A Simple Favor

Stephanie writes on her blog about a friend, Emily Nelson, who has disappeared. Emily’s son Nicky and Stephanie’s son, Miles, both five years old, became friends in school. Stephanie has trouble making friends with the other moms at Miles’s school, but she and Emily both became mothers in their mid-thirties, which makes them older than most of the others. They found common ground there, and Stephanie feels lucky that they are friends.

Miles and Nicky often act out plays they’ve written while Stephanie films them—one of their favorites is called “The Adventures of Dick Unique,” an idea from Emily, who loves to read mysteries and thrillers while she commutes to Manhattan for work. Emily’s favorite writer is Patricia Highsmith, and Stephanie tried to read Strangers on a Train, but couldn’t finish it, and when they watched the Hitchcock movie based on the book, it frightened her. Now that Emily has disappeared, Stephanie tries not to think about that book, where one man killed another man’s wife. She doesn’t like Sean, Emily’s husband, but doesn’t believe he would kill Emily.

Stephanie and Emily often spend Friday afternoons together while Miles and Nicky play. Sometimes Stephanie watches Nicky for Emily if she stays late at work or travels for work, but usually Emily is in constant contact when this happens. This time her absence is different—Emily has been gone, and out of contact, for two days. Stephanie doesn’t think Emily has run away; she believes something suspicious is going on.

On her blog, Stephanie doesn’t usually reveal people’s real names or the name of her town, but because of Emily’s disappearance, she reveals that they live in Warfield, Connecticut. When Davis, Stephanie’s husband, first moved them there from New York City, Stephanie hated it. Now, however, she loves it there, or had until Emily disappeared. Emily is beautiful and sophisticated. She wears perfume special ordered from Italy and has a tattoo, a ring of thorns, around her wrist.

The prior summer, Emily asked Stephanie to watch Nicky so that she and Sean could visit her family cabin on Lake Michigan. On the day she disappeared, Emily called Stephanie, asking her to watch Nicky until she got home from work that night. Stephanie readily agrees, as they often do these favors. Although Emily said she would pick him up that night, she doesn’t call or text, and when Stephanie calls, she only gets Emily’s voicemail.

Stephanie’s husband, Davis, died in a car crash, along with her half-brother, Chris. After the crash, she hid her grief from Miles, and now she uses that experience to hide her worry from the boys. The next day as she gets the boys ready for school, she wonders what to do. Sean is in Europe on business, and when she calls Emily’s workplace, where she works in publicity for a famous fashion designer, Dennis Nylon, her assistant, never calls her back.

Stephanie convinces herself that Emily asked her to watch Nicky for a few days and that Stephanie just misunderstood. When she picks Miles and Nicky up from school the next day, she thinks, for a few moments, that she sees Emily. She doesn’t know what to do about her friend’s disappearance but is developing a plan.

Stephanie decides to go to Emily’s house (they traded keys some time ago for emergencies). The housecleaner tells Stephanie that Emily said she’d be gone for four days. Stephanie still wants to search the house for clues but feels guilty about being in the house. Over the fireplace, she sees the haunting photograph of the twin girls and remembers that when she first saw it Emily had asked her which twin seemed like the dominant one. Now, it makes her wonder if Emily is the dominant one in their friendship.

She sees a bookmarked Patricia Highsmith book, Those Who Walk Away, on the table, and decides to read it for clues. It occurs to her that Emily may have left her life, but she brushes the idea aside. She knows that she should have called the police then, but instead, turns to her blogging community for help in locating Emily.

On his second night at Stephanie’s house, Nicky makes himself physically sick with worry. Stephanie calls Sean in London, and he tells her that Emily is traveling for business for a few days and hangs up. Stephanie finds it strange that he doesn’t ask about Nicky. The next night, when Sean returns from London, Emily is still gone. Emily’s disappearance becomes real to Stephanie as she watches Sean hold Nicky, who is crying.

When Stephanie was 18, her father died. Four days later, a man who looked exactly like her father’s wedding photo comes to the funeral. His name is Chris, and he tells them that he and his mother were Stephanie’s father’s other family. They live in Madison, Wisconsin, and saw their father when he visited twice a year. Stephanie can’t believe that Chris, who is really good-looking, is her brother. The strangeness of the situation is heightened by the fact that at that age, Stephanie looked just like her mother in the wedding photo.

Chris stays for dinner, and he and Stephanie talk until late at night. The next day, he calls to tell her that he hasn’t left for Wisconsin yet. She goes to his motel room, and they have sex. Although she has had sex before with her boyfriend, sex with Chris is a new and irresistible experience.

