We had eventually hung up, and I hadn’t heard anything more this morning. We had opened our own stockings, which my mom still loved to fill for me. It was mostly candy and little treats like that, and I remembered when I’d realized how theyscrimped and saved to get me the Christmas presents that I asked for. That was the moment when I had resolved to stop asking for expensive stuff. I loved the candy instead, and my parents loved the little things I got for them, too.
But here I was staring at my phone. I had gone for a run and then fed the animals. I’d gotten dressed and gone out again for a short walk with my dad, the two of us arm-in-arm. We put on the old Christmas movies that I had always watched and I had texted the old flip phone and called a few times, but there hadn’t been any answer until I got a call from another number, with the area code indicating Detroit.
“Hello?” I asked cautiously.
“It’s Lyra,” she told me. “Silas lost his good phone that folds up, so I had to call from this one. First he couldn’t remember your number.”
“Oh, hi, honey!” In my happiness, I didn’t even realize what I’d called her. “Merry Christmas! Did Santa come?”
“I think so,” she told me. “Somebody did because my stocking was full of so much good stuff. Also, I heard the bells again!”
“You did? That’s amazing!”
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think it’s Silas, but I’m not going to tell him. He likes to pretend.”
“That’s nice of you,” I whispered back. I looked at the time and saw that it was noon. “Um, what are y’all doing now?”
“We’all are going to have lunch and then cook dinner. Did that sound like I was from Kentucky?” She’d been trying to do myaccent, which I tended to let out more at home with her and Silas. It was now full-blown since I was with my parents.
“You sounded great,” I complimented, but that hadn’t been the information I’d been after. “Just the two of you for lunch?” I didn’t want to come out and ask about her father, but I did want to know if he had arrived within the specified window of time or if there was any word about his whereabouts.
“Yeah, me and Silas,” she agreed. “He saw the bust I made and he said he couldn’t believe it. Boris thought it was a turtle but Silas said no, it’s just like him and he loves it.”
“It’s beautiful.” I gave up on the hints. “Tell me about your presents.”
She had a lot to say, but eventually, she did run out of steam and announced that she was going to pass the phone to her brother. But before she did, she had a final question. “Are you coming home tomorrow?”
“The day after tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed—could that have been right? I might have been reading too much into that one little word and I tried not to get excited. “I guess I’ll see you later.”
“You can text me from this phone, if you want.”
“No, this is only for work and dumb stuff. The other phone is the important one,” she explained. “That’s why Silas was upset because he thought you might have been calling on it but he couldn’t find it. Here he is.”
“It has to be here somewhere, probably under some wrapping paper,” he said when he took over. “Were you trying to get ahold of me?”
It was better to admit the truth, since he would see the number of missed calls on the screen when he did manage to find the flip phone. “Probably about twenty times,” I said. “Also, I was texting. I was worried.”
He also lowered his voice to a whisper. “He’s not coming. I fucking knew it.”
“I’m sorry,” I sighed, because I really was, for both of them. “Is Lyra—”
Silas cut me off. “A brand-new pickup truck just stopped in front of the house. That can’t be my dad.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “Probably not. I got you a present.”
“Yeah? What? Hold on, someone’s at the door.”
Then he found out what I’d given him.
Chapter 12
“Ithought it would be a good thing. A nice thing,” I explained. “It wasn’t.”
“That’s an amazing gift,” Juliet said. “A new truck for Christmas? I would have been thrilled to get that.”
Juliet Curran—now Forsman, because she had married my boss, Beckett—was one of the first people I’d met in Detroit, and the first person that I’d become friendly with. I wouldn’t have said that we were especially close, but she had been very nice to me and she was obviously better at relationships. After all, she was married and totally in love, and I had just heard the exciting confirmation that she and Beckett were having a baby. And I needed to talk to someone impartial about this problem, because things had really gone sideways.
