She pulls the phone from her ear, looks at it, and goes sheet white.
“Maisey?”
“She went to the airport at midnight last night,” she whispers. “Midnight. It’s—it’s after ten a.m. there now, and my credit card got declined when she tried to buy a plane ticket, and Dean can’t find her, and her phone goes straight to voice mail, and—and my baby is missing.”
My stomach rolls over.
“She needed me, and she’s missing,” she whispers. “I have to go. I have to go find her.”
“Let me help—”
She doesn’t answer. She’s dialing a number on her phone, climbing into her truck as she does it.
“Where. Thefuck. Is my daughter?” she says before she slams the door.
She jerks her seat belt on, hits the button to start her truck, and nothing happens.
Of course nothing happens.
Her purse is inside.
June’s missing, and Maisey can’t start her truck. I turn to head inside, intending to grab shoes and a shirt and go with her, but before I’ve finished turning around, Maisey’s leaping out of her truck and hustling around me to my front door.
“No, Dean, she’s not beinga brat. You’re being an asshole. You don’t call when you say you will, you cancel weekend trips to come see her, when you email, it’s allLook at the cool places I am that you’re not, and now you fly her to Florida, bully her into driving whenyou know she’s terrified, and top it off by telling her you’regetting married and having a fucking babywith the woman you were cheating on me with, andyou think our neglected daughter is supposed to behappyabout that? You have exactly fifty-eight minutes to call me back and tell me you’ve found her before I’m boarding a plane to come tear you apart piece by piece by—”
The rest of her sentence is lost as my front door slams behind her.
It opens again nearly instantaneously, and she marches out with her purse in hand. “No, I will not calm down, you fucking bastard. You lost my daughter.You lost my daughter.”
“Maisey—” I start.
“Thank you, I’ve got this,” she says to me.
“I can help—” I try again.
“Yes, Dean, that’s a man,” she says into the phone. “A manI’m not marrying, and a manwhose baby I’m not carrying, and a man whodoes shit for our daughter, unlike you, so you can just take a goddamn flying—”
She slams herself into her truck again, still yelling.
Wonder if this is the first time she’s let it all out.
But I don’t wonder how she’s planning on getting to the airport and on a plane in fifty-eight minutes.
I know better than to doubt a mother on a mission.
She flings the phone down, and I hear the truck shift into gear, but before she puts on the gas, she looks down, and she crumples.
Head to the steering wheel.
Truck shifted back into park.
And she crumples.
I cautiously reach for the door and open it, doing my best to not let her see that my heart’s in my throat and I’m terrified for her. She needs calm.
She needs confidence.
She needs belief.
