Page 29 of One Second After Another

“Cross!” he called again.

The little boy just a few feet away looked her way with a shrug. “You’re gonna leave now, huh?”

“I have to.”

He nodded once. “Yeah, you keep doing that to people, I guess. Leaving.”

Penny blinked away the veil of tears that shrouded her vision. “I don’t want to, though.”

“Cross Nazio Donati—time to eat, kiddo!”

As if on cue, Cross’s stomach growled. He didn’t even look sheepish about it.

“The interlude—the part of the song that repeats, right?” he asked her.

She smiled. “Yeah, what about it?”

“Mine feels like a hug.”

Penny stilled.

He couldn’t know that ...

It wasn’t possible.

“It does,” he said again. “It feels like a hug when I hear it. I feel the same. Light at first. But then it tightens, muffles. Like arms wrapping around me, bringing me closer, getting warmer and tighter.”

“I composed a lullaby for you. That’s all.”

Cross kicked at the dirt when his father called his name again. “Yeah, but with a hug. Right?”

“The way I thought a hug should feel. If someone made one with music. If I could hug you through mine.”

Not that she ever told anyone that fact.

“Okay.” Cross turned back toward the house. “That’s what I thought.”

“Cross, are you in those damn woods again?”

Penny sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of Nazio strolling down the steps of the porch and heading their way. Toward the woods.

“I have to—”

Penny didn’t even get to finish her sentence before the boy had turned back around. He darted for her, his small arms wrapping around her middle. The hug was light at first, and then it tightened with warmth.

“Please don’t tell them you saw me,” she whispered, hugging the boy back. “I only want to help them, okay?”

If she could have stayed right there in that moment with a piece of her past cementing her between then and now, she would have. Forever.

“I won’t tell.” Cross peered up at her when he took a step back and let her go, asking, “You’ll come back, won’t you?”

She chose not to lie.

“I’m sure gonna try.”

7.

Penny