“Honey, get your mother. Tell her to open the door.”
A frown crossed her small face, and she shook her head. “She’s not here.”
“You and Lilly are in there alone?”
Lilly wriggled in beneath her sister’s chin, jostling for position. Lilly shook her head too, copying her sister’s gestures in that silent way she often did. She just stared at me, round eyed, as though she hadn’t seen me for years.
I jerked my head around at the sound of a car engine.
Marla’s car appeared in the driveway again.
Someone must have called her and told her to come straight back. If not Evie, then who?
Princess Pout jumped from the car first, her expression set in its all-too-familiar sulk. Marla stepped out behind her. “Gray, what are you doing here?”
“My kids are here. That’s what I’m doing here. Where’s Evie?”
“Look, I don’t know. I’m just minding your girls.”
“How could you not know?”
The front door cracked open. A woman with short, faded brunette hair and harsh eyes looked out. Marla’s mother. She looked straight past me to Marla. “I told you not to get involved.”
“Mum, let me handle this,” Marla said.
“Handle what, exactly?” I demanded.
Three generations of women—Marla, her mother and Princess Pout—stared at me with the same slitted eyes.
Willow and Lilly burst from the house, running to me and hugging my legs and side.
“We’re going now, girls,” I told them.
“Maribelle,” Marla said to her daughter, “I need to talk with Gray. Take Willow and Lilly with you.”
Princess Pout tightened her lips. “But we were going to get my new ballet shoes.”
“We will, maybe a bit later,” Marla crooned.
“The girls are coming with me,” I insisted.
“I can’t stop you from doing that, Gray.” She looked me directly in the eye for maybe the first time ever in her life. “But can we have a short talk first?”
I exhaled a breath through my teeth, stopping myself from grabbing Willow and Lilly and leaving right then. “Okay, we’ll talk.” I nodded at the girls to go back inside.
Marla folded her arms defensively. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. But Evie asked me if I’d babysit the girls for a few days. For a week, actually. Seems that she just needed some time on her own.”
“On her own?” I exploded. “Evie went away without Willow and Lilly?”
“Yes. And you’re just going to have to respect that.”
I lowered my voice. “The hell I do.”
“No point getting like that with me, Gray. Evie’s my friend. She needed help. What else was I supposed to do?”
“What exactly did she say to you?”
“She said you two weren’t getting on. She . . . she was worried for herself and the girls.”
“She said that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, fuck. What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”
“There was nothing wrong between Evie and me. Nothing.”
Marla just looked at me silently, a faint accusatory look in her eyes.
“I need to talk with my wife. Call her now, wherever she is.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Just call her. Tell her I made you do it.”
“No . . . she didn’t leave me a number. She said she would call me.”
“Oh, come on. Let’s be adults here. As if Evie wouldn’t leave a number. What if something happened with the girls?”
Her voice closed down, small and tight, like she was admitting to something she didn’t want to tell me. “I . . . had the impression that Evie was maybe going to check herself in somewhere.”
“What? You don’t mean like a psych ward or something?”
“I’m not sure. She just said her mind was a jumble and she really needed some time to get herself together. She said I couldn’t contact her where she was going.”
To her credit, Marla looked worried.
Where did I go from here? The police? Yeah, I could imagine how that would go. They’d be on Evie’s side. Abused wife flees home. No choice but to leave the girls at a friend’s house for their safety. The cops would be looking at me with sceptical eyes, wondering what I’d done to Evie. Hey, here’s a guy who just got dumped by his employer. And his wife and kids ran away from him. He’s not exactly stable, is he?