Prologue
The incident didn’t start with us. But it ended with us.
I sayuslike the mothers were a team in this, that we were all on the same side. At first, I believed that we were. Together, united, one front. We were friends, after all. Deep in these messy, exhausting, rewarding trenches of motherhood. We knew each other, relied upon each other, trusted each other.
Or at least, we thought we did.
How little we knew each other, or our own children, what they were capable of.
How little I understood whatIwas capable of.
Until that night.
The night that changed our lives forever.
Chapter One
The phone rang, jolting me upright in bed.
I fumbled for it in the dark, knocking over a half-empty glass of water in my rush. My heart pounded, my body reacting before my brain could catch up.
The screen glowed in the dimness. Whitney Alistair.
The phone read 5:40 a.m. A deep and terrible dread coiled in my stomach. Whitney never called me this early. No one did, especially not on a Saturday morning.
I swiped to answer. "Whitney? What's wrong?"
"Dahlia." Her voice was tight, urgent. "You need to come. Something awful has happened."
The words sent a cold spike of fear through my chest.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, rubbing at my gummy eyes with one arm. "What do you mean? What happened? Is it Mia? Is Mia okay?"
Whitney hesitated. I could hear movement in the background, muffled voices. Someone was crying. "Mia is…"
I stopped breathing. "Are the girls safe? Did something happen to Mia?"
"Just come to Rowan's," she said. "Now."
The line went dead.
For a second, I sat there, the phone still pressed to my ear, my palms clammy, my throat dry.
Then I was moving. I yanked on my jeans, pulled a sweatshirt from the hamper, and raced from my bedroom.
I flicked on the hallway light and hesitated at Mia's bedroom door. I pushed it open. Her bed was empty but for our sleeping German Shepherd, curled at the foot of the bed, the sage-green comforter rumpled, the bed unmade.
She wasn't here. She was at my friend Rowan's house down the street, at her daughter Chloe's slumber party.
Fear formed a hard knot in my stomach. I had to lay eyes on her. I had to know she was okay. That she was safe. I was merely overreacting, again.
But then why had it been Whitney, Peyton's mother, who called, rather than Rowan? And what was Whitney doing at Rowan's home before dawn?
Fumbling with the phone, I called Mia's number. No answer. No response to my frantic texts, either. Where was she? What had happened?
I needed to get there. Fast.
I took the stairs two at a time and sprinted down the hall to the living room, stumbling as I shoved my feet into sneakers with shaking hands and fumbled for my keys from the hook by the door.
