A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

MEREDITH
11 YEARS BEFORE
March
Dawn comes quickly. The morning after a birth is never easy. I wake
to Josh leaning over me, kissing me before he leaves.
“What time is it?” I ask, bleary-eyed. I try to shade my eyes from
the morning sun that streams in through the break in the curtains.
“Six,” he says. “There’s coffee on the table beside you. What time
did you get home?”
“Around four.”
When I got home, it took me a while to fall asleep. I was scared,
wondering if the same person who texted me had also followed me
home. I thought about waking Josh and telling him what happened.
But I didn’t want to worry him unnecessarily. Josh already worries.
He’s said it before, how he doesn’t like me driving home alone in the
middle of the night after a birth. Many, if not all, of the hospitals I visit
have sketchy parking garages. Some of the hospitals are in the city,
in rougher neighborhoods that I have to walk through to get to my
car. There aren’t many people on the street after nightfall. I’ve
always been dismissive of his concerns. If anything, I’ve agreed to
the pepper spray, to downloading some app on my phone that tracks
my whereabouts all of the time. Josh feels better because of it. This
way, he said—when he convinced me to download the app and
accept his friend invite—if you go missing, I can find you. He said it
in jest and we both laughed at the time. But now it’s not funny.
It works both ways. I can keep tabs on Josh, too, though I never
have.
Josh has suggested before that I shut down my private doula
practice and teach yoga full-time. He likes that yoga classes are held
during business hours. That the hours are predicable. That the
clientele is primarily female. I don’t tell Josh about what happened
last night because he’d want to reopen this discussion. That’s not an