My daughter came to you for help.

Mary felt a deep pang, then pressed the image of Mrs. Gambone to the back of her mind. She grabbed a pen and propped her legal pad up on her knees. The best way she could help Trish was to do exactly what she was doing. She took a sip of decaf Lipton and began to read on page one.

My birthday!!! Yay, T!! We went out for a great dinner and he gave me diamond studs, 2.3 carats if you add them together!!! G’s are only 1 carat each and also they’re flat, so it’s a cheat. They look bigger but aren’t really heavier and the cut isn’t as good. BTW, I’m starting a journal. But tonight, I drank too much to write much. TTYL.

Mary made a note, then thought a minute. So that was why she didn’t find any other diaries in the house. She read on, and pretty quickly the November and December entries fell into a pattern. Trish seemed to write at night, on a weekly basis, after they’d gone out to dinner and a movie, a club, or a party. The entries were glowing and loving. Entries about the Mean Girls concerned weight gained and lost, and the time Yolanda got a butterfly tattooed on her lower back, which led to a flock of butterfly tattoos.

It hurt like a mother!

Mary smiled, sadly. Trish could be so cute, even conscientious, recording details about work, her increasingly large number of clients, formulas for mixing lowlights, and gripes about one Shawna, who appeared to be the salon’s Mean Girl. Trish wrote about her mother, worrying that Mrs. Gambone never went out and needed a man. She worried even more about Giulia, who seemed so moody lately, and Yolanda was so jealous of me.

Mary sipped some tea, and by February, the entries were changing. After the dinners, there were fights. He drank too much, again. Or, He yelled at me for no reason. There were fewer exclamation points, fewer dates they went on together, fewer notes about the Mean Girls.

Many of the entries read that He came back late from Biannetti’s, drunk. Mary recorded and counted them, finding 28 such entries until March. And about that same time, Trish wrote that he’s skimming, I just know it. He always has so much cash on him, and always when he comes back from work.

By June, Trish was becoming frightened. The fights became worse, the drinking more frequent, and the skimming worried her more and more. On June 4 and June 10, she worried that they’ll find out. On June 23, she wrote that Cadillac thinks he’s stealing because at a wedding, Cadillac said that my watch must have cost an arm and a leg, and said, I didn’t know your boyfriend was earning that much. Mary made a note of the name Cadillac, but couldn’t find a last name.

She read on, noticing that the verbal abuse intensified in the June entries, and she stopped flinching at the whore, slut, and lying bitch. Trish wrote that he’s slipping up on the job and not doing as good as he used to. On July 4th, she felt snubbed by the other Mob girlfriends at a barbecue because he’s not doing as good as he should be, even as good as his brother, who’s a dumbass on top of it.

Mary read on. The story reached a climax of sorts, when Trish confronted him about his stealing, but he denied it to her, and she wrote, he told me I’m nuts to think he’d be dumb enough to steal from the boys, and if Cadillac thinks it, he’s an idiot, too. Cadillac keeps having his suspicions, which led to Trish being accused of having an affair with Cadillac, which she would never do because he’s a pig. Again, no last name supplied.

More suspicions that led to the incident where he shoved me in the closet and held the door closed so I couldn’t get out! I was so scared he was gonna trap me or something! Mary read the following entries, in which a newly mistrustful Trish didn’t believe the apologies: And when he socked me in my stomach like four times and I couldn’t get my breath. In the next pages, the violence escalated. He beat the shit out of me after Biannetti’s again and the very next night, he won’t stop with the biting. More assaults after Biannetti’s, more reconciliations, more I’ll-never-do-it-again, and at least ten Polaroids, each one uglier than the next.

Then Mary turned the page and it got worse: he made me suck his gun and he kept laughing and wouldn’t let me stop or he said he’d shoot me and blow my brains out my neck. Her stomach turned over. He had become a sadist, a sociopath. She shook her head in disgust and bewilderment, then kept reading. Entries in the days following were filled with I’m so scared and what do I do and what if he sees me writing in the diary. There were no references to any weekend getaway, as Brinkley had said, or any clue as to where they would be now. It was the chronology of a nightmare, and Mary reread the final entry: I went to see Mary but she didn’t do anything. Now I don’t know what to do. If you’re reading this now, whoever you are, I’m already dead. But at least this can prove he did it.

She closed the diary, her heart leaden, and looked aimlessly around her bedroom, hoping to see something that would lift her out of Trish’s world and restore her to her own. It was a feeling she had after reading any book, a reentry issue when she was finished, as if she’d been out of earth’s orbit, but this diary was more powerful than any story. It was real, and Mary herself had let the heroine down, resigning her to a fate that admitted no happy ending.

She was scared he was gonna kill her and now maybe he did. Ya happy?

Mary felt her eyes moisten and blinked it away. A white ginger lamp filled the cozy bedroom with a warm glow, and a blue-and-yellow flowered chair sat in the corner. Two landscapes hung on the wall, and a pine dresser sat nearby with a large mirror, which still had Mike’s photos stuck in the side. They weren’t photos of Mike; rather, they were photos he’d taken, loved, and put there, of his parents, his fraternity brothers, and the class he taught, third-graders, missing teeth here and there. He had loved teaching, and every time Mary saw those photos, she remembered him. She didn’t need to see his face in a photo; she had his face in her heart. She wanted to see what he saw, through his eyes. That’s what the photos showed. His soul.

She felt suddenly lucky that she’d been married to Mike. She wouldn’t have married anybody but him, least of all Trish’s mobster. She wouldn’t have changed a single thing about her life, except losing Mike. And that, she couldn’t do anything about. So she set the legal pad and the diary aside, then took off her glasses and set them on the night table, faceup so they didn’t scratch. She reached over and turned out the light, and darkness covered her like a down comforter.

She scooted down in bed, thinking in the silence of her room. Her solitude seemed more obvious to her now than ever, after the noise and violence of the relationship she’d been reading about, though she finally understood some things. Trish had stayed in the relationship because she was afraid to leave it, that much was obvious. But what Mary learned was that Trish had gotten into it because she didn’t want to end up in a bedroom alone, with her hair in a Pebbles ponytail and a mug of decaf tea cooling by the bed.

Trish didn’t want to be her.

Nobody did.

Nobody wanted to be the girl avoiding a good-night kiss from a perfectly nice and handsome man whose only fault was that he liked her. Finally, there in the dark, Mary understood something about Trish, and about herself, too.

And if Trish were still alive, Mary vowed to find her.