“Hot chocolate.”
She glanced around for a mug but didn’t see any. She didn’t even think they had any hot chocolate.
“Hot chocolate? Did Uncle Finn make you that?”
Leo didn’t answer. He buried his hands in the front of her shirt and started pulling on the fabric, the way he did when he thought he was in trouble. “It’s okay, little man. Mommy isn’t mad. We just need to clean you up.”
He looked at her with so much gratitude she regretted all the times she’d been less patient, less understanding. “I wanted marshmallows,” he explained, as she took his sticky hand and led him toward the kitchen.
And that’s when she saw. The bag of marshmallows open on the counter. The stool pulled up next to it. The puddles of French vanilla–flavored coffee that had sloshed over the sides of Finn’s mug from this morning. And the fact that hardly a drop was left inside.
She scooped Leo into her arms and crossed the rest of the distance to the counter, trying to remain calm. She pointed at the mug. “This is what you drank?” He nodded, and something inside her keeled over. No. It couldn’t be.
“This isn’t hot chocolate, little man. It was Uncle Finn’s coffee. Coffee is a grown-up drink. It didn’t taste funny to you?”
He shrugged. She looked again at how much was spilled onto the counter. It was hard to judge. She forced into her voice a calm she didn’t feel. “Did you actually drink it, or did you just dip marshmallows in it?” He didn’t answer.
If only she had dumped it out—if she hadn’t been so careless to hold on to some lingering hope that Finn would polish it off after all …
Her heart pounded, yet she moved slowly—if she set off a tantrum, if he felt he was in trouble, she might never get the answers she needed. And the consequence could be deadly serious. She touched the tip of her nose to his, a move she reserved for when she needed his attention most. “You drank it, or you just dipped marshmallows in it?” she repeated.
“I wanted marshmallows,” he said again. Then, with another sticky grin, “It tasted like hot chocolate!” Caitlin had a flash of Gus and Bear, still sleeping in the tent. She set Leo on the floor at her feet and took him by the shoulders as gently as she could manage with her pulse racing.
“Did Gus and Bear drink some too?”
He shook his head.
“Are you sure? Not even a little bit?”
“I didn’t want to share,” he said.
Caitlin fought against the growing sense of panic that threatened to overtake her. She couldn’t let herself get frantic, not now.
“Honey, do you feel sick at all? Do you feel sleepy?” Leo looked at her strangely. She glanced over her shoulder at the tent, at Finn asleep on the couch. No one stirred.
“Let’s go into the bathroom, sweetie,” she said soothingly, taking Leo by the hand. She pulled him down the hall and he followed reluctantly. Back in the master bathroom, she washed her hands and his at the sink. Then she led Leo gently over to the toilet and knelt down beside him.
When he was younger, he had an underdeveloped gag reflex, one that used to make every little head cold miserable for the whole family by causing him to throw up without warning—all over his bedsheets, or the couch, or his car seat—when he coughed with any force at all. She prayed he still had it. Without a word, she wrapped an arm around his midsection, bent him over the bowl, and pushed her index finger as far down his throat as she could. Leo made a loud, startled gagging noise, and she pulled her hand back. He cried out, and then began to wail, tears of hurt and surprise instantly streaming down his face. He did not, however, throw up.
She did it again, to no avail. She gave him a moment to catch his breath, then tried again. Each time, he wailed louder. By the time her fifth attempt failed, she was crying too. She sank onto the floor, wrapped both arms around him, and pulled him close. His little shoulders heaved and she held on tight.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said. “Mommy’s so sorry.”
“You’re—” Leo was sobbing so hard he could barely get the words out. “Scaring—” Another sob. “Meeeee…”
“Mommy’s so sorry,” she said again and again, rocking him back and forth on the tile. Poison Control. Should she call Poison Control? They’d want to know, of course, how many pills he’d had. Could she safely tell them half the amount she’d given Finn? It seemed possible that the powder might have hovered near the bottom of the thermos. So maybe Leo hadn’t gotten much. Then again, maybe he’d gotten more than his share.
Even if she ventured a guess, invented a story as to how he’d gotten into the pills, even if Poison Control said he would probably be fine—even if they brushed it off as a common accident, even if this sort of thing happened to other parents all the time, even if they asked her to just monitor him for any concerning symptoms—could she ever take that chance, not knowing how much of the drug he’d actually ingested? She knew the answer already. Besides, she couldn’t stay here now that she’d managed to knock Finn out, and she couldn’t observe Leo properly on the road to Asheville. There was no way around getting him to the emergency room.
She had to get them all out of here without waking Finn. If he woke up, this would all be for nothing. She would have put Leo in harm’s way for nothing.
If the hospital said Leo was okay—and if by some miracle they didn’t arrest her for child endangerment—she could take Bear straight to Violet as planned. If not …
She couldn’t think about that. She wouldn’t.
Leo was sniffling quietly in her arms now, heaving the occasional shaking sigh like she herself did after a good cry. She tilted his face up to hers. It was hard to tell after he’d been crying, but did his eyes look glassy? Groggy? His lead lolled against her chest and he looked at her lethargically.
