Maybe I was selfish to have children, knowing they would have to die one day. Maybe I deserve to suffer for it. More than I already have.
But further punishment will have to wait. Because today, we are going to talk about those things.
We are going to do those things.
And we are going to save my daughter.
40
Day sixteen
It took sheer will to walk back outside, away from the bar. She needed the fresh air. She needed to drive, and to push aside the thoughts that were twisted up in her mind.
Reyes, the tortured soul who truly understood her—who might be strong enough to save her from herself.
Reyes, the damaged man who used women the way she used men—and who might just pull her into his despair as well as her own.
She couldn’t possibly know the difference. Not in two days’ time. And not with all that had happened.
She found her mother’s car where she’d parked it the day before. She wasn’t sure where she was going. Not back to Hastings. Not home.
She checked her phone and the texts that had been piling up. Three from her father—all with the same message.When are you coming home? Come home, sweetheart. Where are you—you need to come home.
One from Evan.Did you find her? What’s happening?
It was the final one from her father that provided the most distraction.Edith Moore is Edith Bickman. Moore is her boyfriend’s name. Probably used it to hide the fact that she worked at the bar in Hastings four years ago. And Kurt Kent did time for a gun offense. Two bad apples. Scam. Also—Mrs. Urbansky said she did not give out your number to anyone. Another lie! Call me or answer your phone!
She had two missed calls and voicemails from him as well. She responded with a text.I’m fine. Will call soon.
But was she fine? Drinking and sleeping with strangers again. Infusing her reckless actions with meaning that might be pure fiction?
We are the same…
How could he say that when they’d just met? How could she have believed it. And yet it had felt so real. She wanted it to be real, even now, as the doubt crept in.
She sat in her mother’s car. Smelled her smell, which was fading more every day. She turned on the ignition and closed her eyes. The list of loose ends—what was on it now? Edith Moore—or Bickman—and her plot with Kurt Kent, her father’s PI was looking into that. But what about the lie she’d told about getting Nic’s cell phone number from Mrs. Urbansky? It had been Reyes who’d put those words in her mouth. She remembered that now. Maybe he’d assumed it, and then she jumped on board, not having a better answer.
Her mother had not been at that house. No one had, and it was a long shot anyone had been there the night of the storm. Next, Watkins and the truck—but Reyes said he was going back to find him. Her father and his affair, and the stop he’d made at the gas station in West Cornwall. She should call him, ask him for the truth, for once. But he had already lied to her about the handwriting analysis.
And then, Daisy Hollander—the woman Chief Watkins helped get a scholarship to a fancy summer camp in Woodstock, whom he’d supposedly driven out of town when she’d needed to escape the fate of becoming Mrs. Roger Booth. Watkins and his truck. Watkins and Daisy Hollander.
Daisy Hollander.She remembered the way. The names of the roads, and even the road with no name.
Down Laguna Drive to the end. Then right on Route 7. She was a mile from the Gas n’ Go when she saw the dark gray truck—the Silverado—with Chief Watkins in the driver’s seat. She turned her head and sat low as he drove by. Then she picked up speed, turning onto Hastings Pass. She drove through town, past the police station, until she got to the end—to River Road. Then right onto Pond, left onto Jeliff. Then the road with no name. She remembered the way.
As she made the final turn into the dense woods, those words were still ringing in her head. Making her stomach turn now.
We are the same.
41
Day sixteen
Alice has been such a good girl.
“Can we play Hannah and Suzannah?” she asks me.
Of course we can, you good, good girl.
