“I always tell her it’s polite to always ask and never assume. She was just— Sorry. Nobody really thinks that.” Regan is trying to cover, but I know they all do. I feel something rising up inside me at that moment. All this time I have lived in a mostly numb and shocked state, but now the tingling in my hands and lightheadedness are pushing in and I can tell a panic attack is coming. I quickly excuse myself to the bathroom, which is mercifully right next to the booth we are sitting in.
Inside the tiny single-occupant restroom, I lean over the sink and try to calm my breath. Tears are streaking down my cheeks and I am hyperventilating, which is causing me to see stars. I have to keep control, because there is only a thin wooden door with a flimsy hook latch between me and the rest of the café, and I can’t have anyone hear this. Shit, I need to pull it together. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I mutter to myself. I sit on top of the toilet seat and rest my head in my hands.
I can hear them talking right outside.
“Sorry, I didn’t know,” Hallie says.
“It’s okay. Here. How about you go get in line and get Auntie Andi those donuts and I’ll go grab the uniforms fromher car, and we’ll get going,” Regan says, and it takes a second to register that the keys I hear her pick up from the table are my keys. My car keys. By the time it all makes sense, I’m storming out of the bathroom door, but it’s happened so fast. I see her out the café door already. Hallie in the bakery line with a twenty in her hand, watching me run past her and out the front door. Regan is almost to my car.
“Wait!” I shout, running after her. “Stop!” But like something out of a nightmare—almost as if it’s happening in painful slow motion—I see her beep the key fob. She doesn’t hear me or turn. She clicks open the hatch to my car and it automatically begins to open. The hatch is all the way open and she’s peering inside as I scream.
“Are you crazy?” I catch up to her and fling myself at the hatch, pushing it forcefully closed. “Stop! What is wrong with you?” It clicks closed and my face is flushed and wet with tears. She didn’t move anything yet, thank Christ. She didn’t see. Panic and relief swell inside me.
“Oh, my God, Andi. What—I was...” she starts to say, but I snatch back my keys, push past her. I lunge myself into the driver’s seat and screech out of the parking lot, leaving Regan standing there with her mouth hanging open and a half a dozen other witnesses to the bizarre scene that just happened.
It’s almost dusk by the time I get out of town and onto the rural road leading to the part of the river I’m looking for. I can’t slow my heart rate after what happened in the parking lot. I can’t stop my hand shaking or the thoughts racing. What have I done? Really, what the hell have I done to my life—my family? I suppress the urge to scream until my lungs bleed. I’ll never get away with this, especially after what just happened.
The moon is dim behind the clouds and an endless mistmakes it hard to see where the clearings are in the dense tree-lined road, but I don’t have much time. I need to just do it. It’s been a while since I’ve seen headlights on the opposite side of the road, so I know I’m getting into the woodsy area I’m looking for where I have the best chance of avoiding a car passing. If I pull into a clearing in the trees, I can turn my lights off and hurry. I can... My thoughts stop cold when I see red lights flashing behind me. Then a siren.
Chapter Sixteen
Regan
Everyone is staring. I finally pick my jaw up off the ground and go back into the café to collect Hallie and go home. I thought Sasha going MIA when she promised to pick me up was very out of character, but this... Something is happening beyond Jack and beyond whoever broke into my house looking for something very specific, and it can’t all be a big coincidence. This all has to be connected somehow, and I am dead set on getting to the bottom of it.
The police plan to add extra patrol on my street, and I already have a beefy alarm system with cameras in the house. I just hadn’t had a chance to turn the system on yet before the break-in, attack—or whatever it was meant to be. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the person was there looking for something. The more I really think on it, if they were there to hurt me, why didn’t they have a gun? They seemed caught offguard, panicked, and attacked me with the handle of a shovel that was leaning against the stairs, and then they had to break a window to escape. That couldn’t have been the plan.
He had gloves on, and there’s no blood from a cut or anything around the window he broke. It seems pretty impossible the police can do anything more than file a report. So what can I do? I was too scared to go into the basement all day after Sasha dropped me off. I just slept and slept. It had been a few days since I’d been able to sleep at all, so it all caught up to me, and the pain pill they gave me at the hospital helped. Now it’s time to take matters into my own hands.
“Did Aunt Andi go crazy?” Hallie asks from the back seat, jolting me out of my looping thoughts.
“No, she’s just... under a lot of stress.”
“If you say so,” she says with raised eyebrows.
“She’s going through a lot—we need to be a little understanding.”
“I know, but... do I have to go to Dez’s pizza night next week? I don’t wanna go. No one does.”
“Who’s no one? Why not?” She doesn’t answer. “Hal, why? He’s your good friend.”
Hallie nods and shrugs and stays silent. After a few moments she looks up at me and I meet her eyes in the rearview mirror.
“We’re not safe,” she says as I pull into the garage and park. She gets out of the car and slams the door.
“What?” Her words have caught me so off guard that I don’t have any other response. I hesitate and she runs off.
She doesn’t want to talk about it, so I don’t force her. After a couple tries, I let her lie to me about not having any homework and allow her to eat in her room and watch TV.Whatever she needs today is fine by me. Kids talk and rumors gets embellished. That’s all this is.
I double-check the alarms and doors before making a pot of tea and sitting on the armchair near the fireplace. I scroll on my phone to find Beatrice from the Bluebird Café and send her a message. She seems all too eager to offer any gossip she can, so maybe she’ll keep me informed since I couldn’t get there myself today.
I hesitate, though. I think about forgetting the whole thing. Depression can be funny like that. On one hand I’m fueled by this quest—it’s the only thing giving me life right now—but on the other, I question myself every other second, wondering if I’m actually mad. Have I lost my mind? Everyone else thinks so. I see the way they look at me. It’s not a self-pitying thing when I say it; I actually do wonder if I had some mental break and all of this is in my head. Maybe I went into the basement on some hallucination-filled rage from the meds and took to the boxes with a baseball bat and imagined it all. It’s not impossible. Except that Hallie saw someone, and unless my overwhelming paranoia is rubbing off on her, there is no way we can both be wrong.
I could just go to sleep and forget about all of it—escape life completely for the next ten hours. Then I could drop Hal at school and sleep for six more. That’s mostly what I’ve been doing since I lost my job. Our savings was already plenty to live on, and with the life insurance, I could sleep all my days away and only pretend to be alive for Hallie. Evenings and weekends. That could be my life. It’s tempting. But there is something else tugging at me—something telling me to get up, wake up. Follow this through. Something that feels a little like hope. Maybe just for closure so I can move on with mylife. I feel like I have to know or I’ll rot here, under all the grief.
Hello Beatrice, I type.I was hoping you could tell me if Jack was at the café today? You didn’t tell him about our conversation, I hope.It takes only a couple of minutes before her reply comes through.
Girl, I was looking for him to pop in all day. He always comes on Monday. He did look pretty pale when I asked if his name was Jack though, so maybe he’s scared off. How mysterious. I’ll message you when I see him next. Don’t worry, my lips are sealed.