She had to grab the other kids and go. They had to go now.
25
AUGUST 2016
The morning following her call with Mrs. Branson, Violet didn’t leave the house. She didn’t want to see anyone, if she could help it. Lying rumpled in Bear’s bed, cell phone in her sweaty hand, she made up excuses to evade Gram, then preempted Agent Martin’s daily visit with a phone call to check in.
“We have a lead on a car Finn may have bought, from a mobile home park in walking distance of an Amtrak station in Tennessee,” he told her.
Her heart stilled. “When was it sold?”
“Four, five days ago.” He sounded preoccupied with the information, which she took to be a good sign. “Hard to say whether the guy just wants the reward, but we’re sending someone to look into it.”
Violet had almost forgotten about the reward Gram had offered for vital information. The chances of the missing persons report drawing interest had seemed so bleak.
“Thank you,” she told him, sincerely, willing her brain to wrap itself around this new, small hope. A car would mean a license plate, and that might mean they could issue an AMBER Alert after all. It might mean there was a trail to follow. Her eyes watered with gratitude. “I won’t keep you, then.”
“As always, let us know if you think of anything else,” he said, clearing his throat. “In light of new information.” He was referring to the bombshell about Maribel, of course. Would he think it strange if he knew that she’d phoned Mrs. Branson? She hated this new lingering sensation of always feeling as if she might be doing something wrong. But perhaps it wasn’t entirely new after all. Perhaps it didn’t feel as unfamiliar as it should have.
He said he’d come by the next morning, unless there was something to report in the meantime, and she hung up feeling oddly off the hook. She reverted to not bothering to shower. She stayed in her pajamas. She didn’t eat breakfast, even though her stomach was roiling with a hangover from the night before. She left Bear’s bed only to down some ibuprofen and—though the morning sun streamed through his blinds, and her own room across the hall was invitingly dark—she nestled back in among his stuffed animals, as much because she missed Bear as because she co
uldn’t stand the thought of being in the place where she’d spent so many nights lying next to the stranger who was Finn. She tried to picture Bear now. An Amtrak station. A train, then. A walk to a mobile home park. An unfamiliar car. Tennessee. It wasn’t much, but it was something. She closed her eyes against the daylight, but she did not sleep.
Nor had she really slept the night before. Because even surrounded by so many sweet, soft reminders of Bear, even having downed enough vodka to make the room tilt until she had no choice but to close her eyes, unconsciousness had evaded her. She’d been unable to stop thinking back, memory by painful memory, on all that had transpired with Finn, from day one through the nightmare of today.
No, she wasn’t thinking of it—she was rethinking it.
She was trying to rewrite the story of her life. The story of their lives together. She was trying to discover what an objective passenger might have written in that captain’s log—or, perhaps more to the point, what Finn would have written there. The problem was, she wasn’t sure. Everything was a big question mark now.
Just days ago, she would have welcomed any distraction that would keep her from obsessing about Bear every second of every day and night. Now, in the revelation about Maribel, she had one—but it was a distraction that only made her feel even more helpless, more clueless, than she could have imagined possible.
That confusion, though, was juxtaposed with an odd sense of clarity that overtook specific memories—particularly the recent ones.
Violet had never been able to figure out, for instance, why Finn had insisted on flying rather than driving on their vacation. It would have been so much simpler to choose a beach in the Carolinas that wouldn’t have taken more than a day’s drive. It would have been so much easier to transport their ridiculous amount of little kid gear that way—the car seat, the stroller, the portable booster for mealtimes, the overflowing diaper bag she still kept on hand in case of accidents. It would have been so much cheaper to bring their own beach chairs, and umbrellas, and sand toys, rather than buying it all when they arrived, only to have to throw it out at the end of the week. Violet had argued all of these points, but their fights never got very far—whichever one of them was less determined or less upset, and it was always one of them, would soon cave rather than draw out the agony.
In this case, Violet had conceded. She’d thought Finn was being romantic, wanting to return to Sunny Isles, to the spot where they had first met, wanting to go there with her this time, wanting to add to their memories of the spot with Bear. The fact that he was willing to go to extra expense and more inconvenience to make that happen couldn’t be anything but sweet, could it?
Now she thought differently. She no longer knew when Finn had stopped being in love with her—or if he’d ever really loved her at all. But she did know that the last time he’d embarked on a road trip to a Carolina beach, someone had died. Someone whom he most definitely did love. Of course he wouldn’t want to take that route again.
And if he’d planned all along to leave Violet there—she didn’t know if he had, but if that was the case—why stay closer to home when he could give himself a head start on running away? How much more thorough to strand her so far from everyone and everything she knew, without even a car.
What kind of marriage was that? She’d seen the smugness of the question on Agent Martin’s face yesterday. This guy didn’t even tell his wife he had a fiancée before, let alone that he caused her death. Not so shocking all of a sudden that he ran off with his kid, was it? No telling what a guy like that might do.
