“She has a five-year-old.”
Five. Almost the same age Everett had been when their lives imploded. Lily suddenly felt sick. Sick at the risk, but also at the deep blow of her compulsion to help this little boy. Lily hadn’t been running for her life with Everett, but she’d still felt so terrified, so overwhelmed, so hopeless. What must Connie be feeling?
“Okay,” Lily murmured. “Eight thirty.”
“I’ll see you then. Thank you!”
She hung up and forced herself to move back toward the office. This wasn’t bad. It wasn’t illegal. But if Mendelson was pushing her this hard over a grown woman who’d walked away, what might he do about a five-year-old child taken by his mother?
She hoped to God she wouldn’t find out.
CHAPTER 19
Everett couldn’t stop smiling. His mom had left the apartment again at noon, saying she’d be back in half an hour, which meant he could log on to Discord without worrying she might be over his shoulder. He’d been checking on and off all morning, and now he crossed his fingers for luck as the messages loaded.
It worked. A new message from his dad.
Still, it was only a minor stroke of luck.
Hey, LM! Hoping to have free time later. Maybe at 1 or 2. Let me know if you’ll be around.
“Shit,” Everett grumbled, glancing at the time. It was only noon, and his mom would be back by 1:00, and then she wanted to go for ice cream, which would have been a great idea on another day.
He looked at the door, then back at the screen. She’d been gone only five minutes, and he’d have plenty of warning if she came back.
Before he could lose his nerve, Everett got up, went into his mom’s room, and opened the drawer of her nightstand as his neck prickled with the false warning that she was watching. He tried to ignore it but still looked back at the doorway a couple of times as he lifted a home-and-garden magazine to find her clunky old tablet.
Hoping she didn’t use it often, he slipped it free and quietly slid the drawer closed. Every once in a while when Everett was sick, she let him take it to his room to watch cartoons, but otherwise she had a strict “internet in the family room only” policy. The public service propaganda had convinced her he’d get lured into being kidnapped or exploited somehow if he managed to log on outside her supervision.
After opening Discord in the browser window, he logged on, and even though the whole thing moved at a snail’s pace and took forever to load, it worked. Everett stowed the tablet under his bed.
Back on the computer, he answered his dad, letting him know he’d do his best to be online between 1:00 and 2:00; then he closed the window and jumped up to reheat the leftovers his mom had left for lunch.
At 12:30, he headed out to do his chores, to ensure his mom wouldn’t knock on his door at 1:30 and tell him to get busy. He quickly passed two of the buildings without even bothering to check for open locks. He had more interesting things to occupy him now, and his mom wouldn’t know he hadn’t checked. But the garbage was another thing entirely. It seemed self-generating and had to be emptied every day.
He quickly hit the four garbage cans placed throughout the complex and found they were stuffed full of the usual forbidden trash listed on the can. Cardboard boxes, packing paper, Styrofoam peanuts. He sighed and switched out the bags, then jogged to the big dumpster with all the overstuffed trash before digging the key out of his pocket.
If they didn’t keep it locked up, people would throw away anything. Old furniture, computers, broken televisions, a dozen boxes full of VHS tapes, used tires. Once his mom had seen someone leaving a sleeper sofa next to the dumpster, and she’d had to march out and yell at them. That was the first time he’d ever heard her say curse words in front of him. She’d apologized later and let him get out his popsicle-making kit despite that she always grumbled it was cheaper to buy the store brand instead of using fruit juice. The store-bought kind tasted better too, but he didn’t admit that to her.
Everett slammed the trash lid, locked it up, and sprinted back through the complex on his normal route.
He’d already fully passed one of the alleys before he registered the vehicle there at the same moment he heard his mom’s laugh. He skidded to a stop. Took three backward steps. Stared in absolute shock.
His mom was perched on the back of an SUV, a sandwich in her hand, her smiling face turned toward a man. He was not an old man. He was dark haired and skinny, maybe his mom’s age. But he was parked in front of Alex Bennick’s half-open locker.