Page 19 of Tracking Safety

“Okay.” Jonah picked up his bread and took an enormous bite, already moving on. “Can I have more juice?”

“Of course. Liam, would you help him?”

“Yes, sir.” Liam nodded and slid from his chair.

Cora still looked at Luke. She didn’t push or look upset. Instead, she watched him with those wide, dark eyes.

She had Jenna’s eyes. Jenna’s face too, for that matter.

This little girl had no idea how much she looked like her mother.

But Luke was reminded of it every time he saw her.

Luke reached for his fork and took a bite of spaghetti. But his meal was suddenly tasteless.

He had some big decisions to make—decisions that wouldn’t just affect him.

He couldn’t afford to get this wrong.

CHAPTER 5

That evening, Jenna stood at the window of her room at Hollow House and watched the street below.

She tried to stop watching for danger but couldn’t. She continually scanned the street, looking for any signs of . . . of what?

She wasn’t even sure. But she’d been looking over her shoulder for so long now that it felt like second nature.

For a moment, her gaze lingered on a car parked across the street.

Was that the same sedan as earlier? She wasn’t sure. The darkness made it impossible to tell.

It was probably nothing. Paranoia that had been ingrained in her.

Think about Luke instead.

Thinking of him didn’t seem comforting or safe either, however.

Despite that, she replayed their parking lot conversation.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the way Luke had gone still when he recognized her. His careful voice as he’d delivered words designed to land hard. You lost any rights to our children the day you left.

He wasn’t wrong. That was the thing she kept coming back to. He wasn’t wrong about any of it. But she longed to be with her kids. To smell Cora’s hair. To look into Jonah’s expressive eyes. To tell Liam—who’d always been a worrier—that everything would be alright.

She pressed her fingers against the cool glass and thought about the last morning she’d been with her family. She thought about the way her house had smelled—like coffee and crayons and clean laundry. All her favorites.

As she’d stood in the hallway and listened to Luke moving around in the kitchen downstairs. In that moment, she’d understood she was about to do something she could never undo. She would leave in the middle of the night.

She’d left her wedding ring on the nightstand and had told herself her decision was the only way to keep the people she loved safe.

She was still trying to decide if she believed that.

Her children . . . Liam, Cora, and Jonah.

She pressed her eyes closed and let their images fill her mind. She let herself think about them the way she usually didn’t allow—fully, without the careful rationing she’d learned to apply just to get through a day.

Liam seemed so much like his father that it made her chest ache just to look at him from across a parking lot. Would he ever forgive her for leaving?

She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she deserved his forgiveness—though she prayed for it.