One News Flash after Another
Hi, moms!
First of all, I want to thank moms everywhere for your words of sympathy, love, and support. It's in times of crisis like this that we have each other's back and make our voices heard. The quiet moms who have been reading the blog and clicking through the comment threads without posting are now writing to say that their prayers are with me and Sean, Nicky, and Miles. In this sad time, it would seem gross and vulgar to tell you how many distinct hits on the site I've gotten in the last weeks.
Meanwhile I feel like the bad friend who flakes out when you need her or when you're worried about her and you want to know what's happening. I haven't posted in a while, though I know how concerned you've been. But my life has been in chaos as I've struggled to keep up the search for my friend and to work alongside her husband to make sure that their little boy feels as safe as he can under the circumstances.
I know from your messages that many of you were following Emily's story when it was in the news. Sean and I drew the line at trying to interest one of those creepy TV "investigative reports." It would be too traumatic for Nicky in case he ever found it on YouTube. Still, we know those shows have sometimes located a missing person.
Some of you may be thinking that I am writing this now because of what you may have been reading lately in the tabloids or seeing on TV. I mean now that a new element (money!) has made the authorities more interested in our case than they were when it was just a story about a beautiful wife and mother who left for work one day and never came home.
As some of you have probably heard, just one month before Emily's disappearance, a two-million-dollar life insurance policy was taken out in her name, payable to Sean.
Moms, do you see what's happening here? Real life is starting to sound like one of those ripped-from-the-headlines TV shows, a script you probably can't get made anymore because it's been done too often. Husband takes out mega-insurance policy. Wife disappears.
Before they found out about the policy, the police questioned Sean. Briefly. Standard procedure. The husband is always the prime suspect, as everyone who owns a television knows. But his alibi checked out completely.
He'd been in England, where practically every moment of your day is monitored and recorded on CCTV. His snooty hotel was reluctant to cooperate, but when someone from the embassy there insisted, they surrendered the footage that showed Sean entering and leaving his hotel room. On the night Emily vanished, there's footage of Sean having a drink in the hotel bar with a couple of the real estate developers he'd gone to the UK to meet. And then he went off to bed. Alone.
That Emily's life insurance policy took so long to surface shows you the level of efficiency we are dealing with here, which you moms already know if you have ever tried to file a health insurance claim or register your child for pre-K. When the policy finally came to light, the cops came back for another (suspicious) look at Sean.
The truth is that the policy slipped Sean's mind because he'd been under such stress. Which in my opinion proves he's innocent. What kind of cold-blooded wife killer takes out a policy and then forgets about it? Seriously? But the police have it backward. They believe this suggests that he is guilty, that he's pretending to have forgotten because the truth looks bad. So what are they thinking? That Sean took out the policy and hired someone to kill his wife? That he and I are in this together?
None of that happened.
Perhaps you moms will forgive me for not having posted for so long now that you know how much has been going on in my life, starting with this unfortunate and maddening development. The police have twice picked up Sean and held him without charging him. Is there justice in this country? Don't we have laws against this? Even when you know your rights and have enough money and an excellent lawyer, as Sean does, and a Wall Street firm behind you—even that isn't enough to scare some old-fashioned common sense into these small-town detectives.
Each time Sean is taken down to the police station, Nicky—who has been a brave little soldier until now—becomes nearly inconsolable, and I have to drive over to their house, whatever the hour of the day or night, and pick him up and bring him home and rock him to sleep on my lap and put him in Miles's bunk bed. Sometimes I stand in the doorway of Miles's room and watch them sleep and listen to their sweet, snuffly snoring, and I think how angelic our children are, how much they trust us, and how—try as we might—there's no way we can protect them from the horrors that life may have in store for them.
Anyhow, this seems like a good moment to get back to blogging and tell the moms community that an innocent man is being persecuted and harassed. It's hard for me to explain how I know he is innocent. But I do. I know it with every cell of my body. During this anxious time that Emily has been gone, Sean and I have worked together to maintain our morale, to keep up the search, and most importantly to bolster the spirits of a courageous little boy.
You moms will understand that this hasn't been easy for Miles. Knowing that his best friend's mother could vanish into thin air has (naturally!) made him a little clingy. He's reluctant to be left for a sleepover with Nicky. But once he gets past the separation anxiety, he loves it.
Several times I've had to drive away from Emily's house (I still think of it that way) with my child's sobs echoing in my ears. But I know Miles will be fine. He'll have fun. And the reason I know this is because of the closeness and trust I have felt, over these difficult weeks, with Nicky's dad. Do you think I would leave my child with a credible suspect in a murder investigation?
Anyhow, there's been no murder. What keeps destroying the police's nonexistent case is the absence of a body or any evidence of foul play. First Emily was driving in Pennsylvania; then she wasn't. There's no indication that she didn't wake up one day and decide she'd had enough of motherhood, enough of the fashion industry, of Connecticut, of Sean. Of the whole package. Even Nicky. It's possible that she took off to start a new life under an assumed name. The cops say it happens all the time.
This wasn't the friend I thought knew! But if Sean has turned out to be the opposite of what I'd thought, couldn't Emily as well? It's crazy-making to find out that you could have been so wrong about someone. It's hard to know what to feel. Should I be angry at her? At myself? Should I feel betrayed? Tricked? Honestly, I just feel very sad.
To end this post on a less gloomy note, I'm linking to the post in which I talk about my friendship with Emily. I wrote it when I was still calling her E. But by now you know who I mean, even as I begin to think that maybe I never really knew who she was or what I meant to her. Or whether she really was my best friend, after all.
It's going to make me cry to read this.
But I'm posting it anyway.
Love,
Stephanie
