Her hands found their way to his shoulders, her fingerscurling against the fabric of his shirt, holding him closer as her thoughts swirled.
A slumber party with her family might have been fun. A slumber party withRyansuddenly seemed a far better way to spend Christmas Eve.
She was trying to remind herself of all the reasons that wasn’t a good idea when the shrill ring of her phone cut through their embrace, its sharp tone jolting them apart.
Holly blinked, her breath unsteady, as the moment shattered around them like a glass ornament tossed at a wall.
“Can you ignore it?”
She shook her head, feeling incapable of stringing two coherent thoughts together. “That’s Troy’s ringtone. Lydia might be homesick.”
It was all she could manage. She grabbed her phone off the table in the entryway with fingers that trembled.
“Hello?”
The voice on the other end wasn’t her ex-husband or her daughter. It was Brittany and she only said Holly’s name before giving a panicked-sounding sob.
Fear clutched at her. “Brittany? What is it? What’s wrong?” Holly asked.
The other woman didn’t answer for a long, unbearable moment as she seemed to be trying to control her sobs.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know how but... but Lydia is missing.”
Icy fingers crawled up her spine. “Missing? What are you talking about?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure what happened. I was feeding Hudson and putting him down to sleep.”
“Tell me what youdoknow,” she ordered harshly when Brittany’s voice trailed off into another sob.
The other woman seemed to be trying to pull herselftogether. If Holly had been in the same room with her, she would have been more than happy to slap her if necessary, in order to yank her back to the moment. Instead, she could do nothing but wait in an agony of worry.
“The kids were all down watching a movie while everyone else was playing a game upstairs in the dining room,” she said after a strangled pause while Holly’s nerves stretched to the breaking point.
“At some point, Lydia must have... must have come upstairs. Nobody saw her leave but... somehow she did. When her cousin came up to get a drink, she was surprised to see Lydia wasn’t in with the adults. That’s where the other kids thought she had gone.”
“But she hadn’t.”
“No,” Brittany wailed. “Troy said he hadn’t seen her since she went down to watch the movie.”
Holly felt like she might be sick. How was it possible to go from the magic and wonder of Ryan’s kiss to this heartrending fear in the space of a heartbeat?
“She has to be there. Have you looked in all the rooms? Maybe she’s hiding.”
“We’ve looked everywhere. Under the beds and in all the closets. The garage. Everywhere. We’ve all been searching for the past fifteen minutes. She’s not here!”
She paused and when she spoke, her words chilled Holly to the bone. “Holly. Her coat is missing.”
Dear God. It was late December, frigid, snowing. And the Moores lived on the shores of Lake Haven. If Lydia had gone outside, anything could have happened to her. A hundred horrible scenarios, each worse than the one before, played out in her mind.
How could this be happening? How could they have lether out of their sight for an instant? Every five-year-old child needed supervision and Lydia was a five-year-old with developmental delays. She couldn’t be left alone.
“Susan and Norm have called the police,” Brittany went on in a rushed voice. “An officer is here now. Troy didn’t want to tell you yet, not until we know more, but I... I thought you needed to be told.”
“Thank you for that.” She wasn’t quite ready to completely forgive Brittany for having an affair with a married man but she was grateful for this at least, that she had gone with her instincts and reached out to Holly.
Right now, nothing else mattered but Lydia.
“I’ll be there as fast as I can drive to Haven Point.”
