and we are instantly coiled, our bodies fitting together like two pieces of the same puzzle.
He kisses me, and the house line rings.
Sam’s lips freeze on mine.
“If you answer it, I will kill you.”
Sam looks at the phone, then back to me. I shake my head.
The phone rings again, shrill and insistent.
All around us, the love spell settles like faded confetti.
Sam rolls off me with a groan. He swipes the handset from the holder, stalks to the sliding glass doors, heaves one of them open and hurls the handset into the backyard. A few seconds later, I hear it hit the water with a plunk—the brand-new Bang & Olufsen sinking to the bottom of the pool.
He turns back, victorious. This is the Sam I fell in love with—unpredictable, surprising, just the right side of naughty. Slayer of my dragons, even if only for a day.
“Now. Where were we?” He puts a knee on the bed.
I hold out my hand for his.
And that, dammit all to hell, is when the doorbell rings.
4 hours, 56 minutes missing
When Detective Macintosh told me to start thinking about who would want some more time with Ethan, is it conditioning or dread that my mind goes straight to Andrew? I think about what the repeated stimulus might have been, all those times he brought our son back late on his given weekends. First five minutes, then ten, then a half hour or more, though he never said a word. Never asked for an extra day, or if next time he could keep Ethan for one more night. Just handed Ethan over with a wave and a casual “See you in two weeks, buddy,” even though we all knew it was more than an hour past Ethan’s bedtime.
And honestly, Andrew is not that subtle. If he had wanted more time with Ethan, he would have bitched about the schedule ages ago. He would have had his lawyer bury mine under an avalanche of letters and memos, all of which demanded a hasty—and expensive—response. Death by a million cuts seems to be his divorce strategy, and my bank account is proof that it’s working. Why change course now?
And of course Andrew wants more time with his child. Any father would. If I were faced with visitation rights of every other weekend, holidays and school breaks at his discretion, it wouldn’t be enough for me, either.
But none of that means he’d steal Ethan from his cabin.
Does it?
* * *
The last six miles take an eternity.
The road becomes a twisting, turning thing lined on both sides with thick walls of trees and steep ditches. Detective Macintosh steers us up the wet asphalt as fast as he dares, but the rain is still unrelenting, falling from the sky in steady, blinding sheets, and the speedometer rarely tops forty. By the time he slows at the turnoff and a steady beeping from the GPS signals we’ve arrived at our destination, I’m wound tight and my knee won’t stop bouncing.
He pulls into a narrow dirt road next to a small hand-painted sign. The letters are faded, most of them hidden behind a two-foot stump and thick tufts of weeds. Were it not for the incessant beeping and the Lumpkin County police car parked on the grass, I would have missed it entirely.
Camp Crosby.
The car door swings open, and a police officer steps out, pulls his collar up against the weather and hustles across the grass. The detective waits until he’s close, then hits the button for the window. Rain and cooler air blow in, along with the scent of pine needles and wet dirt.
He flashes his badge. “Detective Macintosh, Atlanta PD. I’ve got the boy’s mother.”
The cop leans down, peering at us through the window. His glasses are dotted with water, which does little to conceal his squinty eyes, or the pillows of fatty skin sagging underneath. He dips his wattled chin in a show of respect. “Ma’am. Very sorry about your son.” His accent is thick and syrupy, the words sticky with a mountain twang.
“Any news?” the detective says, beating me to the question.
“Alpha Team’s out there with their dogs, but the kids have been in the forest all afternoon. The trainers are dealing with some contamination, but right now we’re more concerned about the rain.”
“Any changes to the forecast?” Detective Macintosh asks. After our conversation earlier, I’d pulled it up on my iPhone. The downpour is supposed to ease to a light drizzle around ten, then blow off before noon. But this is mountain country, where weather can change on a dime.
“Not as far as I know. But if this rain doesn’t stop soon, we’re gonna have a problem. I reckon we’ve had a good couple of inches at least, and most of it’s fallen in the past couple hours. Haven’t heard yet if the scent’s holding.”
My gaze flips to Detective Macintosh’s profile, his ominous warning of a three-inch limit filling my mind, but his face gives nothing away. He just thanks the man, puts the car back in gear and points the nose up the drive.
Four feet in and the woods swallow us up, the forest narrowing into a leafy tunnel. The overhanging branches form a solid arch, pressing around us on all sides. I grip the vinyl seat and lean into the dash, my gaze sweeping the tree line for Ethan, which I know is far from logical. He’s not going to just wander out and reveal himself now that I’m here, as if everything up to now was an elaborate game of hide-and-seek. But I’m seduced by hope, by despair, and I peer into the swaying brush as we pass, praying for movement, a flash of skin, anything. But all I see are wet, slick trees.
The detective steers us across a rickety bridge, then skids around the bank of a small pond, the surface a dark spot of shivering glass. The wheels slip and spin in the mud before catching on a patch of gravel, and we hurtle up the hill. We swerve around potholes and switchbacks until finally we emerge in a clearing, a wide expanse of sloping lawn with wooden cabins clinging to the hillside. More than a dozen police cars line the bottom perimeter, their noses pointed up the hill at the cabins and beyond, to the tree line that rises up like a thick, dark wall.
“Which cabin?” I say, meaning Ethan’s, the one where he disappeared.
Detective Macintosh shakes his head. “Definitely not one of these. Wherever it is, they’ll have it cordoned off. Look for the one with the yellow police tape.”
He squeezes us into a spot at the edge of the grass, and I scramble out. Rain and cool air slap my cheeks, pushing a million tiny chill bumps through my skin. I stand there for a long moment, watching people race back and forth across the rain-soaked ground, uniformed police officers and plain-clothed folks, people dressed like aliens in head-to-toe rain gear. They call to each other from cabin porches, huddle in clumps under trees, hurry across the churned-up grass. So these are the people in charge of finding my son.
A noise pushes through their moving bodies and chatter—the sound of dogs barking in the distance, followed by far-off shouts of my son’s name. Ethan! Where are you, Ethan?
My head whips in that direction, my gaze bumping up against the
