“I thought he took you!” he rasped.
“What? Who?”
“I thought you were in the office, and I couldn’t find you. I thought he took you, and I’d never see you again.”
“Oh, honey,” she gasped. “Oh, baby, I’m fine. I was just checking on something. Everything’s okay. I’m right here.”
He quieted then, only his gasping, tortured breath breaking the silence of the night. She pressed her chin to the top of his head as she hugged him closer, breathing in the scent of the new shampoo he’d recently started buying, infused with manly smells like sandalwood and cedar instead of the softer scent of strawberry.
“It was only that police officer again,” she whispered. “That’s all.”
He grew heavy in her arms as her terror wore off, but she shifted her weight, trying to balance her strength so she wouldn’t have to let him go, until he took one more shuddering breath and straightened his body to slide free of her.
“Why was he here?” he whispered. “Is he here for Dad?”
Fucking Mendelson. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s go in before you catch cold.”
She ushered him inside to the couch and tucked the throw tight around his pale skin. “You want some milk?” When he nodded, she went to pour milk into a mug, then warmed it in the microwave before adding a little sugar and vanilla. His hands were still shaking when she delivered the treat, but his cheeks grew pinker when he caught the scent. “Thanks, Mom.”
All of this bullshit with Mendelson and Jones seemed to have tapped into the same overwhelming fears he’d felt as a little boy. She scooted in next to him on the couch and snuggled close. “Your dad isn’t coming to take me away, Everett. No one is.”
“Not Dad,” he said, nose half-buried in the mug.
“What?” She stared down at him in surprise. “Then who?”
He shot her a wary, sideways glance, and Lily realized what was wrong. “Honey, that was just a nightmare you had. No one was outside your window, so you don’t have to worry—”
“It’s Alex,” he blurted out, sounding defiant.
Lily froze. “Alex?”
“It’s him I’m worried about.”
“Everett,” she said carefully. “Alex is just someone I had dinner with. That’s all. I didn’t even mean to tell you about that, because he has nothing to do with our lives.”
“Something is weird about him.”
She tried to keep her brows from tugging down into a deep frown at that. “Baby, you don’t even know him. I’m sure it’s strange for you, but—”
“There’s a bunch of creepy stuff in that storage unit, Mom. Stuff about missing women. And I looked it up and those women have never been found. They’re probably all dead.”
Lily pulled sharply back, her frown finally overcoming her efforts to keep it contained. “What in the world are you talking about? How would you know what’s in his storage unit? That’s his private property.”
She watched him chew the inside of his cheek before he spoke. “I just . . . I looked in there once when he was working. That’s all. There’s a big board with pictures of missing women, and his uncle wasn’t a cop or anything like that. So why would he collect pictures and files about missing girls?”
“What?” she yelped. “How do you know who his uncle is? Did you go into his space? Everett!”
“I didn’t take anything!” he cried in a panicked response that confirmed her fears. “I only looked! And I checked out his uncle online, and that guy used to work for the school system. He worked at schools and he’s obsessed with missing girls? What the hell, Mom?”
She let the cussing slide, tamped down her rising panic, and thought of the eighteen-year-old Mendelson had mentioned. “What missing girls?”
“They disappeared from here a long time ago, like in the ’90s.”
Lily felt one brief moment of relief, but that only cleared the way for her deeper, darker fears. Fear for Everett. Fear over who he was or could be. “How do you know any of this?” she asked quietly. “How did you know his name to look him up?”
“Uh,” he grunted in response, and then his eyes darted back and forth, searching for a solution. “I don’t know,” he said, lying.
And what did it mean that her son was lying and sneaking around and trespassing? What did it mean about how she’d raised him or who he was?