remember the name of the town, but Josh’s sister lives in the backwoods of southern Georgia, a tiny blip on a bright red map. No streetlights, no Walmart, just a couple of neighbors sitting on lawn chairs, waving Confederate flags.
“Keep trying, will you?” Sam says. “In the meantime, let’s you and I put our heads together and come up with a plan.”
She slides a laptop from the bag at her feet and begins clacking away. The police officer stands pressed against the bookshelves, his hat clutched in his hands, awaiting orders.
Sam turns to me with a pained look, and I stop him with a shake of my head. An Atlanta child is missing. There’s no need to apologize.
I turn to the police officer and Brittany. “How do you two take your coffee?”
The last thing Sam needs to worry about is me.
5 hours, 24 minutes missing
Ever since the dogs screeched to a stop at Black Mountain Road, the game plan has changed, something that becomes clear when the dining hall fills with rain-soaked bodies, shouting orders with a new sense of urgency. They see me and avert their eyes, a sign of respect that hits me like a cold, hard slap. Dawn notices and hauls me out of there, guiding me outside to a cabin across the clearing. She parks me on a tiny two-seater couch.
“Why don’t I make us some tea?” she says. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a little warming up.”
It’s then I notice that my teeth are chattering. I bite down hard until the noise stops. “Tea would be great, thank you.”
The cabin is dark and tiny, a square space with a round table, a musty-smelling couch and the most basic of kitchenettes lining the back wall. The glass of the lone window is filthy, coated with cobwebs and crud and framed with two strips of faded floral fabric. The air in here is just as cold as outside, just as damp, and I shiver.
Dawn flicks on the electric teapot, then settles on the couch next to me. Her eyes are kind.
“We’ve told you why we are taking a good, close look at Andrew. Why don’t you start by telling me why you think we’re mistaken.”
Her question surprises me more than a little. From the second the detective showed up at my door, I’ve been trying to talk myself out of the possibility Andrew would have anything to do with this, and my denial hasn’t gone unnoticed. Do I think they’re mistaken? Maybe, but I also never thought Andrew would hurt me like he did, either.
“I suppose you know what he did.” I can barely push out the words. My mouth is a desert, my tongue sandpaper against my teeth.
“I’ve read the police reports, yes.” The kettle turns off with a sharp click, the water bubbling into a rolling boil. Dawn pushes up from the couch. “But I’d really like to hear it from you.”
I hesitate, trying to summon the strength to rehash all that ugly drama. The thing is, I’ve spent a good part of the past half year trying to not think of Andrew, and I still cringe whenever his name tunnels unintentionally across my consciousness. The way we broke apart was messy and painful, and I’m still fighting to find forgiveness—for him and for myself, for the way Ethan has unwittingly ended up in the middle.
“Things had been bad between us for a while,” I begin, my breaths coming fast and hard, like I just jogged up three flights of stairs. “At least a year, maybe more. He was drinking too much. He was under all sorts of stress at work, and he took it out on me and Ethan. When Andrew attacked me at the CVS, I had just filed for divorce.”
I don’t bother cataloging my injuries—a black eye, two broken fingers, a bloody scalp from where he ripped out big chunks of hair—or the way Good Samaritans pulled him off me, a couple of tourists in town for a Falcons game. They told the cops he’d threatened to kill me. As a police officer, Dawn would know all this, as well as the way he took off before the police could get there. They arrested him the next day at work, marching him in handcuffs past his staff, the office security guards and dozens of wide-eyed witnesses.
“Sounds like a pretty ballsy guy.” She hands me one of the mugs and sinks with hers back onto the couch, watching me with clear blue eyes.
“No, just the opposite, actually. I saw his face when those men pulled him off me, and Andrew was just as surprised as I was. Surprised and humiliated. I’m sure he regretted it immediately.”
Actually, I’m positive Andrew regrets the aftermath the most. Gossip has a way of dancing around, and Andrew lost clients and friends because of what he did. He tarnished his precious reputation. He lost every last bargaining chip he could have cashed in for the divorce. Proof in point: when the judge heard about the attack, when he saw all but the tips of my right-hand fingers confined to a hot-pink cast, he granted me temporary full custody without question.
Dawn reaches for a legal pad on the table and digs a pen out of her bag on the floor. “Still. Andrew lost control.”
“With me. Only ever with me. Never with Ethan.”
“Prior to the attack at CVS, had Andrew ever hurt you physically?”
A familiar sick rises in my throat, because what do I say? Yes, but never enough to leave a mark? That I slapped and shoved him right back? There was that time when he grabbed my arm too hard or when he shoved me into the fireplace or when he held me down on the bathroom floor, but none of his outbursts hurt me that much, and they always ended in a more loving, considerate Andrew. They call it a cycle for a reason.
“Yes. Never at that level, but yes. I knew it was abuse.”
“Did you ever threaten or attempt to leave?”
Even now, six months later, the question still hits me as judgment, and it reminds me of some of my former girlfriends, loose-tongued women who cloaked their questions about the attack under a mask of compassion. Dawn might as well have said if you knew it was abuse, why didn’t you just leave? My former friends certainly did. Everyone but Lucas and Izzy.
“It’s not that easy. We had a child together, one I gave up my job to stay home and care for. I didn’t have any money, no family to depend on or move in with. I knew exactly how difficult leaving would be, and that Andrew would never let me walk out of there with half of anything, especially Ethan. I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m only trying to explain why I didn’t bring it up, not even once.”
“Not until he attacked you in broad daylight.”
I lift a shoulder. “As awful as that was, at least it put me in a position of power. Everybody, including the judge, knew what he did.”
“So far I haven’t heard any reason to think he wouldn’t be capable of taking Ethan.”
She says it with a soft smile, which does nothing to soften her words. No woman wants to think the man she once loved—the father of her only child—capable of such evil.
“Okay, then how about this—because he loves Ethan.”
“Maybe Andrew wants more time with his son than a few hours every other weekend.”
I throw up a hand
