Forever, With You

by Sophie Love

  Then Emily found something else in the vault that she felt certain was a message from her father. It had to be. A dollar bill, just one, fell into her lap. When she studied the date on it she found that it was from last year.

  Emily could hardly believe it. She had to rearrange her mind to accept the new reality that just last year, Roy Mitchell had been alive and had been in this house. It could only have been a few months prior to her moving in! The thought made her nauseous. Had she really come so close to seeing him again?

  She clutched the dollar bill, the sudden new lifeline to her father. Though she still had no real answers, she had found the most revealing evidence yet.

  Roy Mitchell was alive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  “He must have been here!” Emily exclaimed to Daniel once she’d left the basement, her bundle of letters clutched tightly in her arms.

  “Someone has been here, there’s nothing to say it was your father,” Daniel countered.

  Emily shook her head. “No. It was him. I know it was. I can feel it. No one else would store the letters like that, hide them away in a vault. No one else would read them over and over again.”

  Daniel took a deep breath. “Fine. Say it was your father who read the letters. What makes you so certain that he’s alive?”

  “Don’t you see?” Emily cried, growing almost hysterical. “Twenty-five years ago my dad disappeared. Five years ago he was in this house reading these letters.” She waved the bundle in the air for emphasis. Then she held up the dollar bill, jabbing her pointer finger over and over again onto the date. “And just one year ago he left this in the vault as well. ONE YEAR. It could have been as little as a month before I arrived here.”

  Daniel looked uncertain. “I’ve been living in the carriage house for a long time, keeping an eye on the property, making sure the house didn’t fall into complete disrepair. I never once saw any sign that your father was here.”

  “You just missed it,” Emily snapped. “Like the rest of us.” She remembered her game of hide and go seek with Chantelle. There were a thousand and one places to hide in the house, from the attic to the basement, and it was more than conceivable for her father to sneak in undetected, right under everyone’s noses.

  “The important thing,” Emily added, “is that his disappearance was no accident. He didn’t get murdered or commit suicide. He made a deliberate attempt to disappear.” She looked at Daniel and tried to read his expression, concluding that it was one of disbelief. “He’s still alive, Daniel. I need you to believe me.”

  “Okay,” Daniel soothed. “I believe you. Can we go to bed now? It’s been a hell of a day.”

  But Emily couldn’t sleep. Not now. Not after this discovery. That Daniel could think of sleep at such a time seemed to suggest to her that he didn’t believe her, despite his insistence that he did. Infuriated, she shoved past him, the precious bundle of letters in her arms.

  “Where are you going?” Daniel said, exasperated.

  “Somewhere where I can read these in peace,” Emily replied.

  She rushed up the stairs and into her dad’s study, locking the door behind her. She always felt most connected to her dad in this room, with its huge desk and filing cabinets. She sat down in the chair, ignoring the wall clock that told her it was past midnight, and began to read.

  As she read and reread the letters, the present day disappeared and Emily found herself sliding back in time, back into one of her erased childhood memories.

  It was Thanksgiving. She was ten years old. Her dad’s friend was coming over to help cook dinner, something she liked to do on the holidays to make sure he wasn’t lonely, her dad had explained.

  “If Mom came then we wouldn’t be lonely,” Emily said.

  She was getting older, questioning things more. Roy didn’t like his daughter challenging him.

  “Your mom didn’t want to come,” he snapped back. “And Toni’s a very good friend of mine. If I want her over for Thanksgiving I will have her over for Thanksgiving. You love playing with Persephone, you’re always asking to see her.”

  Emily listened to his tirade, but the words weren’t really reaching her. Something her dad had said earlier had left her confused. She frowned. “Why did you call her Toni?”

  Her dad’s eyes widened with shock. He instantly shook his head. “Diana, I mean. You know what I’m like, always mixing up names.”

  But Emily knew that wasn’t true. Roy was good with names, a real people person, always making an effort to remember everyone. For the first time Emily wondered whether her father was hiding something from her. Diana. Toni. Diana. Toni. She ruminated on it over and over. And it didn’t seem like a coincidence to her that Diana didn’t come around to help cook the Thanksgiving meal that year, that she then didn’t come around in the summer with Persephone. But like all things in Emily’s early childhood, her memory of the woman began to fade, along with it her suspicions.

  It was the sound of Chantelle’s screams that tore Emily out of her flashback. Disoriented, it took her a moment to work out where she was, when she was. But the cry of a child for its mother is a powerful force, and Emily found herself on her feet before her brain had fully come back to its senses.

  She could tell the cries were coming from Chantelle’s room. She rushed in and found the little girl in her bed, screaming frantically. Emily leapt in beside her and held the girl tightly.

  “Don’t let her take me back,” Chantelle cried, gasping for breath.

  “It’s okay, I’m here,” Emily soothed. “You just had a nightmare.”

  “I’m not going back to Tennessee,” Chantelle cried. “I won’t!”

  “Okay, okay,” Emily said, over and over, desperate to take the child’s pain away. Sheila’s brief visit seemed to have set the girl back. It would take time and patience to get her back to the carefree place she’d gotten to. And even then, there was no guarantee that Sheila wouldn’t take her back in the end. They had no legal right to her.

