CHAPTER 7
What Victoria Langdon Did
Three years ago, in early December, a young woman named Victoria Langdon received a phone call that changed the shape of her life.
She was twenty-two at the time, living in a rented flat in Zurich's fourth district and finishing the second year of a dual-degree program in international law and political philosophy. She was bright and careful and genuinely decent, which she proved by not trying to present herself as anything else.
She had been with Ethan Voss for sixteen months. They were not, technically, engaged, but they were the kind of couple that other people treat as though they might as well be — stable, coherent, building toward something.
The phone call came from a number she didn't recognize. The man on the other end spoke German, then English when she didn't respond quickly enough.
He told her that there had been an accident on the A3 highway. A car. Two confirmed fatalities — that was the phrasing he used, confirmed fatalities, as though the word confirmed made it more bearable — and that rescue teams were still working the scene. He gave her a case reference number. He told her to call the Zurich cantonal police if she needed further information. He said he was sorry for her loss.
She said: "Both of them?"
He said: "I'm afraid so."
She sat on the floor of her flat for a long time after the call ended. The detail she remembered most clearly, later, was the silence — how total it was. How the city outside her window seemed to understand that this was not a moment it was entitled to intrude upon.
— ◆ —
In the days that followed, Victoria did the things that people do in the immediate aftermath of loss. She made calls. She answered questions. She sat in a police station on a Thursday afternoon and answered more questions, and signed documents, and was given a manila envelope containing the personal effects found at the scene.
She did not look for Ethan in that envelope. She did not ask about a third body, or a third person, or any passenger who might have survived. This was not callousness. This was the efficient, blinkered way that shock manages information: it accepts the frame it has been given because building a new one requires more cognitive capacity than grief permits.
She had been told two fatalities. She understood this to mean the senior Voss couple. She did not think — not at the time, not for weeks — to ask whether the case files indicated anyone else in the vehicle, or nearby, or unaccounted for. Shock makes you incurious. It tells you that asking more questions will only produce more unbearable answers, and so you stop asking.
There was also this: three days after the accident, she received a visit from a man who introduced himself as a legal representative of the Voss-Krane Foundation.
He was polite and formal and slightly too well-dressed for a grief condolence call. He told her that the Foundation wanted her to know that, in recognition of her relationship with the family, a fund had been established in her name — a scholarship endowment that would cover the remaining costs of her degree and provide a generous transitional stipend.
"That's very kind," she said, numb and uncertain of what else to say.
"The family wanted you to be able to continue your work," the man said. "They would not have wanted the tragedy to interrupt your studies."
She thanked him. She signed a document she read imperfectly because her hands were shaking. She did not wonder, until much later, how the Foundation had organized this so quickly, or what it meant that the man's demeanor had been one of conclusion rather than condolence — the manner of someone tying off a loose end rather than expressing sorrow.
She took the scholarship. She moved to London for her third year. She tried to grieve properly, and found that grief of this specific kind — the loss of someone whose body you never saw, whose death existed only in the administrative record of a phone call — is a disorienting thing.
It does not anchor the way conventional grief anchors. It floats. It resurfaces at unexpected moments. It looks for somewhere to land.
She did not look for Ethan. She tried to, once — a few weeks after the accident, when the initial shock had fractured enough to let questions through. But the search felt both futile and somehow wrong, like reopening a wound that was finally beginning to close.
She told herself: he was there, and now he is not, and looking for evidence of the shape of something that is gone will not make the shape less painful.
She stopped looking.
She was twenty-five now. She had finished her degrees in London and taken a graduate research position at Harrington University — good department, interesting faculty, a thesis topic on international succession law and sovereign immunity that she had been developing for two years.
She had arrived in Crestwood three weeks ago. She had unpacked her books in a new apartment and set a photograph on the desk — not of Ethan, not of anyone from the Zurich years, just a picture of the Thames she'd taken from Waterloo Bridge on a day when the light was doing something spectacular — and she had, she believed, made a kind of peace.
She had not, as it turned out, made any such thing.
— ◆ —
She did not see him that first week. She saw him in the second, crossing the quad at eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday morning, head down, canvas jacket, moving with that particular unhurried quality she had forgotten and then apparently not forgotten at all.
She was fifty meters away. The distance was enough that she could tell herself she was mistaken. She did.
She stood on the path for longer than was natural, watching the corner of the building where he had disappeared, and then she walked to the library and sat at a table and opened her laptop and stared at a document she did not read for the better part of an hour.
She did not tell herself she was fine. She simply decided not to make a decision yet. This was, she had come to understand, sometimes the best you could do.