I muttered, “I’m going to bed. Are you going to try to sleep?”
“No, gonna stay out here all night. If she comes back I don’t want her to be alone. And what if the guys come back?” He waved his gun toward the yard. “I need to be ready.”
I said, “Call me if anything happens,” and went inside to sleep in the guest room.
The night was long and,though I was exhausted, I had trouble sleeping.
Cooper was a mess in the morning. “She’s not back, you said she’d be back.”
“I thought she’d be back the next day, it’s not even past breakfast time yet.”
He counted on his fingers like an ass. “Midnight to now, seven hours. Seven hours already.”
I huffed and sat down on the porch swing. “I really hoped she’d be here by now, it’s been a long time since she… you know, was taken.”
He said, “Yep, too long. We gotta call the cops.”
“Yeah, I think so too. I’m gonna make coffee though, first.”
“You want me to tell the cops that we made a pot of coffee before we called them?”
“We waited all day, ate dinner, you had a couple of beers, we went all night, and then we made a pot of coffee. Then we called them. I don’t know what to say except, we thought she would come back. We’ve been waiting for her. I’m sure that happens all the time. Not everyone calls immediately, sometimes it takes a while before you realize someone is missing. She was with Torin, you know, we thought she would be back.”
He nodded. “I want to kill that guy.”
“You know it’s not his fault, he’s not the one who took her. He was trying to keep her safe.”
“Yeah, I know, butstill… if he hadn’t come, she would be fine. We would be normal.”
I nodded. “Yeah… true. But what if, suddenly, out of nowhere those kidnapping guys had shown up and stolen herwithoutTorin being here? He might be the only person in the world keeping her alive.”
“Yeah, but, why would they find her without him?”
“Because she’s some kind of princess.”
He shook his head.
I said, “It’s the only explanation, Coop.”
He asked, “You making coffee? I’m going to need coffee to discuss this kind of thing, and I don’t want to take my eyes off the grass.”
“Yeah, I’ll make it. Better at it anyway, you put too many grounds in.” I squeezed his shoulder as I went into the house.
I was pouringwater into the back of the pot, when a shadow fell over the house. I looked out the window to see the sky had turned gray. Wind gusted hard, trees whipped.
It was shocking at first, a storm out of nowhere, but then I realized —A storm out of nowhere!
I dropped the pot and ran for the door. It flew open before I reached it, yanked wide by the gale. The wind howled into the hall.
Cooper was outside, pinned against the siding, one arm braced across his face as the gusts drove him back. He staggered, slammed flat against the wall. In the half-breath lull betweengusts, I grabbed the screen door, yanked it open, and shouted, “Come in!”
He dove inside, and we crouched in the narrow hall as the wind tore through, rattling the walls. The screen banged violently, gusts burst into the house, knocking a picture frame from the wall. Glass shattered on the floor.
And then, almost as quickly as it had risen, the storm ebbed. The roar lessened, the house stilled.
It dawned on me, with certainty — it was undeniable, the storms were part of it.
We could argue that it wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t true, but it had just ripped a frame off the wall and broken the glass. There was no denying anymore.