Of course, Violet hadn’t admitted to the agent that she actually had known all along that Finn had been engaged—that as those first days of their courtship had stretched into weeks and then months, she had waited for the moment he would take her hands in his, say softly that there was something he had to tell her, and then gently explain that he had had a fiancée once, but that it hadn’t worked out for one reason or another, and say that he was so very glad it hadn’t, because all along he’d been thinking of her and wishing things had ended differently on the beach that day. And she also hadn’t volunteered to Agent Martin that when that moment never came, she decided to just try to move forward as if she didn’t feel a piece of his history was missing from what they’d shared. Because who knows? Maybe her company’s HR department had gotten his reason for canceling the interview wrong in the first place. Maybe they had misunderstood, or mixed him up with a candidate for another job opening.
There was no way to know. Because after months of waiting for Finn to bring it up, how could she possibly be the one to do it? “Hey, remember when you applied for this job with my company, but canceled your interview at the last minute? How do I know that? Well, funny story…” He’d want to know why she hadn’t asked him about it earlier. There wasn’t an explanation that didn’t peg her as a coward, afraid to hear the answer. Which, deep down, she had been. And apparently with good reason.
She could still hear Katie’s parting advice that day she’d brought Violet the Missed Connections ad. “Be honest and play dumb.”
Right.
In a way, she was just as guilty as Finn. Maybe not guilty, but not guiltless either. Admitting that to Agent Martin would have meant she would have had to admit it to herself. And Gram. And Caitlin.
Caitlin.
She hadn’t called to check in, nor had Violet tried her again since catching her on the house phone days ago. And that was just as well.
Caitlin had to have known Finn’s history. All of it. And she, too, had never seen fit to mention this to Violet, as if it were something that might be important for Finn’s wife and the mother of his child to know. Not only that he had loved before, and been responsible for the death of that love, and planned to start a new life with her in the very place that Violet found herself now, but that it wasn’t clear how or whether he’d found a way to make peace with any of that.
Caitlin had said nothing when she and Violet first became friends. She’d said nothing when the two women were bound by their forays into motherhood and grew just as close as Caitlin and Finn had been all those years before. And she’d said nothing when Finn disappeared with Bear and she herself came to sit in this very room with Violet and cry with her.
Alongside Gram, Caitlin had been the first one here when Violet returned from Sunny Isles—was it really just a week ago?—brokenhearted and confused and empty-handed. She’d seemed appropriately devastated and outraged and mystified on Violet’s behalf. But now all of Violet’s memories were being called into question. Who was to say whom she could trust? Or whom she should?
Had Caitlin been more loyal to Finn all along? Had Violet been blind to the true feelings of everyone she felt close to?
Even if she still couldn’t see it in looking back, she now knew that while Finn had appeared sturdy enough on the surface, he’d been crumbling at some key structural components underneath. And if the foundation was that shaky, there was no way anything they built on it could ever be stable. Violet could slather on as much mortar as she wanted; she could redecorate their relationship to mirror a glossy picture that she liked; she could patch and prime and paint until she’d exhausted the available resources and then some. But none of it would ever fix the real problem, none of it would stop the whole crooked thing from sliding to the ground.
It wouldn’t have been so catastrophic if what they’d built had housed just the two of them.
In spite of everything she’d learned, none of it changed her disbelief that Finn would want to hurt her this way by taking Bear. Maybe he’d panicked and hadn’t thought it through. Maybe he regretted it. Maybe even as she was lying here miserably now, he was looking for a way to bring Bear back without digging himself in deeper.
If there were a way for Finn to return Bear without himself being charged with kidnapping, would he take it? There had to be a way, if she had anything to say about it—but how could she let him know?
And how had they spent so many of th
e years since they’d met wanting to reach out to each other but unsure how to cross the indeterminable distance between them?
26
AUGUST 2016
Caitlin had pictured this moment countless times—the moment she would do irreparable harm to one of her children. But she’d never pictured it like this. Watching the national news or reading parenting magazines, she’d feel physically ill at the stories of parents who’d forgotten their sleeping children in car seats, who’d thought their handguns were stored out of reach, who’d sworn they’d gone back inside just for a second while the child was playing in the front yard. She knew everyone else was thinking, What awful parents. Who could be so irresponsible? But Caitlin felt only fear. Who was she to judge? What if she were to one day make some crucial mistake that brought on that kind of heartbreak and self-loathing from within, that kind of wrath from all around?
Once she’d made it with the boys out of the cabin, past a mercifully unconscious but evenly breathing Finn, the full force of her terror set in. She’d hastily squeezed and strapped Bear’s car seat between the twins’ as best she could with shaking hands, and peeled out in a crunch of gravel and a cloud of dust. The whole drive here to the hospital, she’d silently begged—whom, she wasn’t even sure. Please, she pleaded, over and over, as her eyes flicked wildly from the rearview mirror, where she could see Leo slumped over, eyes closed, in his car seat, to the curvy road ahead, and back again. Please don’t let today be that day. Please don’t let this happen to Leo—my beautiful, perfect, energetic, miracle baby Leo. Please don’t let it happen to Gus, his brother who needs him, or to George, who didn’t ask for any of this, or to Bear, who just needs to go home. Please don’t let it happen to me.
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