When she was pregnant with Emma, living with Vincent was enough to have her cramping off and on for months. Now, she’s got it coming from all directions, and her body isn’t coping well.
“Need to lie down? Get off your feet? Can I bring you some food?” Wyatt asks softly, so obviously regretful that he’d been pushing her.
This is her chance. She should take it. Tell him she needs to rest and use that as an excuse to avoid breaking her own heart out in the woods, but she doesn’t. “No. I’ll be okay, you don’t have to worry.”
It strikes her as a silly thing to say. Who is she to him that he would worry at all? Then again, she spent the last week worrying about him, didn’t she?
Her cheeks heat up as she looks away. His concern for her well-being far surpasses anything her husband ever showed. That’s not something she expected from such an unlikely source. After years of wishing a man would treat her with kindness and basic decency, she’s finally gotten that and doesn’t know what to do with it.
He’s quiet for a long moment, and she wonders if he’s ready to admit that she isn’t strong enough for this. He’ll see how weak she is and agree it’s for the best that they stay here, where she won’t have to face reality.
Her stomach flips, and another cramp squeezes hard, bringing buried memories along with it.
“I almost lost Emma before,” she whispers. “The first time, I stopped feeling her move for three days. I was six monthspregnant. We weren’t allowed to visit the city for groceries, let alone the doctor. I thought she was gone, and then one morning she started doing somersaults as if nothing had happened.”
Addison wipes at her face with the back of her hand, not daring to look up for fear of finding judgment. She should have left the group so many times. So many times. It’s only in hindsight that she can fully see how trapped she was her whole life.
“The second time, she was fishing on a dock. I only went inside for a moment. Just a moment. When I came back out, she was gone, and Vincent was reaching over the edge to try to pull her back up. That’s how little he thought of her. She wasn’t worth the hassle of jumping in the lake, even to save her life. She was halfway to the bottom by the time I reached her. And then she coughed up some water and told me she fell off because she caught a fish, and the tension on the line pulled her in. She wanted to try again after she got a snack…like nothing had happened.”
“She’s a fighter. It sounds like she always has been.”
“I wanna believe she still is. That she’s out there waiting for us, and we’ll find her safe, but fate’s been trying to take her from me right from the start. Our luck’s running out.”
“This wasn’t fate, ain’t no such thing. We can’t give up,” he says. “Not knowing is worse.”
He’s right, much as she hates to admit it. Fear of finding an answer has kept her frozen, but fear of never knowing lurks in the background, too.
“Okay.”
A decision made lifts a small weight off her shoulders. The upward curve of his half-smile gives her a much-needed boost.
She can do this. She has to.
He grabs the shotgun by the door. “You even got the spiders in the corner. Did you stand on the chair while evicting them?”
She huffs. “Maybe. Couldn’t live with them moving around like that. It made me shiver. I either had to get rid of them or name them.”
“No more pets.” He smirks. “The cats and the goats are enough. Not unless it’s a dog…”
They talk about redecorating the house as they head out to search, and she teases him that she’ll let all the cats in soon. Any conversation is better than thinking about the crushing fear swirling in her gut. Hiding from this forever isn’t an option. The only way forward is to walk out that door and face what waits.
* * *
They begin where they found the stuffed animal. Addison clutches it in her hands like a good luck charm, but the only thing it’s good for is giving her something to squeeze.
Wyatt walks a few steps ahead before veering into a ditch. “I didn’t notice this last time. Did you?”
She stares at the backpack he holds up from a long-dead rotter stuffed face-first into a bush. “No. Anything in it?”
He dumps a few papers and random items onto the ground. “Nothing useful. Thinking someone looted it already. We found the toy a few yards back…”
“Do you think she found this? That she could have gotten supplies from there?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
It’s wishful thinking that solving this puzzle can be as simple as reconstructing a crime scene on a TV show, but if this is the road he wants to go down, then she’s happy to follow.
“There’s a dairy farm not far from here. I passed it coming in. She would have seen the sign.”
