by Freya Barker
I’m learning from her food works like a charm if you want to distract men of all ages. The boys, clearly familiar with the drill, sit down at the counter in a flash, while Rita fills small plates with the pastries.
When we’ve all been supplied—the boys on their second cannoli—Joe asks, “So how was camp?” That leads into two weeks’ worth of adventures from two perspectives, not always in sync, which is then cause for an argument Joe quickly squashes by suggesting the boys fire up a game on the PlayStation in the basement. He doesn’t have to ask them twice. I guess after two weeks without electronics the need is high.
The rest of the afternoon I hang in the kitchen with Rita, while Joe goes upstairs to fix the door, and later joins his dad in front of the tube, watching golf. The US Open or something. It’s more interesting watching grass grow. I listen with half an ear to their low voices—commenting on back swings, flop shots, and short games, none of which mean anything to me—but I savor the sound of their companionship while I help Rita fill ravioli.
The closer it gets to five—Trinny’s plane is scheduled to land at five-oh-five—the more restless I become.
“I’m running out to pick up Gracie, Sweets,” Joe walks up behind me and slides a hand low on my belly. I lift my hands from the sudsy water, wipe them on a towel, and turn in his arms, gliding my hands up his chest.
“Okay. Maybe Trinny will be here when you get back,” I share hopefully.
Joe grins down at me. “Her flight hasn’t even landed yet. Then they still have to wait for luggage to clear, get their car from the lot, and load it up. I don’t expect them much before six.” He drops his mouth to mine for a quick brush. “Be back soon.”
He turns, moves to the door and freezes in his tracks, his head turned to the top of the basement stairs, where Mason stands glaring at me.
Fuck.
“Mase,” Joe starts, but the boy turns and runs back downstairs. Joe hesitates before finally turning back to me. “Leave him be. I’ll have a talk when I get back.”
“Fuck,” I repeat under my breath.
“He’ll be okay,” Rita says, not having missed a thing, when Joe pulls the door shut behind him.
Joe
Fuck.
So much going on in my head, I never stopped to think that however natural it’s become in the past few weeks to press my lips to Ollie’s, it’s new for my boys. They still miss their mother.
I could’ve handled that better.
Luckily Grace is waiting for me in the lobby again, so within minutes she’s strapped in the passenger seat and I’m on my way home.
“Everything okay?” I glance over to see her watching me closely. Not much escapes Grace, and given the situation back at home, it’s probably better she’s prepared.
“No,” I confess, and proceed to fill her in on what happened at Ollie’s place, my father’s hospital stay, Ollie’s breakdown last night, and the silent confrontation with Mase just now.
“Sounds like you’ve got your hands full,” she points out dryly, staring out the window. I snort and her eyes flick to me. “Nothing you can’t handle, though,” she says, reaching out and giving my arm a squeeze. “Bumps in the road, is all.”
The vote of confidence means a lot. A whole fucking lot, because seeing my boy standing there, pain and anger on his face, cut me deep.
Keith opens the door for us and Grace takes her time looking him over from top to bottom and back.
“You taken?” she asks, and a big grin appears on Keith’s usually stoic face.
“Sadly yes,” he teases. “Married to a redhead with a fiery temper. And given that our boy still calls on her to feed every four hours, and she’s been cut off from her Guinness for the better part of a year, it might not be a good time to challenge her on that.”
Grace tilts her head to the side, taps her index finger to her lips, and mumbles, “Pity,” before skirting past him into the living room.
Pops is still engrossed in golf, Ma is still at the stove, and Ollie is setting the table, her eyes on me as I approach.
“I’ll be downstairs.”
She nods, sets down the stack of plates, and goes to greet Grace. Ma catches my eye on my way to the stairs and mouths, “Here if you need me.”
The moment I step into the basement, both boys’ eyes come my way. Mason’s angry, and Ryder’s confused.
“I need to talk—”
“Mason says you’ve forgotten about Mom.”
