by Sandy Hall
“Mom said we had to wait for the boys to wake up,” Keegan explained, taking Jane’s hand and walking down the carpeted stairs. “We wanted to wake them up, but she wouldn’t let us.”
The large basement had two separate areas, one with a TV and a sectional couch, where the floor was piled high with blankets and pillows from the sleepover. Beyond that, an area in the back was sectioned off with shelving that held all the girls’ toys, including a kitchen set that Jane would have gone wild for as a kid.
The girls got deep into playing almost immediately, and Jane joined in. She tried to focus their play on the kitchen area, because, really, it was beautiful, but they seemed to want to play a game that, from what Jane could gather, was essentially My Little Pony DMV. There was a pony behind a couple of blocks in a pile, and the other ponies would step up and ask questions about insurance coverage.
They didn’t even really want Jane to play, because every time she picked up one of the figures, they would tell her that now Applejack (or whoever) had to go to the end of the line because Jane had made her lose her spot.
Connie came down to say good-bye to the girls.
She tsked at the mess that the boys had left in the basement and told Jane not to clean it up for them. “They’re big boys. They can handle it.”
It hadn’t even crossed Jane’s mind to clean it up.
Connie asked Jane to come back upstairs so they could go through the regular schedule.
Today would be easy because the girls only had swim class at eleven. “I tried to keep it light to start with so you could get used to the routine and get to know the girls a little bit better,” Connie said.
“Thanks,” Jane said, trying to peek around to see if muscleman Teo was still lurking.
“Do you feel okay about driving the minivan?”
“Yes.”
“And make sure the girls are all strapped into their seats before you drive. Sometimes they like to pretend they buckled themselves in, and then they climb into the front seat and scare the bejesus out of me.”
“That sounds terrifying.”
Connie nodded and smiled. “If you need anything, text or e-mail me. Even when I’m in class, I can usually get back to people that way. But the girls are really self-sufficient. Try to be at least within earshot of them, but you don’t need to be on top of them all the time.”
Jane nodded. She could handle that.
“Feel free to bring along a book or a magazine or summer homework or anything,” Connie said. “I know you’re giving up a lot of time to be here, so I don’t want you to feel like you have to watch them every second.”
Jane smiled because that was very good news. She had totally planned to watch them every second.
“And if you’re hungry, take whatever you want from the fridge or the cabinets. Let me know if there’s anything you like that we don’t have. Especially lunch-wise, since you’ll need to feed yourself and the girls every day.”
Connie must have caught Jane’s scared look. “It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. Sandwiches, fruit. Rory doesn’t eat bread. She’s not allergic or anything—she just doesn’t eat it—so I make her cheese roll-ups or crackers with peanut butter.”
Connie finished packing her bag and let out a deep sigh. “All right. I’ll see you around five!” she said.
Jane went back down to the basement and kept an eye on the time, but it seemed to be moving in the wrong direction when the girls decided they wanted to play hide-and-seek. They would hide and Jane would have to find them. And according to the girls, all games of hide-and-seek had to be started from the living room.
Jane threw open the basement door at the top of the stairs and felt it crash into someone.
“Ah!” Teo’s voice came from behind the door.
The girls slipped around Jane and out of the basement while Teo stood there rubbing his exposed toes in his flip-flops.
“I’m so sorry!” Jane said. “I thought you’d already left for work.”
“It’s cool. It’s not a big deal. I didn’t need those particular toes,” he said. “Crap, I never cleaned up the basement, did I?”
Jane shook her head, and Teo glanced at the time on his phone.
“It’s cool,” Jane said. “I’ll clean it up. It’s the least I can do, since I just hobbled you. The girls will help. Right, girls?”
They looked blankly at Jane.
“Don’t you want to help Teo out?” she asked them.
They looked at her, and then at Teo, and then at one another before they started dancing around and yelling, “Yes! We love to help!”
“Yeah, we’ll take care of it for you. After we play hide-and-seek.”
Teo grinned and squeezed her shoulder. “Good luck with hide-and-seek, and I totally owe you one. Thanks.”
Jane smiled as she stood in the living room with her eyes closed and counted to fifty, as the girls had instructed her. If Teo was going to be a nice guy this summer, it would definitely help balance out the pain of Ravi.
When Jane got to fifty, she yelled, “Ready or not, here I come!”
Checking upstairs first seemed like a good idea, since she hadn’t heard the door to the basement open.
Buck had done a lot of work on the house over the years, putting on an addition and reconfiguring the layout. It was like a completely different home. Jane was met with a long hallway of closed doors when she got upstairs, and she tried to listen for giggles, but there was complete, eerie silence.
Maybe the girls hadn’t gone upstairs; maybe they went outside to hide, even though Jane had told them outside was off-limits. Or maybe they had left completely and were on their way to Acapulco, for all Jane knew.
She tried to imagine breaking the news to Connie and Buck that somehow she had lost all three children while playing hide-and-seek on her first day. After the court trial, there would be a made-for-TV movie about the girls: Hide-and-Seek Gone Horribly Wrong: The Story of the Buchanan Sisters.
After prowling the hallway, listening for any sound of the girls behind the closed doors, she decided she needed to be more systematic in her approach. She would open each door and check under the beds and in the closets. After that she would check the basement.
The first door she opened was obviously the twins’ room. Two beds to check under and just a tiny closet. Next was Connie and Buck’s room. She scanned it fast because it felt totally wrong to be in there. Unfortunately, they had a rather large walk-in closet that required extra effort.
After that there was the bathroom, where she looked behind the shower curtain and then in the linen closet. Unless the girls had climbed onto a shelf and perfectly replaced all the folded towels and sheets in front of them, she could definitely cross off the linen closet with one quick look.
The next room was Teo’s. She really didn’t want to be in Teo’s room, but she had to check for the girls, because now she was getting a little nervous.
She bumped her hip on his computer desk, and the screen came alive. She didn’t mean to look at the search bar, but her eye was drawn to it.
How to find your biological father, it said.
Jane gasped and put her hand over her mouth. This was not information that she should be privy to. Immediately she x-ed out the window, and a second one was open behind it. Consuela Garcia and Jose Rodriguez, the search said in that window. She closed that one, too, and backed out of the room, shutting the door and fleeing back downstairs, trying not to think about what she’d just seen.
The girls were all sitting at the kitchen table, eating grapes.
“You didn’t come find us,” Keegan said.
“I was looking for you everywhere upstairs,” Jane explained, taking a grape for herself and sitting across from the girls.
“We were in the basement.”
“I thought for sure you would have hidden under a bed or in a closet.”
Rory looked terrified. “That’s where the monsters live.”
Jane laughed. “Good
to know,” she said. “How did you get downstairs without the door making any noise as you opened and closed it?”
“You have to do it really slow,” Keegan said.
“Also good to know,” Jane said as she focused on the kids, determined to forget that she had ever been in Teo’s room.
About the Author
SANDY HALL is the author of A Little Something Different and Signs Point to Yes. She is a teen librarian from New Jersey, where she was born and raised, and has a BA in Communication and a Master of Library and Information Science from Rutgers University. When she isn’t writing or teen librarian–ing, she enjoys reading, marathoning TV shows, and taking long scrolls through Tumblr.
sandywrites.tumblr.com. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
Swoonworthy Extras
Preview: A Little Something Different
Preview: Signs Point to Yes
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Sandy Hall
Excerpt from No Holding Back copyright © 2016 by Kate Evangelista
A Swoon Reads Book
An Imprint of Feiwel and Friends
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All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
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First trade paperback edition 2016
eBook edition August 2016
eISBN 9781250100665
