“Good. Now go back upstairs so I can fuck my husband’s brains outagain.”
15
Lily Graves hated the woman she’d never met before Saturday, but would never forget—or forgive.
That voice. That awful, singsong, arrogant bitch.
Lily crossed herself. She needed to remember not to lower herself to that level. She needed to remember her faith.
It was really hard to trust in the Lord when her son was suffering. But she was trying, praying for an answer to this impossible situation.
Lily stared at the photo sent from Franklin’s cell phone and read the attached message.
I’m not joking. If you leave the house, Franklin is dead. Maybe that’s what you want?
Franklin looked terrified. Hollow. Dark circles under his eyes. Had he even slept in the last forty-eight hours? Probably not much more than she had.
The woman claimed she had been his lover, that they had apassionate affair. Lily didn’t believe her. Well... maybe in the back of her mind she thought it was possible, but that would have been in the past. He’d confessed to her that he’d lost his first wife in part because he had an affair with a colleague at his law firm. That between the affair and his long hours, Marissa couldn’t forgive him.
But she and Franklin had always been honest with each other. Her ex-husband had been abusive and cruel; Franklin was neither. He was kind, he was responsible, and he loved them. Lily didn’t doubt it. He had changed his practice, never worked nights, and only worked Saturdays when Nathan didn’t have a baseball game.
He had never once missed a ballgame. When Lily worked—as a nurse, she worked three twelve-hour shifts a week—Franklin picked Nathan up from school and made dinner. He brought her flowers. Not on birthdays or Mother’s Day, but randomly, once or twice a month, from a roadside stand near his office. Spring bouquets or a single yellow sunflower or long-stemmed white rose, her favorite.
He was the man she deserved. He waspresent.
Nathan’s father had wanted nothing to do with his son, who as a baby had been sickly and small. He’d walked out on them when Nathan was three.
Now Nathan was almost twelve, healthy, and growing like a weed. He played baseball and was very good. His grades were nearly straight A’s. Franklin had shown Nathan nothing but love and pride. He never yelled, even when Nathan on rare occasions deserved punishment. Franklin would talk to him, then together the three of them would come up with a punishment to fit the crime. Nathan loved Franklin, and Lily loved her little family.
Now they were all threatened. By a woman who had knocked on her door and then... Lily hadn’t remembered much after. A glimpse of a blonde and then... nothing.
She’d been unconscious for hours. And when she woke up, the woman had been in her face, wearing an obvious wig and large sunglasses even though they were indoors.
Now she was gone, but Lily couldn’t leave this damn house in the middle of nowhere. She would never leave her son. She believed the woman when she said Nathan would be dead if she stepped off the porch again.
She limped down to the basement of the farmhouse where Nathan was locked in a cell. Who had a jail in their basement? Who would put a child there?
If she were locked up, Lily would have told Nathan to leave. She had tried. At dawn, while Nathan slept, after the woman had left, Lily had tried to leave to get help.
The porch stairs exploded. She thought she was dead because of the sound, but the explosion was small and the damage to her calf was manageable. She had found a first aid kit in the kitchen and painstakingly removed splinters from her skin, then cleaned the cuts—dozens of small cuts. She was bandaging them when her phone rang.
“Next time, you’ll be dead and your son will starve to death, so think twice about defying me.”
Lily believed her.
He’d starve, or die from the gas that the woman threatened to release into the basement.
Lily couldn’t bear the thought.
There was only one light in the basement, a bare overhead bulb. So she’d brought down a couple lamps and a mattress from one of the beds upstairs. She wasn’t going to let her son sleep down here alone. It was damp and the stench of mold and dirt filled the space; it was cooler than upstairs but that was actually a blessing in the middle of the day when it was so hot.
She’d made them dinner—canned soup and grilled cheese. There wasn’t much to choose from, but the woman had left them two grocery bags of food. No fresh fruit or vegetables ormilk, but two loaves of bread, cheese, eggs, frozen hamburgers, and canned soup. Lily had written out how long the food would last if she had one meal a day and Nathan had two. They had ten days; this was the third day.
Her son would not go hungry.
“Mom,” Nathan said when he accepted the mug of soup through the bars, “you need to go find help.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
