“Have they—”
“They’ve done everything. But Lucie needs you. They’re… they’re dredging the lake.” He clears his throat. “She’s going to need you when they find him.”
It’s exactly like the moment Beck called to tell me Hannah had died. I never thought history would repeat itself so precisely, but it is.
The car is still moving, but I feel like I’m suspended in time. I see every streetlight, notice the way the sign over the bakery flaps in the wind, a single corner blown loose.
“He can’t be dead.” My voice is hard, businesslike. But I’m far from calm. My stomach is about to swallow me whole.
“I hope not, man,” Harrison says, but his voice is full of doubt and pity. And I remember that too…that same sort of pained, exhausted certainty in Beck’s voice when he told me about Hannah. I’d thought the same things then, didn’t I? I told Beck that I’d seen her three days before on an ultrasound. That she’d been sucking her thumb—that she couldn’t just be gone without warning.
I can’t. I can’t go through this. I can’t lose him. I can’t watch Lucie lose him. I can’t.
I can’t believe this is happening all over again.
THE FLASHING blue and red lights of police cars are visible from a block away. A barricade is in place halfway down the street, so I grab my bag and run—into the cul-de-sac and over the crest of the hill—stopping only as the house comes into view.
Lucie’s on the ground, holding something in her arms. I freeze in place. “Oh, God.”
“They just found him,” says the man beside me.
My knees go loose, my stomach swimming.
“That family got lucky,” he adds. “Should have been watching their kid better.”
“He’s okay?”
The guy shrugs. “Far as I know. Found the kid somewhere off in the woods. Got lost on the path or something.”
I sprint down the driveway and don’t stop until I reach them. Lucie is clutching Henry and Jeremy has his arms around them both.
I realize they had children together, but the sight of them like that after all the shit he’s done to her infuriates me. For now, though, I ignore it and drop to the ground. “I’m so sorry. I got here as fast as I could,” I tell her. I brush a hand through Henry’s hair. “Hey, bud. You okay?”
Henry nods. He’s the only one of the three of them who will even look at me.
“So what happened?” I ask Lucie.
She buries her face into Henry’s hair. “The sitter wasn’t watching, and he walked out the back door. It took three hours to find him.”
“Three hours? Where did he go?”
“Where do you think, asshole?” sneers Jeremy. “He was looking for you.”
I glance at Lucie to confirm this, and she can’t meet my eye.
“You were looking for me?” I ask Henry, swallowing down the bile in my throat.
He blinks. “I wanted to show you the arm. You always come around the path after a trip.”
He walked around the lake because I fucking promised him something, and he just couldn’t believe I wouldn’t deliver.
It makes me want, simultaneously, to promise him everything—that it will never happen again, that we will build a fucking airplane in my front yard to make up for it—and at the same time I want to get in my car and drive away. This feeling—this sick, fucked-up feeling—is exactly what I wanted to avoid. I have a job that requires everything, and I had nothing to give on top of that, but I went for it anyway.
“Come on, Henry,” Lucie says, rising and lifting him into her arms. “Let’s get some dinner and go to bed.”
I watch, numb, as she starts walking toward the house with Henry. Jeremy looks me in the eye and then turns to follow her. Like he belongs, and I do not.
And that’s just it…I don’t. I knew all along that I didn’t belong here.
I never wanted to live through what happened with Hannah again and tonight I nearly did. I shouldn’t have been a part of this in the first place.
35
LUCIE
For all the tears I’ve shed tonight, there are more inside me. Those hours I spent thinking my son was dead have taken a decade off my life. They’ve also put everything in perspective. I have decisions to make, later on, though I sense I’ve already made them. The way Caleb jerked backward when Henry said he’d been looking for him—as if we were too much trouble, more weight than he was willing to carry—told me everything his half-in, half-out stance has not.