Page 80 of Weight of Guilt

Marlowe was exaggerating, but Wren laughed also. She let herself watch everyone a second. Her mother and her sisters and her brother, all in one kitchen. Not everybody was here. Her dad was headed to a motel, and Mason was asleep at Cody’s. But it was closer than they’d come in ten years to feeling like a family, and it was the very thing she’d asked God for in every prayer for so many years.

Nash had gone into the living room without being asked, which she noticed and appreciated.

“I keep waiting for it to feel normal.” The serious tone of Christian’s voice broke any of the levity of only a few seconds earlier.

Wren wanted to ask questions. She wanted to ask if anyone else was being held where he’d been taken, and what his captor fed him, and—well, anything. She just wanted something.

“Did you . . . did you remember anything else?” Wren held her breath as she waited for his response.

“Nothing.” He took a sip of his soda. “Sometimes . . . sometimes a feeling shows up without the memory attached to it. I try to understand it, but I can’t.”

Wren tried not to react.

“You’ll get there.” Nora squeezed his shoulder. “Give it time.”

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, the FBI would be here.

Then they’d have one more step of this process behind them.

After everyone went to bed, Wren turned off the light over the stove and headed toward the couch.

It hit her that she didn’t have any clothes or toiletries over here. Everything she owned sat in a cabin a hundred feet out the back door. She could sleep in her jeans or ask her sister to borrow something. But that seemed silly when her own clothes were so close.

She glanced at Nash in the recliner. “I need to run out to my cabin to get a few things.”

He sat upright and slipped on his boots. “I’ll go with you.”

“You don’t have to. I know you’re tired.”

He picked his phone up off the arm of the chair and stood. “You didn’t ask. But I’m coming anyway.”

Wren didn’t argue. She knew it would be useless and a poor use of her limited energy.

Bo lifted his head and sent her a questioning look as they passed him.

“Stay,” Wren told him.

He lowered his head. If dogs could frown, Bo would be frowning right now.

However, she didn’t want him barking and waking the whole house.

Outside, she and Nash crossed silently toward her cabin. Every few steps, Nash scanned the woods, the barn, and the road.

“Key.” He held out his hand.

Wren fished it out of her pocket and passed it to Nash.

He climbed the steps ahead of her, and Wren waited as Nash unlocked and pushed the door open. He reached around the frame and found the switch. A second later, the front room flooded with light.

“Wait here,” he instructed.

Wren stayed on the porch and wrapped her arms over her chest.

The light from the front room reached maybe four feet across the porch. Past that was the yard. Past the yard, the barn. Past the barn, nothing she could see at all.

The cicadas were singing out there, loud as they’d been all week.

Then they suddenly quit.