The man is in awe as he watches the mother of this child, his child, move toward him.
“Drop the gun and take us through the woods the way you came. Back to the inn. Then give us a car. Or I swear to you, I will put a bullet in her head.”
The man is wide-eyed as he lets these words reach into his soul, the way they do mine. They do not have anyplace else to go.
His hands tremble but he holds the gun steady. I watch Daisy’s finger pull back the safety lever. I hear the click. She knows—I can feel it—she knows he won’t fire that shotgun. He will stand there in a perpetual state of human conflict, wanting her dead, but afraid of hitting his daughter. Afraid she will pull the trigger first. He will do exactly what she tells him now. And then she will be free.
I am there again, five years ago, turning the corner on my street. The corner just before our driveway. I am worried that something is wrong. I can feel the anger that will come when I find out nothing is—that it was just Nicole being a teenager. Both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road. Thoughts on what I might find inside my house.
I feel my feet move. I feel a heavy rock in my hands. I feel eyes turn.
But I am there five years ago. Turning the corner, seeing the flash of something. What is it? What could have suddenly come into the road, into the path of my car?
I hear a crack. And a scream. My hands ache.
I am back there. My foot on the brakes, my hands turning the wheel. Hard enough. All of it is hard enough. I turn to see Annie safe on the other side.
I feel arms grabbing my legs. Little arms squeezing tight.
I look down and see Alice crying with relief.Not Annie. Alice.
I look down and see Daisy unconscious at my feet. The rock still in my hands.
The man runs toward us now.
We hear the sirens stop and voices call from the driveway.
“Here!” the man yells back. “We’re down here!”
Alice cries harder. I let the rock fall and I lean down to pick her up in my arms. She wraps her entire being around my body and I hold her tight.
“It’s all right,” I say.
Nicole comes now, out from the woods. She sees me and I see her. And I am floating in an ocean of love.
Just devastating, blissful love.
“It’s all right,” I say again.
And I think to myself, that maybe it is.
56
Seven months later
It was not easy to make the turn down Hastings Pass.
Nic had insisted on driving. She knew the way, she said. But that wasn’t the reason. That turn, this road, everything about this town had become a monster under her bed. The flashes came in nightmares. They came in daydreams as she ran, stopping her in her tracks. Stealing her breath. A flash of the inn, or the fence, or the woods.
She needed to face it. To look under the bed and see that there was nothing there. That it was just a town, and the people who had terrorized them were now dead or in prison.
Her mother held on to her shoulder as they drove past the Gas n’ Go.
“Are you okay?” she asked, though her eyes were on the gas station—the place where all of this started.
Jared Reyes had followed Daisy Hollander to Hastings after that summer in Woodstock. He’d been working in the kitchen—one of a string of odd jobs he’d taken after leaving the force in Worcester.
Then he’d found work in Hastings providing security for the company that owned the property behind the inn—the investors who had wanted to build a mental-health facility but were shut down by town protests. They owned the Gas n’ Go as well. Reyes monitored the security cameras at the station and looked after the property and buildings that had once been part of Ross Pharma. He used these positions to find his marks and run his cons, even after Watkins took him under his wing.