Stephanie and Sean put Miles and Nicky to bed, and then he calls the police. The police, however, insinuate that Emily probably needed a break and will come home soon. Sean tells them that she is estranged from her mother, who has dementia. This surprises Stephanie, who thought Emily’s mother was in good health and that Emily had a good relationship with her.

After the police leave, Stephanie and Sean have a drink, and Sean calls Emily’s mother; however, neither she nor her caretaker has heard from Emily. When Stephanie asks about the family cabin, he says Emily would never go there alone. When he continues to speak frankly about Emily and their relationship, Stephanie realizes it is the first time she has really talked to him.

A few days later, Sean calls Stephanie and asks her to pick Nicky up at school because the police have asked him to come in. When he picks up Nicky later, Sean tells Stephanie that he had been questioned. He doesn’t feel like the police suspect him of anything, and, as far as he can tell, they think Emily ran away.

When the police call Stephanie, they ask if Emily was happy. She tells them that Emily wouldn’t run away from her life, but they clearly don’t believe her. Dennis Nylon appears in the media to draw attention to the case. The police find footage of Emily saying goodbye to Sean at JFK. She had a ticket to San Francisco but never checked in. The police discover that Emily rented a car at the airport, and they follow her route into Pennsylvania. They also discover that she withdrew a few thousand dollars from the bank, but without new information, the investigation stalls.

Stephanie and Sean work together to shield Nicky from the worst effects of Emily’s disappearance. She grows to like Sean, whom Emily had often complained about. Stephanie had been surprised, when he returned, that he was better looking and nicer than she remembered. She feels a spark between them but resists it—it would be inappropriate, as her relationship with Chris had been. However, she admits that this is part of the attraction.

On her blog, Stephanie confirms reports that just before Emily’s disappearance, Sean was made the beneficiary of her $2 million life insurance policy. While Stephanie believes that the fact Sean forgot about the policy proves his innocence, the police see the insurance policy as motive. She argues that Sean is innocent and being harassed by the police. Stephanie now believes that maybe Emily did run away, and she feels betrayed. She wonders if it’s possible to really know anybody and ends the entry with a link to an older post about her friendship with Emily.

When Stephanie first moved out of the city, she put her time and energy into being the perfect wife and mother. She had a hard time making friends with the other local moms and started blogging as a way to reach out to all of the mothers like her. After Davis died, the blog and Miles were all she had. Her parents and her brother were dead, and her friends in the city had moved on. Locally, people avoided her, as if bad luck was contagious, until she met Emily.

Before they officially met, Stephanie noticed Emily while waiting to pick up their kids one rainy Friday afternoon. Emily asked Stephanie and Miles to come to their house, where the boys drank cocoa, and Emily and Stephanie had wine. Her house is elegant and perfectly decorated, with a large photograph of twin girls over the mantel.

Emily talks about how she and Sean met and then asks about Stephanie’s husband. Stephanie realizes that Emily moved there after Davis’s death, so tells her the story. Emily cries, and they have been close ever since. Stephanie feels fortunate to have a friend who appreciates her and what she does. Although they look like opposites, they are very similar underneath. Because of their friendship, her faith in the possibility of true friendships between moms has been restored.

As she rereads her old blog post about Emily, Stephanie feels guilty because she is attracted to Sean. One stormy night, Stephanie and Sean stay up late talking at her house, and he and Nicky stay overnight. Stephanie fantasizes about having sex but knows that they would feel so guilty that the police might assume they are guilty of other things, too.

They talk about Emily a lot, and Sean tells Stephanie that Emily’s grandfather abused her when she was young. Her parents never admitted it, so she was estranged from them. Later, in her twenties, she abused alcohol and drugs but has been sober since. Stephanie realizes that even though she told Emily all her secrets, Emily hadn’t told any of her own. She reads the Patricia Highsmith book that Emily left behind but doesn’t find any clues.

Stephanie dresses up when Sean and Nicky come for dinner and begins cooking red meat again. She knows that she cannot blog about it—her readers wouldn’t forgive her for wanting to sleep with Sean. Her attraction to him is another secret she has to keep. She tries not to think about his past with Emily, or the fact that Emily could return.

Stephanie’s feelings for Davis were not like her feelings for Sean—Davis had been just what she needed, and she was always comfortable with him. Soon after they had Miles, they moved to Connecticut, and Davis worked from home while restoring their house. Sean is different from Davis, and sometimes she doubts him. He seems to show genuine sorrow about Emily’s disappearance and has explained the life insurance. She feels that she would know if he had done something to Emily.

Stephanie tells her readers that she, Miles, Sean, and Nicky have attained a degree of normalcy, yet nothing could ever be the same. Nicky is beginning to act out and is angry with Stephanie, but she continues to try to do what is best for him.