She kept her eyes on Jess’s flank. Followed every turn she took. Even snapped a quick photo of her license plate. In TVshows, they were always able to find people that way. Angela would too.
If she couldn’t find her address first.
Angela followed her deeper and deeper into the mountains. More than half an hour driving onto the darkest and dimmest of roads. The sun was still shining, but the snow-covered tree canopy hardly let anything through. Her stomach curled and coiled the farther they got from civilization.
Bile burned up her throat when Jess turned onto a gravel road.
Did she know? Had she realized Angela was following her? Was Jess leading Angela to her son in the worst way she could imagine?
Angela pulled over.
She waited on the side of the road. She checked where they were on a map, but all it mentioned was some forest.
Why had Jess driven into a forest, alone, not long before nightfall?
Her fingers trembled and her heart slammed harder. Time passed, but she couldn’t say how much. She just had an odd, sinking sensation that she was in danger. That Jess knew, and Jess would do to her what she had done to David.
Whatever that may have been.
Cars drove past. One woman even rolled down her window and asked if Angela needed any help. Angela only shook her head, forcing a smile.
Then, that very woman, in an old beat-up van, turned down the gravel road.
Angela waited. She waited until that van was out of sight, then shifted into drive.
She kept a distance. The other woman couldn’t have seen her, not through the cloud of snow that floated from her van’s rooftop.
The moment Angela saw her taillights, she tapped her brakes. She stayed practically frozen between the conifer trees, waiting for the dust to settle behind that woman’s vehicle.
When it did, other shapes became clear. A tall metal fence, wrapped in barbed wire. A small metal box—the kind the correction officers talked through when Angela had visited David or her late husband in jail.
A security measure of some kind.
But there were only trees behind the fence. Trees and a gravel road stretching uphill.
That fence. The longer Angela stared at it, the sicker she felt.
Something was wrong here. Something had happened. Angela couldn’t put words to it, but a mother knew. A motheralwaysknew.
What the hell is this place?
