He’d left me on purpose. He’d left us all. For a second I didn’t exist. I wasn’t Bellanger’s favorite and oldest daughter, just a creation he’d abandoned. I imagined my genes unraveling, the nucleotides unspooled, until I vanished.
Cate’s skin against my cheekbone, warm and solid. Her heartbeat working its way into my skin. I calmed a little. I was here: I was real. I pulled back and cupped Cate’s cheek. “Thank you,” I whispered, and I kissed her.
“Of course.” She brushed the tears from beneath my eyes.
“And my mother.” That was the other thing I hadn’t been able to say. The other thing too big to acknowledge.
“What about her?”
“She was looking into all this too. Now she’s been missing for weeks. There was a fire. Maybe she tracked them down. Maybe they tracked her down.” The maroon sedan. The Utah plates. Bellanger’s land.
Cate’s eyes grew more serious, her thick eyebrows tugged into a frown. “You think Bellanger had something to do with her disappearance.”
“I know he did.”
“We’re going to find your mother,” Cate said. “That’s what we set out to do.” She sounded so confident. Like it was a done deal, no question.
“What if we’re too late?” I whispered.
Cate began to answer, but the door opened, sunshine slicing across the carpet and cutting across our bodies. We both flinched.
Isabelle stood in the doorway. She still lived in a world in which Bellanger and Fiona were dead. I envied her, a quick, weary jealousy. She had no idea yet.
“I need your help,” Isabelle said, and I realized now that I had no idea what she’d been up to today. “They’re coming.”
“Who’s coming?” I asked, my mind immediately going to Bellanger and Fiona.
“The men from Kithira. I told them we’re here in Freshwater,” Isabelle said. Because she was backlit, it was hard to see her face, only her calm voice issuing from the halo of sunlight. “We have something they want, and they have something we want. I set a trap for them, but I can’t do it alone.”
45
We moved along the narrow path that wound around the edges of town. Isabelle walked a few steps ahead of us. Out here, away from the strip malls and chain restaurants, Freshwater was different. Spanish moss draped like cobwebs over tree branches. A river crawled nearby, turning the air lusciously humid. Everything lit with the buzzing of cicadas.
I remembered the way Isabelle had talked about setting a trap for the Bellanger boys in their maroon car, but I’d brushed it off. Now she had led us here, walking deeper into isolation, just the three of us, preparing to confront the men who wanted us dead. I was grudgingly impressed with Isabelle’s ambition. Her action. Instead of running, she’d taken her fate into her own hands. Even if it’d get us all killed.
“You know how to use that, right?” I asked, noticing Cate adjusting the holster tucked inside her jeans, ugly against the familiar white of her T-shirt.
“You don’t grow up in Arkansas without shooting a few beer cans off a fence,” Cate deadpanned. She smiled, although the tension didn’t leave her eyes: “Yeah. I’ll be fine. At least I know how to work the safety.”
I tried to smile back. “I just want you to have a way to defend yourself.” Unlike Isabelle and me, she didn’t have an inborn ability to protect herself.
“I probably won’t even need it,” Cate said, and the hopefulness in her voice made my heart hurt.
“You should turn back,” I said, speaking softly enough that Isabelle wouldn’t overhear. “Seriously. I know you care about Isabelle, but I can handle this.”
“So I sit around waiting to hear whether or not you’re dead? Not my style. Anyway. Every party needs a healer.”
I laughed, surprised. “Dungeons and Dragons?”
“Senior year was lonely for the only known gay kid in a twenty-person graduating class. I took my friends where I could find them.”
“Well, I’m excited to learn all about your misspent youth.” The possibility of that future—an easy future where we caught each other up on everything we’d missed, where we had time to document our tiny triumphs and embarrassing fashion choices—glowed between us.
“We’re here,” Isabelle called out. “This is where they’re going to meet us.”
We approached a clearing, the trees thinning out again to show the glass-sharp glimmer of the water, the sloping, sandy shore of the river.