I stumble over my own feet, sprinting to the bedroom to wake Tate. I need to call the cops, call Dad. Call the fucking president.
Molly’s gone.
“Tate!” I wheeze, opening my bedroom door and practically collapsing through it. Every nerve in my body is sparking with adrenaline. It’s the only thing keeping me standing as terror slices through my veins like a lethal injection.
I round her side of the bed and slam to a halt.
She’s lying on her side, sleeping. Her lips are parted, and each soft exhale spills out over her pillow… gently ruffling the delicate dark curls lying beside her.
I fall to my knees beside the bed, a silent, relieved sob caught in my throat.
They both look so peaceful. Molly must have climbed in during the night, the way she used to before I linked the monitor to her door, so I’d know if she left her room.
I didn’t set it last night. The silence from Tate’s lack of playing as I took Molly to bed distracted me. I wanted to get back to her. To make sure she was okay. I hated seeing her soobviously torn up from hearing her song on the radio. I needed to take care of her, for my own sanity.
IneededTate to be okay.
For a brief moment, my subconscious was focused on my needs. Not those of my daughter.
Guilt weaves its way up my windpipe, replacing the fear. But it still chokes me up, lashing at me without restraint.
Molly comes first. Always.
As my daughter’s eyelashes flutter sleepily over her chubby little cheeks, dancing in time to a dream, a glimmer of hope unearths from a dark place inside me that I thought was long buried, if not snuffed out altogether.
But hope can be destructive.
I hoped my brother and mother could survive an explosion that blew out one side of my father’s yacht in the marina that day.
I hoped that if they did, then they’d also survive the fire that spread in front of my eyes as we all raced down the jetty toward them.
I hoped that my father would find them alive when he ran onboard through the flames to try and reach them.
All of that hope was for nothing.
I swallow around the lump in my throat and stand on weak legs.
Leaning down, I press a kiss to first Molly’s, then Tate’s forehead.
“Look after her for me,” I whisper.
“You’d like her, Brother. She adores Molly.”
The gray headstone stares back at me, silent and still. A complete contrast to what he was like when he was alive.
We called him the ‘Risk Taker’. It was a joke, of course. He assured us that the skydives and the base jumps, and all the other crazy shit he called fun were completely safe. And I guess they were.
It was an accident that killed him.
A pointless, tragic accident.
“And she plays piano,” I say to the matching headstone on the left. “Not just plays, composes her own songs.”
Elaina Marigold Beaufort.
The deep chiseled letters of my mother’s name remain lifeless and empty. A shell devoid of emotion, when I know had she been here to hear those words, they’d have made her eyes light up with joy, and she’d have asked me a barrage of questions about Tate’s music.
That was Mom’s love. Music. It’s why I was given lessons from a young age. My brother wouldn’t sit still long enough to practice, and Sinclair lacked the coordination, her body too intent on growing at an alarming rate in order to give her career-making supermodel height.