  “I want you to be my mom,” Chantelle said, gripping tightly onto Emily’s arms.

  “I can be,” Emily said. “I can be as much a mom to you as your real mom is.”

  “No,” Chantelle said fiercely. “I want you to be my mom. My only mom.”

  Emily hugged her tightly. She wanted that too, but she knew that in reality there was only a very slim chance of it coming true, and she’d made a deal with herself to never make a promise she couldn’t keep.

  So instead she just sang softly, in a way she’d want a mother to do to her in such a situation, to soothe her with her gentleness and warmth. She sang and rocked the precious girl in her arms, stroked her hair over and over again, and began to feel Chantelle’s taut muscles relaxing. Finally, the terror seeped completely from the little girl and she fell back into slumber. Emily hoped this time she wouldn’t be awoken by the ghosts and nightmares of her past.

  *

  Once Emily was certain Chantelle was fast asleep, she went into the master bedroom. Daniel hadn’t been roused by the child’s nightmare at all. He was in a deep slumber, snoring softly.

  Emily crawled into bed beside him, staring up at the ceiling, filled with anguish. Her veins were buzzing with electricity, from the recovered memories, from Chantelle’s nightmares; there was no way she’d be able to rest now.

  “Daniel,” she said, turning on her side to face him. She shook his shoulder when he didn’t stir and spoke more sternly. “Daniel.”

  He startled awake, looking around, disoriented. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I think we need to take some real steps towards giving Chantelle security. She needs to know she won’t get taken away from us.”

  “Okay,” Daniel murmured sleepily. “But can we talk about it in the morning?”

  “She had a nightmare,” Emily informed him, ignoring his request for sleep. This was more important. “She’s terrified of being taken back to Sheila.”

  “But what can we do?” Daniel said, rubbing
his face and drooping eyes. “I mean, becoming her legal guardian would be difficult. We’d need to get lawyers involved, and that would mean fees. Do you think I’d even have a case?”

  Hearing Daniel talk seriously about her concerns for Chantelle’s well-being made Emily relax a little. She felt one of her tight knots of anguish loosen.

  “I can ask Richard in the morning,” she said, referring to their family attorney friend.

  Daniel wrapped Emily up in his warm, strong arms and pulled her into an embrace. Normally Emily would find the comfort of him relaxing and she would drift off to sleep, but tonight sleep didn’t come easily. Emily tossed and turned, her mind frantic. Too much was happening and she could hardly keep track of it all. Trevor’s impending death and her looming back taxes, Daniel’s half-hearted talk of marriage, and Chantelle’s terrible history haunting her dreams. Then there were the letters, Antonia, her father. How could she sleep with all those worries floating around in her mind?

  When morning finally came, the first thing Emily did was arrange a meeting with Richard. He was happy to help, agreeing to drive over to the inn for a midday appointment, waiving the fee for his friend. Then they got Chantelle up and ready for school. She was so lackluster it was almost as if she were a different child, as if Sheila’s appearance had sucked the joy right out of her. It made Emily even more determined to get some kind of legal protection for Chantelle, to fight for Daniel’s official guardianship over her.

  When Richard arrived, they all settled down at the table in the living room window and Daniel made coffee.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me a bit about the history of your daughter,” Richard said. He clicked his pen, ready to take notes.

  Daniel recounted all he knew about Chantelle, which was very little. He and her mom had split before she was born. He knew nothing of her conception nor Sheila’s pregnancy. He’d heard through mutual friends that Sheila had started taking drugs, but none of them ever mentioned the fact she’d had a child, that there was a chance the child may well be his.

  Emily listened patiently. For her, this was the first she’d heard of a lot of this. Daniel always kept his past very private. She didn’t know how to feel about the fact he was able to lay it so bare in this context but would not open up to her about this stuff when she asked.

  “Are you named on her birth certificate?” Richard asked Daniel once he had finished speaking.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  Richard hummed and tapped his chin with his pen. “Well, if you were it would certainly strengthen the case, although a paternity test is just as helpful in this kind of situation. If the mother is on drugs and has no fixed abode it will definitely work in your favor. The only thing is there’s nothing in writing and no witnesses to the agreement that you would take Chantelle into your care. So there’s a chance this could backfire.”

  “Backfire how?” Daniel asked.

  “On the smaller end of the scale she could counter with a child support back payment claim.”

  “What?” Emily gasped. “Even if she no longer has the child in her care?”

  Richard nodded. “I’m afraid so. If Daniel wants to take guardianship of Chantelle then he will need to prove he’s her father. The catch twenty-two being that once he does so, he admits also that he hasn’t paid anything towards her care for the first six years of her life.”

  “I don’t care about the money,” Daniel said sternly. “I’ll pay Sheila whatever she demands if it means I get to be Chantelle’s legal guardian.”

  Richard seemed to understand. He must have been this a thousand times before. Families ripped apart by drugs and mental health problems, children caught in the middle of adults who couldn’t care for them, or who loved them so much they fought over them in a court of law.

  “You said that was the smaller end of the scale,” Emily said. “What’s at the other end?”

