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Charlie let out a snort of laughter. “Or she could have just told us straight up what she wanted to say! Why does she always have to be so cryptic?”
“Hey.” Molly never allowed Lila-slander in her presence. “She’s not cryptic, she’s just…Lila.”
There was no arguing with that, so none of them did. Back in their small Indiana town, they’d all been misfits for various reasons, but Lila most of all. Molly was the dirt-poor one, Charlie was too tall, Ani had a leg brace, but Lila…Lila was the witchy one. Sometimes Molly used to imagine that she had floated down from another planet, looked around and seen all the flowers, and decided Earth would do just fine.
A pang of emotion lanced through her, so sharp and strong that she gasped.
“What’s wrong?” Always the caretaker, Ani put a quick hand on Molly’s shoulder.
“This is my fault. I’ve been so busy with this big divorce case they dumped on me that I had to cancel on Lila twice. She was going to come over and we were going to make tamales, but I had to postpone.”
“You mean, she was going to make tamales.”
“Not the point. But yes.” Molly mentally skimmed through all her recent contacts with Lila. What if Lila had wanted to fill her in on whatever was going on, but Molly kept canceling? Lila’s intuition worked in mysterious ways. If she felt disrespected, she tended to shut down.
“Oh shit, I just thought of something else,” said Charlie.
They all looked at her.
“What if she didn’t leave New York voluntarily? She always hooks up with wounded bird types. What if one of them was too wounded?”
Molly could barely breathe at the thought that Lila might be in real, serious trouble. If she had a blind spot, it was people who needed her. Warning signs didn’t register when she was on a mission to help someone.
“We have to find her. I have to find her. I should have kept in better contact. That’s my job.”
“It’s not your job. Don’t be silly,” Ani scolded her. “Lila is a grown woman.”
“But she’s Lila. And you’re wrong. I have two jobs, the law firm and Lila. I’ve been slacking on one of them.”
The more important one, she realized suddenly. No big wheel divorce case, no junior partner responsibilities, would ever compare to taking care of Lila.
“We have to find her.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll figure it out.”
“I have to fly back tomorrow,” said Charlie with a worried frown.
“Me too,” said Ani. “John and I have a session with?—”
Molly waved them both off. “You guys take care of Goldie, and I’ll find Lila.”
Ani gently squeezed Molly’s forearm. “Okay, but don’t take any big risks, and keep us in the loop. We want to know everything.” She glanced in the backseat, where Charlie was typing on her phone. “Charlie, what are you doing?”
“Googling how to take care of a goldfish.”
There was no laughter in the world like laughing with old friends, thought Molly as they all cracked up. You should be here, Lila. Next time, you will be.
3
Molly had always been good at solving puzzles, and when she put her mind to something, she rarely gave up until she’d finished. Two days after Charlie and Ani flew home, she learned from the pet shelter where Lila volunteered that she’d left New York about a month ago, after mentioning a one-way ticket to Anchorage, Alaska.
The next day, she spent several hours—potentially billable ones—trying to narrow down where in the enormous state of Alaska Lila had gone.
Was Lila trying not to be found? Molly would have come to that conclusion if not for her last post on Instagram. She hadn’t posted at all since then. She could have deleted it. But she hadn’t, and Molly figured that must mean something.
Life at the end of a road that comes and goes with the snow, said the post, along with a black-and-white photo of a curve in a road buried under six feet of snow.
