything to with any of this, but there’s nothing. He had to have known, though, right? They were in school together. He would’ve known them both most likely. If he didn’t have a class with the professor, he would’ve at least heard about her death.

I can’t believe he never told me about any of this.

The more I learn about my husband’s past, the more I realize how little I ever really knew him.