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 in frustration. “Then why not just keep him one Sunday night? Why come all the way here to do it?” I’ve already had this conversation today, and the more I have it, the harder it is to talk myself out of my suspicions.
Dawn’s answer gets cut off by the unmistakable thud-thud-thud of helicopters—more than one—swooping over the camp, shaking the air and rattling the cabin’s wooden walls.
“Why are you trying to talk me into this?” I say once the sound fades. I feel jittery, keyed up, like I have to restrain myself from jumping off this couch and running out there to join them in the search for my son. Every second we sit here, yammering on about Andrew, is another second Ethan is not found. “Andrew would not try to steal his own son.”
“Have you considered the possibility that Ethan’s disappearance could have nothing do with your son...” She pauses, and that ever-pleasant half smile she’d been wearing disappears. “And everything to do with you?”
My skin goes cold, a chill snaking down my spine. “With me, how?”
“Let me put it this way. If Andrew were angry and hurt and looking for revenge, what do you think he would do? What would he see as your one biggest weakness?”
And just like that, I’m a believer. My one biggest weakness is Ethan.
5 hours, 57 minutes missing
Outside the cabin, a big body in work boots comes clomping up the stairs with a gait I’d recognize anywhere. Dawn looks up expectantly, but I pop off the couch, lurch to the door and yank it open, right as Lucas raises a fist.
He looks like hell. His skin is pale. His shirt is untucked. He needs a haircut and a shave. Under the frayed orange rim of his ancient University of Tennessee baseball cap, his hazel eyes are crinkled with strain.
But he’s here and I fall into him, even though Lucas is the kind of guy who’d sooner put me in a headlock than a hug, and I’d sooner punch him in his stomach than throw my arms around his waist. As unaccustomed as I am to this embrace, I’m awfully glad for it. I press my face into his chest and fall apart.
“You gotta stay strong, Kitty Kat.” A nickname I haven’t heard from him since my high school days. He drapes a big palm on the back of my head. “For Ethan. You have to stay strong for him.”
I tip my head back, look up at Lucas through my tears. His face may have a few more wrinkles, his once-thick hair thinned out on top, but for me he’ll always be that solemn-faced man-boy who lived across the street, the one who took me in after my mother’s death made me an orphan at sixteen. “You would get eaten alive by foster care,” he said to me then, and Lucas would know. He spent more than a decade in the system, and to this day, the only thing he’ll tell me about it is that it was no place for a girl like me.
“I am. I will be. I’m just so glad you’re here.”
“Yeah, well, those two cops down at the turnoff didn’t make it easy on me. It would have saved me some trouble if you’d told them I was coming.”
I don’t ask how he got by, mostly because I don’t care. All that matters is he’s here.
He untangles us, heaves a battered duffel from the porch floor and walks me backward until we’re both inside the cabin. Behind him, the rain has stopped. A hazy mist rises up from the woods, smoky puffs that hang suspended in the air like ghosts.
While I mop up my face with a paper towel, Lucas introduces himself to Dawn. Like pretty much every other red-blooded female on the planet, she eyes him with interest. “Dawn Whittaker,” she says, shaking his hand.
I toss the towel in the trash and point to the duffel in Lucas’s fist. “What’s that?”
That is no overnight bag. It’s a bag big enough to carry every pair of jeans, T-shirt and sweater in Lucas’s very meager wardrobe, but a clinking of metal on metal sounds from inside the canvas. He drops it on the floor, where it lands like a chunk of concrete.
“My tracking gear. GPS. Night goggles. That kind of stuff.” Lucas pulls out a chair, flips it around and sits on it backward, his big body facing me. “What’s the word? You never texted.”
I fall onto the couch while Dawn spouts off acronyms I only vaguely recognize