“I asked if Vigi likes butterflies. Do you think he does?”
My heart clenched. “I don’t know. Maybe.” I turned away, busying myself with the oven. “I’m sure he does. Most people do.”
“When he comes back, I can show him my drawing,” she continued, oblivious to my tension. “He promised he’d visit us, remember?”
Yes, he had promised. Another man making promises he wouldn’t keep. I’d sworn never to fall for that again after Langston, and yet I’d let myself believe Trent Dalton when he’d said he’d check on us. That he’d make sure we were safe.
“Sophia, honey, Trent—“ I caught myself. “Vigi is very busy. His work takes him to lots of places.”
“Fighting bad guys,” she said with certainty as she carefully placed cheese on top of the macaroni. “That’s what he told me. He fights bad guys like my dad.”
I nearly dropped the casserole dish. We never spoke of Langston, and I’d never told her what he’d done. What he was still capable of doing if he found us.
“Sweetheart, who told you your dad is a bad guy?”
She shrugged, suddenly interested in the cheese bag. “Vigi did. When you were sleeping in the car, when we were driving here. He said my dad was a bad man who hurt people, and that’s why we had to move away from California. And Vigi protects people from bad men.” She looked up, her eyes wide and trusting. “He’s protecting us, isn’t he? Even when we can’t see him?”
The lump in my throat made it hard to speak. How could I tell her that Trent had dropped us here and disappeared? That we were on our own, as we’d always been?
“Let’s put this in the oven,” I said instead, taking the macaroni from her.
As I moved around the kitchen, setting the table, pouring milk into plastic cups that wouldn’t shatter if knocked over in a hurry, my mind circled back to the stranger at the motel. It wasn’t Trent. I knew that for certain, but what if it wasn’t just some random traveler? What if Langston had finally tracked us down? He had resources, connections. He was a determined man with a lot of money who could find anyone eventually.
Escaping his grasp was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life.
I’d taken my barely one-year-old baby and run to the mountains of California, to the Hope’s Embrace compound, thinking no one would look for us in an off-the-grid community. I’d been desperate and terrified, and the compound had offered a safety I hadn’t felt in years.
Until it didn’t.
The irony was bitter. I’d escaped one controlling man only to deliver my daughter into the hands of another.
Who was the stranger staying at the motel?
The question nagged at me all through dinner.
You’re just being paranoid, I told myself over and over as I helped Sophia with her bath and settled her into bed, reading her favorite bedtime story twice.
I smoothed the pages of “The Princess and the Knight,” my fingers lingering on the illustration of the warrior standing watch outside the castle walls. Sophia’s favorite character wasn’t the princess. It was the silent guardian who protected her.
“He looks like Vigi,” she mumbled sleepily.
A strange tightness gripped my chest—not quite pain, not quite longing, and more than a little bit of anger. I’d sworn off depending on anyone after Langston, had learned the hard price of trusting too easily. Yet in those desperate hours of escape from the cult, I’d placed my life and my daughter’s in Trent’s hands without hesitation.
He’d carried her through the night, her small body cradled against his chest as we crashed through the redwoods, his large hand supporting her head as he navigated the pitch-black forest like he could see in the dark.
Hell, maybe he could. There was so much about him I didn’t know, might never know.
I closed the book and tucked the covers around Sophia’s small form. Her eyelids were already drooping.
“Mommy?” she whispered as I switched on her night light. “When is Vigi coming back?”
My heart squeezed. Trent was the only father figure my girl had ever really had. What was my awful taste in men teaching her?
“I don’t know, sweet pea,” I said softly. “Try to sleep now.”
She nodded and clutched her stuffed rabbit tighter—another gift from Trent during our frantic escape from California. He’d handed it to her without ceremony, as if buying toys for little girls was something he did every day.
“Mr. Hoppy will protect me until Vigi comes back,” she murmured, already drifting off.
