Right at that moment, it didn’t feel as though she was ever going to be anything but lost and alone and haunted by demons that no one else in the world had to see. But tomorrow, she reminded herself, she was going to see someone who really needed her – and that was one very strong reason to keep going.
CHAPTER THREE
The next day was a new day. It had to be.
Laura sat in her car at the steering wheel, her hands still resting in the ten and two positions. She had to get last night out of her mind. The way Nate had reacted. She had to forget about it, at least for a short while.
She needed a clear mind for this. No distractions. And definitely no inner monolog
ue telling her that this was going to go just as badly as that had.
This was important, and Laura couldn’t let whatever was going on in her personal life bleed into it. Even if it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between her personal life and work these days.
Laura took her hands off the wheel with a deep breath and used that same momentum to reach for the door of the car and open it. She had to get moving. It was already the time that she’d said she’d be here.
She looked up at the house as she left the car, trying to gain a clear first impression. It was a big house, for sure. Not quite as big as Amy’s old house. Governor Fallow, her father, had purchased an impressive colonial-style manse for his family. This one was a little more modest.
But the yard out front was neatly mowed, the brickwork was clean, and the windows shone in the sun. it was bigger than any house Laura had ever lived in, in her life. It was nice. A good neighborhood. Quiet, except for a couple of young children playing in a yard down the street.
Everything looked good. So, why did Laura have a pit in the bottom of her stomach when she looked at it?
It wasn’t hard to self-psycho-analyze. She was probably overreacting, projecting. When she’d responded to a report of a kidnapping earlier in the year and rescued six-year-old Amy, the child had seemed safe at last. Until a vision in the hospital room showed her Amy being beaten by her own father, the Governor who put on a family-friendly face to the world but was privately dealing with serious anger issues.
And if that hadn’t been enough, then what followed would definitely have made anyone paranoid about the girl’s safety. Wading into the family home herself and forcibly removing Amy from the situation, and even retrieving videotaped proof of the beatings, should have been the end of it. But instead of staying in care, Amy had ended up going back with her father after he pulled strings behind the scenes.
And then she’d been in the house when her father went on one of his rampages, took things too far, and beat his own wife to death. If Laura hadn’t had another vision warning her, she’d have ended up another victim.
Laura walked up the short path to the front door, flanked by a white-painted portico that added a suitable amount of stately drama to the property. She was going to get the chance to touch Amy again today, and she was already mentally bracing herself for another vision. Another sign of calamity.
Amy had been taken in by her uncle, a certain Dr. Christopher Fallow. A man of whom Laura had absolutely no experience. The fact that he’d agreed to let her see the child again had to be a good sign, but how much of one she wasn’t sure. Was it just going to be a smokescreen? An attempt to fob her off with a family-friendly face, the same way that John Fallow had always operated?
She needed to know for sure.
Laura knocked, loudly, feeling the power of that knock reverberate through her hand even as it shook. She was nervous, badly so. Afraid. Not for herself, but of what she was going to find. Of the fight not yet being over.
She knew she was going to do whatever it took to make sure that Amy was safe. But that, in itself, was the scary part. Putting everything on the line. Never quite knowing whether it would be enough.
“Hello?”
The door opened with a rush, and Laura found herself standing there agog, somehow not ready for it to happen even though she’d been the one to knock. She took in the man who stood in the doorframe immediately, her brain marking comparison points to John Fallow.
He had the same dark hair as his brother, the same kind of build. Tall. But he was slimmer, actually, as she looked at him, and his beige slacks paired with a white button-down shirt seemed somehow more casual than anything John Fallow would ever wear. He was never not in a suit. Even the day Laura had watched him carted off by the local police, covered in his wife’s blood, he had seemed somehow stiff and formal.
Christopher’s eyes, too, were softer. The same dark shade of brown, but softer somehow. There were more fine laughter lines around them. He was in his late thirties, Laura estimated, not yet showing any signs of gray in his hair. Fit, slightly tanned, and with a wide smile that showed straight white teeth, almost dazzlingly so.
“You must be Laura,” he said, his initial doubt cleared up.
Laura found her voice, checked herself, cleared her throat. “Hello,” she replied. “And you’re Christopher Fallow.”
“That I am,” he said, with another wide grin. His mouth was still open, like he was about to say something else, but whatever it was, it was cut off immediately. There was a kind of screeching sound from somewhere inside the house, and before Laura had time to process it, she was being tackled around the legs by a streak of pink.
A streak of pink that turned out, once she’d managed to stop herself from falling over, to be Amy Fallow.
The blonde-haired, blue-eyed child looked up at Laura with an expression of absolute joy and excitement, hugging her tight around her legs. “You came to see me,” she said, making Laura blink her eyes quickly twice to clear any moisture from them as she looked down at her. With the instinct of a mother, she found herself reaching for Amy in return, laying her hand on top of one of her tiny arms and using the other to stroke her hair out of her face.
“Of course, I did,” Laura said, waiting for the vision to come. Her skin was in contact with Amy’s. She tried to concentrate, to will something to come. She took a deep breath, honed in on her senses. “I said I would, didn’t I?”
Nothing was coming. No single hint of anything. If there was something bad coming in Amy’s future, then Laura was none the wiser to it.