  Richard paused, clearly hesitant to share it with them. “If she’s the vindictive type then there’s a chance she could claim kidnapping.”

  Daniel thumped his fist against the table, suddenly enraged. It shocked Emily to see him like this. There was something almost animalistic about his need to protect Chantelle from harm.

  “So you’re saying that following a legal route is risky,” Emily asked, trying to make sense of Richard’s warning. “That we may lose her entirely?”

  He nodded. “If Sheila were to go that route, you may both lose the child. She could end up in the care system, with Sheila deemed unfit and you two deemed dangerous.”

  Daniel cursed loudly and swiped his hands through his hair.

  “But that’s only if she goes that route,” Emily countered. “And she wouldn’t. In spite of everything she loves Chantelle and wants what’s best for her. I don’t think she’d do that.”

  Daniel looked at her, confused. “You trust her?”

  “I trust her not to behave in a way that will ruin Chantelle’s life forever just to get back at us,” Emily explained. “That said, I wouldn’t put it past her to try and bleed you of every cent she can.”

  “The money doesn’t matter,” Daniel said dismissively. “But if I rock the boat and end up losing her entirely I’d never be able to live with myself.”

  “You do have a strong case,” Richard interjected. “Since there are drugs involved. But it won’t be easy. The law rarely is.”

  He folded up his clipboard and stood. Daniel and Emily saw him to the door, each shaking his hand.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  Then he left.

  Emily and Daniel stood in the deathly quiet inn, letting everything sink in. Life had thrown another seemingly impossible hurdle in their way. Emily prayed they had the strength to clear it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  When Emily woke early the next morning, after another restless night, the first thing she found herself doing was racing up Trevor’s steps and knocking on his door. She’d had a strong desire to see him, to make sure he was okay and to offer any support she could.

  When Trevor answered he looked pleased to see her. But by his appearance, Emily could tell his health had already declined. His skin had taken on an almost yellow hue.

  Emily smiled in return, though it felt very unnatural to do so; it was going to take her a little while to adjust to the idea of Trevor being her friend rather than her enemy.

  “I came to see how you were,” Emily explained.

  “Checking to make sure I’m still alive?” he replied sarcastically.

  Emily gasped, surprised that Trevor was joking about his own mortality.

  “Why don’t you come in?” he added.

  Emily hesitated. Last time she’d been here the house had been a state, with Trevor slipping in and out of consciousness. It had been a tense and fraught experience. She’d never actually been inside Trevor’s house as a guest. It felt a bit like stepping over the barrier into a strange, unknown world.

  In Trevor’s kitchen, Emily saw that the repair work to the house had been completed. There was very little evidence of the destruction that had taken place here, other than a slightly uneven patch of plastering in one corner of the room.

  “It looks amazing in here,” Emily said, marveling at Trevor’s clean, crisp, white kitchen. “It’s almost like a show kitchen.”

  “The highest compliment,” Trevor said. “Tea?”

  “Let me do it,” Emily said. “You should rest.”

  Just their brief conversation thus far seemed to have worn him out. He accepted her offer without resistance, though Emily could tell it hurt his pride to accept her help.

  They sat at the table together, each clasping a cup of steaming tea between their hands.

  “Why are you here, Emily?” Trevor asked a little sullenly. “I mean really?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I just wanted to see how you were feeling. See if you needed any help with anything.”

  “You pity me,” Trevor said baldly.
<
br />   Emily startled. “No. It’s not that at all.” She didn’t want to tell him that she felt like her sister’s spirit was urging her to care for him, that she felt compelled to check up on him and offer whatever help she could.

  “You feel a misplaced sense of guilt about my dying,” Trevor continued philosophically.

  “Can’t a girl just make her next door neighbor a cup of tea from time to time?” Emily quipped.

  Trevor laughed and Emily shifted a little awkwardly, feeling very out of place in Trevor’s domain.

  As she sat at his kitchen table, drinking tea and staring out the window at his immaculate garden, she found her mind wandering back to the most recent discovery regarding her father. It suddenly occurred to her that since she and Trevor had never been on friendly terms, she had never spoken to him about her dad, had never asked for his memories. He was also the only one of her Sunset Harbor friends she had not yet drilled for information on Roy Mitchell’s disappearance. But Trevor had a vantage point by living in the neighboring property. Could he have seen something?

  “Do you remember my father?” Emily asked. “I mean you must have known him in passing at least. You were his neighbor, after all.”

  Trevor sipped his tea. “Well, this was just my vacation home before I decided to settle here last year. I was only ever up for a couple of weeks each summer. Occasionally we’d spend Christmas here, or Thanksgiving.”

  Emily’s hope leapt. “I don’t suppose…” She paused, not knowing how to frame the question. “Did you ever see him?” she asked finally. “After he was supposed to have disappeared?”

  Trevor’s moustache twitched. “After?”

  “Yes.” Emily squirmed. “I have reason to believe he may have returned to the house.”

  Trevor’s eyes widened with astonishment. But he shook his head. “Forgive me for being crude but I didn’t really pay much attention to the whole situation. Your dad wasn’t my favorite person in the world and it wasn’t exactly unusual for years to pass without us crossing paths.”