The Lies That Bind

by Emily Giffin

I manage to hold on to a sliver of hope, playing our collective excuses back on a loop. His cellphone is broken or lost—and he never memorized my number to call from a landline. He went to his mountain house just after he left my apartment early this morning, and doesn’t have cell service or an Internet connection or a television; maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. He lost a close friend in the towers, and is too filled with grief to do anything, including contact me. He has spiraled into depression, something we are all experiencing to various degrees, but his is even more crippling due to his brother’s situation. He’s injured in a hospital somewhere. He’s buried alive in the rubble, waiting to be saved. He will be saved. But with every passing hour, it becomes harder to suppress another explanation. The one that I can’t and won’t say aloud, and my friends won’t say, either. At least not to my face. They are thinking it, though. I hear it in the tentative way they ask if I’ve heard from him—as if I could possibly forget to tell them that I had. I hear it in their wavering reassurances that they are sure the call will come. I tell myself the same. Any minute he will call with a breathless, crazy story. Any minute now he will knock on my door and give me one of his huge, tight hugs.