39
CHLOE
I’m dreaming of the lake again, although this time, the water’s as warm as some tropical sea. I float on my back, staring up at a bright, turquoise sky, and when strong hands wrap around my waist and pull me under, I don’t fight it.
Theo,I whisper, his name turning into a stream of silvery bubbles.
Some kind of sonic jangling cuts through the water, and his hands slip away from me, and I’m left floating on my own. The jangling doesn’t disappear, though. It gets louder and louder until I?—
Until I gasp awake, blinking in the bright morning sunlight. The jangle, I realize, is my phone. It beeps over to voicemail as I try to get my bearings about me.
“Theo?” I sit up, tossing the blankets aside. My bed is empty, and I feel a kind of hollowness at the sight of it, even though last night when I asked him to come to bed with me, I didn’t fully understand why. I didn’t fully understand why I asked him to fuck me in the kitchen, either, or why I had him choke me, or why I came so hard from it. Twice.
“Theo? You here?” I grab my phone and squint down at the caller.
Sofia Social Worker
I freeze, suddenly not focused on Theo’s whereabouts. I fumble to play the voicemail.
“Hi Chloe, it’s Sofia Barrera. I know it’s been a few months since we, uh, spoke, but I have some questions I wanted to ask you.”
My heart thuds. She never calls me. I was the one calling her, desperate to set up a time to see Oliver, to make sure he’s okay.
“If you could give me a call back when you get a chance, I would really appreciate it.”
Is there a tight quiver of worry in her voice? My whole body goes numb except for my heart, which pumps so furiously I feel like I can’t catch my breath. Every time I called Sofia, she told me the same thing: I’m not family. She understands my concerns. They want to smooth the transition as much as they can.
With shaking hands, I call back. She answers on the first ring.
“It’s Chloe.” I stumble into the living room, bright with sunlight. There’s no sign of Theo anywhere. “Chloe Monroe. You just called?—”
“Oh, yes. Chloe.” Sofia sounds harried, I think. Worried. “Thanks for calling me back. I was just calling because—“ She hesitates for a second, and I stop in front of the picture window and shove the curtain aside to look at the snow-covered trees of Theo’s peninsula. I’m sure that’s where he went. “Because I was wondering if you had heard from Oliver lately.”
“Heard from—” I shake my head, my heart still pounding. “No, I’ve been out of power for the last three days because of the storm. I—he never texted me or anything. Is he okay?”
Sofia takes a deep breath. I hate that fucking sound. It’s what she does right before she delivers bad news. “Please,” I say, whipping away from the window and pacing across theliving room. “I understand that I’m not family and that there’s a certain way of doing things, but I really do worry?—”
“He’s missing,” Sofia says.
Every system in my body seems to stop.
“Missing?” The word echoes around in my ear. “How the hell can he be missing?”
Sofia takes another deep breath that, on the phone, sounds like the blizzard. “His foster family woke up this morning to find his bed empty and some of his clothes missing. His backpack, too.”
I think of that backpack, covered in green and blue dinosaurs.
“He had been—unhappy.” Sofia hesitates. “He was having trouble adjusting, given everything that happened. It was—one of the reasons we didn’t want him to have contact with you.”
I squeeze my phone, my heart thumping. “If I heard from him,” I say numbly. “I would tell you.”
“I know you would. The police are aware and are out looking for him, but I wanted to give you a heads up in case he did try to contact you.”
“Did he leave a note?” I ask. “Anything? Some sign of where he was going?”
He thinks Theo is a ghost.
“No, nothing that the family was able to find.”