This comes from Ryder, which explains his confusion. I give Mason a hard look before focusing on my youngest, whose lip is starting to tremble.
“I could never forget about your Mom, I—”
“Then why were you kissing Ollie?” Mason interrupts.
Guess I’ll have to deal with his anger first or I’ll get nowhere. “I want to give you answers, but I can’t do that if you interrupt me.” Mason tries to stare me down, unsuccessfully, and finally just turns his head in the opposite direction. “It’s impossible for me to forget your mom, she gave me you two. You boys are the best of both of us. Nothing will ever change that.” I scoot over and tuck Ryder, who’s no longer able to hold back tears, to my side. “I know you miss her, guys, I do too, but she’s not here anymore. I don’t want to be sad the rest of my life, and I don’t want you to stay sad. Don’t think Mom would’ve wanted that for us either.”
“How do you know that?”
I look up at Mase. “I know that because if it had been me having to leave you and Mom behind, I know I would want you guys to be happy.” My boy swallows hard, and I’d give anything to be able to show him the same affection I can give Ryder, but I know that doesn’t come easy to him. Twelve going on thirteen is a tough age.
“Does Ollie make you happy?” Ryder asks, and I smile at him.
“I like her. I like her a lot and I feel happy being around her.”
“Are you gonna marry her?” Again, my youngest.
“Bud, we’re still getting to know each other. Getting married is a big decision. I’m not saying it might not happen one day, but it’ll be a while before we talk about that.”
“Can we stop talking about this now?” Mason turns to me, still with an edge, but most of the anger is gone from his face. For now. I have no illusions that this will be the only time we’ll have a talk on the subject.
“Yeah, Bud. Just one more thing for you to think about, though: there’s no limit to the love we have to give. It’s not like shoes, where you can only wear one pair at a time. I loved Grandma and Grandpa first, then I loved your mom, and then you two came along and I loved you too. I never loved Grandma and Grandpa less, because I found more people to love—love grows and there is always room for more.”
“Is it dinnertime yet?”
I grin at Ryder, and kiss his hair. “Soon. I’ll tell Grandma you’re hungry.” I get up, walk around the couch behind Mase and reach over, cupping his chin in my hand and tilting his head back. “Son, you’re allowed to feel what you feel,” I whisper while his younger brother is already engrossed in the game. “But if you’re mad, be mad at me, and not at Ollie. Okay?”
“Fine.” It doesn’t come graciously, and he quickly shakes his head to loosen my hold, but when I bend down to kiss his hair, he doesn’t duck away.
Small victories.
Dinner is a lively affair, with Ryder and Grace doing most of the talking, while both Ma and Ollie throw occasional concerned glances at a brooding Mason. He’ll clearly need some time.
“Boys, you guys clear the table? Rinse and on the counter, please. I’ll load the dishwasher.”
“I’ll put on some coffee.” Ma follows the boys into the kitchen and gives Mason a little side-hug in passing.
Mase throws his grandma half a smile, wipes his hands, and disappears back downstairs without a word. Ryder wipes his hands as well, but instead of following his brother downstairs, he comes to stand beside Ollie’s chair.
“I’m sorry about your house,” he mumbles, barely moving his
lips.
“Thanks, honey,” Ollie says with a warm smile. “I am too, but everything can be fixed.”
Suddenly he lurches forward and gives her an awkward hug, before running to follow his brother downstairs.
“Well, then. One down, one to go,” Grace shares matter-of-factly, before turning to Ma, who is putting cups on a tray. “So where are those cannoli Ollie told me about?”
“You can have two,” Ma decrees firmly. “The others are for Trinity.”
Ollie
I’m still reeling from Ryder’s sweet show of support when I hear Rita mention Trinny, and my eyes immediately look for the time on the kitchen clock.
Six thirty.
Surely she should’ve been home by now.
I put my hand on Joe’s knee, who’s sitting beside me. He immediately looks over at me.
“Can I have your phone to check the flight tracker?”
