“I’m picking you up at seven.”
“I remember.” She looked up at me. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.” I squeezed her hand again.
By then, we had done one full lap around the park.
“Are you ready to go back?” I asked.
She looked up, but her eyes were closed, like she was enjoying the sun on her face. “Not quite yet,” she said quietly.
“Okay.” So we kept walking. She was quiet for almost half a lap. Then she asked, “Tell me what your summers were like when you were a kid. You were with D’Shaun, right?”
So we walked and we talked for almost an hour. She told me about how she used to switch places with Lynn when Lynn would come to her Nana’s house to spend the summer, and no one could tell them apart. She told me about how they streaked around on their bikes. She didn’t mention their father, or Lynn’s friends. And I somehow knew that she avoided those topics on purpose. She laughed when I told her stories about scrapes D’Shaun and I would get into, and how MeeMaw used to ground me and him at the very same time.
And, after we had done five more laps around the park, we went back to work, and now she didn’t avoid me. She looked directly at me when she spoke to me again.
It was almost five o’clock when I had a thought about our date. “I need to run an errand, Shelly,” I said, as I walked toward the office door. “Will you be all right until I come back?”
She barely looked up. She was still cataloguing facts. “Sure,” she chirped.
“I’ll be back in about an hour.”
She waved a hand at me like she was swatting at a fly, and it made me laugh.
I needed to get one thing for our date tomorrow. I needed one thing that would make it perfect. I just didn’t know what it was yet. But I would find it.
Chapter 26
Shelly
Almost as soon as Clark walked out the door, a ringing phone jolted me out of my work haze. I jumped, not sure where it was coming from, but then I remembered the spare phone I’d put in my purse, the one I’d bought special so that Lynn could call me to check in. I grabbed my purse and pulled the phone out.
“Hello,” I said.
“Can I come home yet?” Lynn whined from the other end of the line.
I rested my forehead in my palm on the desk and took a breath. “Oh, my God, I have been so worried about you. What took you so long? I thought you would have called by now.”
“We drove all day and all night. We went pretty far away.”
“How far?” I asked, my heart in my throat.
“Do you really want me to tell you?” she asked cautiously.
“Probably best if you don’t.” Not if there was any chance Megan could get the information. “But you’re safe, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “We’re safe. But I do want to come home.”
“Me too!” Mason chimed from somewhere nearby, but I could hear him clearly.
“I know,” I replied. “I’m working on it.”
“So what’s the status?” she asked. I could hear her eating something while she talked to me.
“We haven’t seen or heard from Megan.”
“Nothing?”