I can care for her. I just need a chance to get that chance.”
“When’s the meeting?”
“Four.”
Right in the middle of the time he’d allotted for the shower he’d planned to take before the evening’s round of party visits. Well, a washup and change would suffice.
“You want me to pick you up here?” It would take extra time. Meeting Edward at the shelter would work much better for him.
But this wasn’t about him.
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
And he had an idea...one that was growing on him in leaps and bounds. “Then, afterward, assuming they need a while to discuss things and you don’t get to see Joy right away, you can come to work with me. I always have two tickets to every event, and one of tonight’s functions is to raise money for some technically advanced machine for the new hospital here in Santa Raquel. It’s taking place on hospital grounds. You’d fit right in...”
Finally, something truly helpful he could do.
Introduce Edward to his own kind.
That way, he wouldn’t feel quite so alone while he waited to learn his daughter’s fate.
And his own, too, Hunter supposed, when you considered that he could possibly become guardian to a seven-year-old child he’d never met.
“If I’m not spending the evening with my granddaughter, I’ll probably take you up on that offer, son,” Edward said.
Sounding just like Hunter’s dad.
So much so that Hunter relaxed.
He had this.
AFTER A COUPLE of hours with Joy, followed by a board meeting in LA, Julie pulled back into the Stand’s parking lot just after two on Friday. Joy would be out of “school” for the day, and if she wanted to be with Julie, Julie wanted to be with her. According to Sara, they’d had to put Joy’s aunt in a medically induced coma—Julie wasn’t privy to the details—but it meant that Joy was alone.
A feeling Julie knew only too well. Shortly before the attack that had changed her life, she’d lost her own mother. And her father, too.
Memories of the debilitating fear that had taken over her life crept in even now, eleven years later. And she’d been nearly an adult at the time. Seventeen. Joy was only seven.
She’d coped by losing herself in the memories of her childhood. Expressing them through her drawing. And writing.
Amy, the little girl afraid of her own shadow, had been born during that time in Julie’s life. It was no wonder to Julie, and no mistake, in her view, that Joy clung to the fictional character. To the book.
She couldn’t stand in for Joy’s mother or aunt, but she could be a kind stranger who understood what she was going through during these first difficult days. And if there was a chance that she could help Joy tell someone what had happened the day her mother went missing... If there was any clue to her parents’ whereabouts that the child could possibly disclose, then she’d spend every moment she could trying to help Joy come out of her shell enough to communicate with them.
She’d had an idea and was feeling hopeful as she sat with the little girl in the same private room they’d been in that morning, a room in the school wing of the Stand’s main building. She’d set up two identical easels with a table in between. The table held pencils. Sitting at one easel, with Joy at the other, she started to draw freestyle. She invited Joy to do the same.
“This is how Amy came to be,” she told the little girl, her gaze on the page in front of her. She was drawing Amy. At The Lemonade Stand. Joy might not have figured that out yet. But Julie had faith that she would. “My mom was gone, too, and I was scared, and then Amy came into my head, like an imaginary friend, to play with me. Do you ever have imaginary friends?” she asked.
Kids had them. It was normal. Her minor in child development had taught her that much.
“Mine was a lot like me. I named her Amy. But I wanted her to be out here in the world, you know, so I could see her...”
Amy had been the way she remembered her younger self.
“So I drew her, just fooling around, and I started to feel better. So I drew her some more.”
The fictional face that was so familiar to her was taking perfect shape on the page. Usually Amy’s expressions were more serious; she was a little girl who had fears and learned that the only real thing she had to fear was being afraid. But today, Julie drew her differently. Today Amy’s eyes glowed with hope. There was going to be a grin on her face, too. Not the happy, secure, quiet smile she usually wore at the end of the books. But an ebullient, childish grin. Something she hoped Joy could remember feeling.
As she worked, she chatted. About Amy. Keeping her comments age-appropriate and one step removed. The grin was there on Amy’s face. But something wasn’t quite right. The chin maybe.
“Sometimes Amy thinks she’s the only one who knows stuff,” she said. “And sometimes she knows secrets that she’s afraid to tell because people who are bigger than her might get mad.”
After she’d been brutally raped, Julie had come home to Colin. He’d taken her to the hospital. They’d gone to the police. Her rapist was known to them. But he was the son of a powerful man, and in the end, she and Colin had agreed, understanding the consequences if they didn’t, to let the matter drop.
Amy had taken it all on.
No, the problem wasn’t the chin. She looked at the mouth again.
There was movement beside her. Joy had picked up a pencil.
Heart pounding, Julie left Amy’s face incomplete, moved down to the neck and shoulders, which she could draw without paying much attention. Dressing Amy in a T-shirt with butterflies, she watched Joy—also in a T-shirt with butterflies—out of the corner of her eye.
Afraid to do anything that might distract Joy, she continued to talk about Amy. About the reasons she liked butterflies—because of their soft wings and pretty colors, which was why Julie had always liked them.
Sara had said that she thought Joy was relating to Julie, or maybe to her childhood self, through Amy. She’d told Julie just to be herself.
Joy’s hand, gripping the black pencil, hovered over the page. Black was a color associated with anger. And fear.
But it was also good for outlining.
Julie steadied her own hand. Drew another long stroke. Analyzing Joy’s reactions wasn’t her job.
“Amy used to love chocolate ice cream best,” she said, fixated on that dark pencil in the girl’s hand, in spite of her admonitions to the contrary. “Now she kind of likes vanilla better sometimes.”
She was babbling. But kids liked ice cream. And she