He pulls his phone out of his back pocket right away, leans over so I can see, and opens the app. “Looks like the flight got in on time. They’re probably still waiting for luggage” He sits up straight, taps his screen, and puts the phone to his ear. I catch a look he shares with Keith across the table. I can’t read it, but I know something is conveyed when Keith gets up and walks to his perch by the front window. “Did you have the parents’ number written down somewhere?”
“Is she not answering?” I can hear the panic in my own voice.
“She may have forgotten to take it off airplane mode, Sweets. If you have the number I’ll give Kim’s parents—” He’s interrupted by the phone ringing in his hand and looks at the screen. “That could be them,” he suggests, smiling reassuringly.
“Hello?”
As he listens, his eyes suddenly shoot across the room where Keith is standing.
“Stay where you are. We’re on our way.”
“What? Is that them?” I pull on Joe’s arm and when he turns to me I already know what he’s going to say.
“Honey—”
Chapter 30
Joe
I step out on the deck, phone against my ear.
“Talk to me.”
Inside I see Ollie curled up on the couch, her face pale and her eyes vacant. Shock. Pops is staying close, trying to distract Ryder who plastered himself to Ollie, looking terrified.
Ma and Grace are apparently cut from the same cloth, both of them in the kitchen keeping busy. Even in a crisis, people need to eat and drink.
My Mason is sitting on the bottom step of the stairs—keeping his distance—but his eyes don’t miss a thing, which is why they’re looking right at me through the sliding door.
It’s been three fucking hours.
Three hours since Trinny disappeared.
Three hours since she stood waiting for luggage, pulled a suitcase off the conveyor belt for an old lady with a cane standing beside her, and offered to haul it to the curb outside where the woman said she’d be picked up.
Two hours and fifty minutes since Dave, Kim’s father, went outside to see what was taking so long and didn’t see her.
The next twenty minutes they scoured the terminal, which isn’t that big. Bathrooms, restaurant, gift shop, parking lot—they searched them all. Then they alerted airport security, and only then did they call us.
By then Trinny had been gone thirty minutes. Thirty minutes gets you to the New Mexico border, or into the mountains, or halfway to Cortez. Thirty minutes can get you gone.
“Don’t have much,” Damian warns me. Keith already had him on the line before I got off the phone with Kim’s dad, and Gomez had his team out at the airport within ten minutes of the call.
“Give me what you’ve got.”
“Waitress at the restaurant, just starting her shift, was walking up to the terminal and remembers passing an old woman and a young girl with blue hair who were standing by the open back gate of, what she called, a big shiny dark SUV. She says she was just about to head inside when she thought she heard someone calling, she turned around just as a man slammed the gate on that SUV shut.”
“Let me guess, no make, no license plate.”
“You’d be correct, but she was pretty detailed in her description of both the older woman and the man, so Luna is working with her on a composite and to try and identify that SUV from what little she remembers. Hope to have something to send out soon.”
“Fucking nuts to be standing still when every damn second she could be farther away.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Or dead,” I voice on a whisper, but Gomez hears it.
“Don’t go there, my friend. The moment we have something to work with, we’ll be all over it. In the meantime we have alerted State Patrol as well as law enforcement in neighboring counties to be on the lookout.”
“Cruz have any fucking thing on Montenegro’s whereabouts?”
“Livingston is on a Bureau jet, scheduled to land here in about half an hour. Unless something develops before then, we’ll head your way. In the meantime, you and Blackfoot stay put and keep everyone contained.”
“Killing me,” I mumble, my eyes coming up to see Ollie, her face turned my way. Her look is burning into me.
“I know. Hang tight. We’ll find her.” He ends the call.
There’s no way he can know that—an empty promise—no matter how much conviction in his voice.
Still, I hold onto it tight.
Without taking my eyes off Ollie, I tuck my phone away, and open the sliding door.
Ollie
I watch him walk toward me, sitting down on the coffee table putting his hands on my knees.
