“Do you? Or are you just saying that because you don’t want to hurt my feelings?”
“I do. I like you, Daniel,” I say. “A lot.”
He hesitates, not sure if he believes me at first, and then he softens. He smiles. He squeezes my hand and says, “I like you a lot too.” He stares at me. He reaches out to stroke my cheek,angling his body toward mine. He says, “I think I could fall in love with you, Reese like the candy.” And I say nothing because I can’t breathe. I can’t think. “It’s too soon, right?” he asks, laughing at himself, something self-deprecating that only makes me like him more. “You probably think I’m crazy. We’ve only known each other a couple days, if that. It’s just that I’ve never met a girl like you. And when you know, you know, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, breathless. When you know, you know. “It’s not crazy,” I say. “I’ve never met anyone like you either.” When I smile, he leans his face down to mine. We kiss, moving fast, not letting a second go to waste. We stay outside like that, kissing on the end of the pier until color creeps back into the edges of the nighttime sky.
Only then does he walk me home. He waits outside the cottage while I go in, and after he leaves, I lie in bed, wondering if this is real or not, if it’s just a dream, and if, when morning comes, I’ll wake up to find it never happened.
Because it feels almost too good to be true.
Courtney
Found Lake Road is narrow, winding and wooded. As I drive down the street, the brown picket fence gives it away though, like Sam Matthews said, it’s the only home you can see from the street, the rest with long, private gravel drives that sit hidden behind dense and overgrown trees.
I park in the driveway and get out of the car, hearing the drum of a woodpecker striking a tree, though the woods are so deep I can’t see it. Sam answers the door when I knock, his face broken up by the fiberglass screen.
“Courtney,” he says, surprise in his voice that I took him up on his offer and came. I realize then that he wasn’t expecting it, which makes me feel guilty for not calling first, but accepting the invitation and wondering now if it wasn’t so much an invitation as a polite gesture.
“Hi, Sam. I’m sorry to just stop by like this. Is this a bad time?”
“No. Not at all.” His kind smile puts me at ease. “I told you you were welcome anytime. Joanna’s just in the basement, doing laundry. Let me get her for you.” He turns away, going to the basement door and calling down for Joanna, who comes up, smiling but short of breath from the steps.
“Courtney. Hi. Please, come in. Excuse the mess,” she says, coming and pushing the screen door open for me, gasping asshe takes in my face. “Oh my God. What happened?” she asks, Sam looking too and seeing it for the first time, his expression changing to concern.
By instinct, my hand goes to the bruise. “It’s not what you think. It was an accident. My nephew, Wyatt, was sleepwalking. I tried to wake him. I should have known better. They say not to wake up people who are sleepwalking, that they can become disoriented and lash out by mistake.”
“He hit you?” Joanna asks, stunned, her eyes wide.
“It’s not like that,” I say. “He was having a dream. I don’t even know if he knows he did this.”
They’re both quiet, not sure what to say, processing what I’ve said. For a moment, they lock eyes, and then Sam suggests, “Why don’t I go finish the laundry and let you two talk.”
She nods, and then to me she says, “Please, sit,” as he leaves, Sam pulling the basement door closed behind himself before I hear his heavy footsteps jog down the stairs. Joanna takes a chair for herself, offering me the sofa, and then she leans forward in her seat so that her elbows are on her knees, asking, “Has he done this before?”
“No,” I say. I shake my head. “I don’t think so. My brother and sister-in-law never mentioned Wyatt sleepwalking, though my brother was a sleepwalker when he was young, so maybe. I’ve heard it runs in families.”
Joanna is quiet at first. She’s circumspect. She visibly hesitates, angling her head the opposite way and then leaning back and crossing her legs before asking, “What I meant was, has he hit you before?”
The question takes me by surprise. I inhale a long drag of air, sitting up straighter on the sofa. “No,” I slowly breathe out. “God, no. Never. Wyatt isn’t like that. Like I said, he was having a bad dream.”
She nods. “Have you heard anything from the police?”
I tell her what I know, which isn’t much. “I want more,” I say, my sigh heavy, frustrated with the lack of progress. It’s been forty-eight hours now since it happened. The first forty-eight hours are the most critical time in finding a missing person. I know the stats; I’ve looked them up. The more time that goes by, the likelihood of finding Reese dead, if at all, increases.
“I know how you feel,” Joanna says. “Waiting is the hardest part. It’s excruciating. So many times we thought we were onto something only for it to turn into a dead end. People would call the police station and claim they saw Kylie somewhere—the library, some street corner, on a bus two hundred miles away—but when we went to look, she was gone. Or surveillance footage that turned out to be someone else. Tracing shoe print patterns through the woods, only to find out they belonged to someone with an alibi or that the prints themselves were inconclusive. We’d get our hopes up for nothing, over and over again. It broke our hearts. It made Sam and me crazy. We wound up turning on each other, because we had no one else to take our frustration out on, and we needed someone to blame.”
“What do you mean?”
Joanna pauses, throwing a glance over her shoulder to be sure Sam is in the basement still and can’t hear. When she speaks, it’s thoughtful, slow, thinking carefully through her words, her voice low. “When Kylie disappeared, I wondered if Sam had something to do with it.”
“Why would you think that?”
I watch as she gazes down at her hands, turning her wedding band around and around in circles before saying, “He had gotten home late from work that night. When I asked why he was late, he said there was a freight train stopped on the tracks. But I wasn’t sure I believed him, because Sam is almost never late. It seemed too coincidental that it would happen on that night of all nights.”
“What did you do? Did you tell anyone?”
She lifts her eyes to mine and admits, “Yes. I told the police.” Her shame is evident, making me think of the blood on Elliott’s shoe, the photo of Reese on his iPad, him rolling me briskly onto my back.What do you think, Court? ThatIkilled them?Maybe I’m just looking for someone to blame. “They looked into it. There is no worse feeling in the world than telling the police you think your husband may have had something to do with your daughter’s disappearance. It didn’t make sense. There was no reason for it. Sam loved Kylie more than anything in the world. He never would have hurt her.”
