They escorted me to a small back office where a lawyer in a gray suit handed me a cease-and-desist letter.

“If you attempt to contact Mr. Whitmore again, we will file harassment charges,” the lawyer said.

“I am his wife,” I said, my voice cracking. “We were married in June.”

The lawyer sighed and closed his folder.

“Mr. Whitmore has never met you, Miss Donovan,” he said. “Please seek professional help.”

My friends stopped returning my calls.

My landlord asked if I was eating enough.

They all believed I had suffered a nervous breakdown.

But I knew the man I had married.

I knew the faint, crescent-shaped scar just below his left collarbone.

Yesterday, my phone rang.

The caller ID showed a restricted number.

I pressed the phone to my ear, my heart hammering against my ribs.

“Do not speak,” a man’s voice whispered. “They are monitoring your apartment.”

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Go to your old art restoration studio on Twenty-Seventh Street,” the voice said. “Look under the loose floorboard beneath the drying racks. Hurry.”

The line went dead.

I did not take a cab.

I walked the fifteen blocks in the cold autumn wind, checking behind me at every intersection.

The studio was dusty and dark, the smell of turpentine still hanging in the air.

I knelt by the drying racks and scraped my fingernails against the pine floorboards.

One of them yielded.

I pulled the wood away and reached into the dark space.

My fingers brushed against a small, padded envelope.

I sat on the floor and tipped the contents onto my lap.

Three items fell out.

The first was a black electronic keycard with no markings.

The second was a receipt for a secure storage facility in Queens, dated the day after Alexander disappeared.

The third was a faded photograph.

It showed two teenage boys standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a stone terrace.