It’s quiet in my head. So quiet, I feel like I’m underwater—drowning.
I see his lips move, but I don’t hear a word. All of my concentration is focused on his eyes, knowing I’ll read the truth there, regardless of the words coming out of his mouth.
I feel Ryder burrowing in even closer, but I can’t bring myself to move.
My body is here, but it feels like I’m already gone from it. No concept of time, simply floating in a dark void, awash in an onslaught of memories. Her birth, alone in a hospital with only the company of a nurse. Trinny placed in my arms, her eyes blinking open and the instant feeling of being connected on a cellular level, filling the emptiness that had become my life. Filling me every day since. Those same eyes squinting as she offered me her first smile. Her first steps, her first words, her first school day, her first tantrum. Snippets of a life touching me before drifting away and out of reach.
“Olivia!”
My body jolts at the invasive noise, as Joe leans his face close, our noses almost touching. His eyes searching mine and I let him see the depth of my despair.
“Baby,” I hear him whisper, before I feel myself lifted off the couch and carried upstairs. He lays me on the bed and covers me with his body—his weight anchoring me. “Listen to me,” he urges and I close my eyes, trying to block the sound of his voice.
I prefer floating in silence—suspended in time—where nothing can reach me.
A firm shake and my eyes snap open, finding his so close, I could drown in their gray depths.
“You need to snap out of this. This isn’t you. The Ollie I know is strong; she’s a fighter, a warrior. She would never give up. Never check out. Never.”
I shake my head from side to side, not wanting to hear. Every word pulling me closer to the surface where reality is painful. Too painful.
“Trinny is out there. She needs you, goddammit.”
Her name slices like a hot knife through the numbness I’ve surrounded myself with, and my mouth opens wide, gasping for air, before the pain comes pouring out.
Joe
Jesus.
In my life I’ve not heard anything as agonizing as the sound coming from Ollie. And the worst part is—I know I’m responsible for snapping her out of her near catatonic state, and making her feel.
I roll over on my back, rolling Ollie right with me, so she’s on top, my hand pushing her wails in my chest. I
know the sound has not gone unnoticed when the first person storming into the room is Mason, who was sitting at the bottom of the stairs when I carried her upstairs. His face is pale as he takes in the scene before him. Right behind him, Keith slides to a halt just inside the bedroom, and next Grace’s head pops around the doorpost. Surprising speed for a seventy-five-year-old.
“It’s okay,” I direct mostly at my oldest son. “She’ll be all right.”
Grace, her lips pressed tightly together and her eyes haunted, reaches out and places a hand in Mason’s neck. “Come on, boy. Your dad’s got this.”
I confirm with a nod, and with one last look at Ollie’s limp form on top of me, he lets himself be led out of the room and back downstairs.
“Jesus, brother,” Keith, the last one left in the room, mutters, before he too turns to go back downstairs.
I don’t know how long it takes for Ollie’s wails to turn into sobs, but I’m absorbing every one of them. When all that’s left are occasional sniffles, I lift my hand from the back of her head. I’m relieved as fuck when she lifts, her face a mess, looking me straight in the eye.
“Tell me everything.”
I hold on tight, and don’t hold back getting her up to speed. Every reaction plays out clear on her face, but she seems to hold it together, so I don’t resist when she pushes up off me.
“I need to get cleaned up. I need to get some coffee in me. And then I need to find my daughter.”
Thank fuck.
For a while there I thought I’d made the wrong call, forcing her to break.
I quickly change my shirt—the other one is drenched—while I wait for her to wash her face in the bathroom. She comes out still looking a mess, but with a determination on her face a shitload better than the disconnected look she wore before.
We hit the living room just as Keith opens the door to the FBI contingent.
I hear Ollie mumble, “I’m okay, baby,” to Ryder, who jumps over the back of the couch and almost takes her down as he throws his body against her. With a quick glance at her face to make sure she’s okay—she makes this known with a faint smile—I turn to the collection of law enforcement crowded in my hall.
