By noon, my phone is buzzing constantly. Nash checking in, Boone asking where I am, and Jet calls too.
“Dallas,” she says seriously. “I’ve got half the town checking in. No one’s seen her since yesterday afternoon. Laura says she hasn’t been at the diner. The gas station kid says no one matching her description came in. I asked about anything weird, and nobody’s sure, but Marty at the feed store says he saw a black SUV at the edge of town last night around six thirty.”
My skin goes cold.
“Which direction?” I ask.
“South,” Jet says. “Toward the highway.”
I swallow hard. “Thanks.”
“You okay?” Jet asks.
No.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
She doesn’t buy it. “We’re going to find her.”
“I know,” I say, and hang up before my voice breaks.
By the time I drive back home, the sun is already dropping toward the trees, turning the snow a bruised blue. The day is slipping away, and panic rises with it, sharp and choking.
I park in the driveway and sit with my hands on the steering wheel.
This is how it started with Belinda, too.
A day that felt ordinary until it didn’t.
A phone call.
A moment that cracked my life clean in two.
I blink hard and shove the thought down.
Not that.
Not again.
I cannotget lost in all of that today. No way.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Faith
January 24th
Time stops meaninganything after a while.
It turns syrupy and cruel, stretching thin and sticky between one shouted sentence and the next. The clock on the wall keeps changing numbers, but none of them feel real.
Evan hasn’t stopped talking.
Yelling, really. Talking implies conversation.
It doesn’t help that this house feels strange now. Everything looks sharper than it should. The clean lines, the expensive furniture, the framed photos that were chosen because they looked good together, not because they meant anything.
“Do you have any idea what kind of mess you’ve made?” he demands, turning on me suddenly. “Do you know how many calls I’ve taken in the last few weeks aboutyou?”
