One glance up at Malcolm’s suddenly blank expression, and I know he recognizes it. “Who? Malcolm, tell me.”
“That’s Mrs. Abbott’s number.”
The Abbott estate is set back nearly a mile from the road. We can’t even see the house through all the trees when we pull up to the gated entry. Malcolm groans before he kills the engine. “I don’t know if I can scale another wall.”
“You don’t have to,” I say as I unbuckle my seat belt.
His head snaps to me. “I’m not sending you in there alone.”
I find a smile for him somewhere in all my panic for Mom. “No, I mean you don’t have to climb over. Neither of us does. Look.” I point to the white Nissan pickup some twenty yards away. It’s parked right up against the wall. “Mom wasn’t scaling anything either. You’ll still have to jump down, but I can catch you if you want.”
“Hey,” he says as I turn to open my door. When I glance back over my shoulder, he fits his hand to my chin. “Apologies to your not-boyfriend, but—” And then Malcolm kisses me.
It’s fast and hard and I barely have time to close my eyes before it’s over, but it’s maybe the best kiss of my life.
“In case you drop me or something and lose that flicker of attraction you’ve had since I kicked you the first time we met.”
We’re still really close, inches apart. So close that I can see that his eyes are flecked with gold.
“You never apologized for that.”
“What do you think I just did?” That soft look in his eyes fades when he adds, “Now let’s go find your mom.”
Jumping down from the wall hurts. And Malcolm refuses to let me catch him, opting instead to accept my hand when he botches the landing and slips on some wet leaves.
“Okay?” I ask when he’s standing again. He glares at me in answer. No, he’s not okay, but it doesn’t matter. Like he said in the car, he’s not sending me in alone. I should probably be frustrated with his stubbornness, but I’m too relieved.
We move up the driveway as quickly and cautiously as we can. It curves around a pond at one point and branches off toward a pool and a guesthouse at another. The moon is bright and nearly full, but there are so many trees lining the property—lofty sycamores, maples, and evergreens—that we never have to stray from the shadows. The air is damp and cold, and my goose bumps have goose bumps before we finally see the main house.
Towering before us are three stories of light-gray stone, with arching windows and walls of glass, all covered with heavy drapes. It doesn’t look like a home so much as a mausoleum. That chilling thought brings me up short, because that’s exactly what it is. My father—my real father—died here.
My mother fled down this exact driveway that night, and she walked back up it maybe ten minutes ago.
I don’t know Mom’s mindset or her intentions, but I can’t imagine her brazenly knocking on the door. I start circling the house in search of an entrance. Mom wouldn’t have wanted to walk any farther than she already had, and judging by the car she didn’t bother hiding at the gate, she wasn’t planning to slip in and out unnoticed. My heart lodges high in my throat. I don’t think she’s planning to get out at all.
Where, where, where would she have gone in? I’m not looking up. She’s hurt; she needed someplace low. And she didn’t have time. She knew I’d come after her, and if I found her once I could do it again.
It’s the blood that tips me off. A basement window is broken, and glittering on one jagged edge is a smear of red. Relief isn’t the emotion that hits me; it’s more like intense panic, making me forget myself and call to Malcolm.
I have to break out more of the glass before I can wriggle through, and I still end up catching my sweater and slicing through a good chunk of my forearm. Malcolm has a much easier go of it, what with my blood, and Mom’s, signaling the side to avoid.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah.” The cut is long, but I don’t think it’s deep. The adrenaline coursing through my body isn’t letting me feel pain at the moment, though, so I don’t really know if it’s bad or not. I tear off the strip of sweater the window started unraveling, and Malcolm helps me tie it over my cut arm. The need to find Mom is jittering through me so strongly that it’s almost impossible to stand still, so as soon as he’s done, I dash to a narrow set of steps and up to the first floor.
Faint light shows us another staircase, this one immense, bringing a formal sitting room into view along with a stacked stone fireplace so big I could stand in it. Moonlight reflects off a marble countertop far in the distance, in what is presumably the kitchen, but neither Malcolm nor I move in that direction.
Because above us we can hear voices.
And one of them belongs to my mother.
The voices grow louder as we tiptoe up the stairs, and my pounding heart thumps with increasing intensity. For the first time since my mom left me, I’m at war between wanting to sprint toward something and wanting to flee from it.
There are no lights on in the long hallway at the top. The only source of illumination bleeds out from beneath a partially closed door at the end. Mom’s voice is steady as we draw near, strong and sure.
“—what you wanted.”
“What I wanted?” another voice says, an older woman, and I know by the way the hairs rise on the back of my neck that it belongs to my grandmother. “I want my son back.”
