Page 163 of Taken Away

Right here.

The ink blurred. Aubrey blinked hard, but the tears came anyway, hot against her cheeks.

Right here. If only she’d known.

That birthday played in her mind as if a tape were running behind her eyelids. Ted had strung paper streamers across their small kitchen, crooked, earnest, and lopsided. He’d burned the first batch of cupcakes, starting over from scratch without cursing a single time. A few girls from her new school had come over, more out of curiosity than actual friendship, eating pizza and playing music too loud while they all pretended to be older than they were.

All night, Aubrey had kept glancing toward the front door. Waiting. Hoping.

Because her mother had said she’d try to make it. She’d said it with that distracted, breezy tone that always meant nothing and everything at once.

A problem with a man, Anne had texted Ted an hour before the cupcakes were served. She wasn’t going to make it. Not even the man she’d originally left them for—that one was already long gone, replaced by someone older, sicker, and needier.

Another man.

Another excuse.

In the dark hallway, her cheap phone clutched in her hand, Aubrey had watched Ted read the message. Something deep inside her simply went still.

Of course she wasn’t coming. There was always a man.

She spent the next twenty years telling herself it was fine. That she didn’t care. That birthdays were fundamentally stupid metrics anyway.

And all this time, there had been a number. There had been Mabel.

Her throat closed tight, a low, raw sob escaping her lips before she could lock it down. Downstairs, the grandfather clock in the foyer chimed the hour. She had no idea which one; time had gone slippery. She didn’t hear the heavy front door open or the scuff of boots moving through the downstairs rooms.

She only caught the soft, deliberate creak of a floorboard right outside the open bedroom door.

“Aubrey?”

Bennett’s voice was very quiet in the threshold.

She squeezed her eyes shut, her fingers fisting into the edges of the card. She’d forgotten he was even an option—forgotten she was supposed to go back up the ridge road, that there was finally someone in the valley who would notice when she didn’t show up.

“I wondered where you got off to,” he said, his rough baritone low, threaded with a tight, unyielding strain of relief. “I was getting worried.”

He stopped inside the doorway. Aubrey heard his sharp intake of breath before she even looked up—knew exactly what he was seeing. Mabel’s bedroom half-dismantled. The cedar chest open. Century-old birthday cards spread around her like fallen leaves, and Aubrey sitting on the floor in the center of the wreckage, her shoulders hunched and her face damp.

“Aubrey.” His voice dropped into a rougher, softer register. “Hey.”

She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t bear to fall apart that completely in front of him. Her gaze stayed locked on the faded watercolor cake.

“She wrote me every single year,” Aubrey said, her voice hoarse and broken against the quiet. She wasn’t even sure who she was talking to—him, the room, or the little girl still waiting at the door. “Every birthday. Four, five, six... fourteen.”

She held the crumpled card out, her hand shaking violently.

Bennett crossed the room in three long strides. He didn’t sit on the edge of the stripped mattress; he dropped straight down into a crouch in front of her, bringing his massive frame down to her level as if she were fragile. His gold-flecked eyes flicked over her face, taking in the redness and the tears.

“Can I see?” he asked, voice low.

She nodded, her throat too tight to form a syllable.

He took the card from her fingers, careful not to smooth the frantic crease she’d made in the paper. His dark gaze tracked Mabel’s handwriting, moving line by line. Aubrey watched the muscle in his jaw tighten, the subtle flare of his nostrils as he read the phone number at the bottom.

He drew a slow breath. “She gave you her number,” he said, his voice roughened. “Told you to call.”

“If I needed to talk,” Aubrey whispered.