“Study hard,” she says, and closes the door behind her.
At Grace House, the nurses are clustered in the kitchen. Holly talks with them each individually before she searches the house and grounds again—there must be something she’s missed.
Interviewing the first two nurses leads nowhere. But Tala, the nurse who was on duty the day Eden disappears, is fidgety and anxious. As soon as the door shuts behind her, she starts to talk. She tells Holly that the nurses keep a few personal items in one of the bedrooms, for when they spend the night. She checked yesterday, when Dr. Darling asked them to search everywhere. A pair of her jeans and a T-shirt are missing.
Holly takes a breath. It could be coincidence—Tala could have lost the items, or another nurse could have borrowed them—but Tala shakes her head.
“I have asked everyone. No one has seen them,” she says. She starts to say something else, then stops. Tala is the youngest of the nurses, slender and petite. With her hair pulled back with a ribbon and her face scrubbed of makeup, she looks like a child.
“And?” Holly coaxes.
Tala shakes her head. She crosses her arms, looks down at the floor. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”
Holly waits. The silence builds. Tala shifts in her seat. “It’s just . . . ,” she says at last. “The bedroom we use—it’s the blue one on the second floor. You know which one I mean?”
Holly nods. Of course she does. She painted that room herself, the perfect shade of blue for the twins. It has two dormer windows that face the back and window seats upholstered with a truck print. She hasn’t been in it for years.
Tala leans forward, her voice dropping as if she’s afraid she’ll be overheard, although there’s only the two of them in the room. “It’s nothing really,” she says. “Just . . . I don’t like to stay there. Not by myself. It always feels like someone is watching. I’ve looked, and there’s no one there. But I still feel it. And then last week . . .” She pauses, looks at her lap. Holly follows her gaze, notices her cuticles are chewed bloody and ragged. “Last week, when I turned around quickly, I’d swear I saw a shadow by the window. And then it was just gone. Which is impossible, because that window is on the second floor.” She shakes her head. “Crazy, right?”
“Crazy,” Holly agrees. Her voice is so steady no one could tell she’s covered in goose bumps.
“That’s what I thought.” Tala shifts uncomfortably again. “That’s why I didn’t want to say anything.”
Holly’s struggling with what to say, how to sound calm when her insides are quaking, when through the window behind Tala she catches sight of a car bumping over the road. It pauses at the top of the hill, then starts the descent that leads to Grace House. Holly frowns, distracted. She isn’t expecting anyone, but perhaps one of the nurses has ordered something from the village.
The car glides to a stop in the circular driveway. There are no logos on the outside of the vehicle. Tourists, maybe. Lost and looking for the village or the beach. But there’s something familiar about the person in the passenger seat, despite the glare that makes it hard to see. And then Holly’s heart lurches before she even knows why, before her brain has had time to process the way he opens the door, swings his legs gracefully to the ground.
It’s Jack.
Shit.
For a moment she’s frozen, her stomach doing flips. But she doesn’t have the luxury of more than a few seconds of indecision. She races outside and stands in front of him.
“Jack?” she manages. He’s looking at the house, studying it, as if he’s trying to recall if he’s seen it before. For a minute she thinks he’s going to ignore her. But then he looks her right in the eyes.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
She can’t breathe. To buy time, she turns to the driver of the car, who is standing with the door open, leaning across it. It’s a woman, tall and thin, with a shock of flaming-red hair. At first Holly doesn’t recognize her, but then the woman smiles, and Holly flinches.
“Mallory?” she says in disbelief. All her ghosts are coming back to haunt her, it seems.
But there’s no mistake. It’s the girl who babysat the day of Eden’s fall. This woman has the same distinctive red hair, the same quick way of moving.
“Dr. Darling? I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”
“Of course. How very nice to see you again,” Holly says. She brushes past Jack and extends her hand, and all the while her mind is frantically racing. Mallory was gone by the time Jack woke up all those years ago, so she hadn’t witnessed those miraculous steps. But if she’d told Jack why she was there that day, how she knows him . . .