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CHAPTER TWENTY
Laura was sitting outside the office, holding onto her favorite doll. The seats were wide and covered in a soft gray fabric that she liked running her hands over, but she had stopped doing that. Her mommy and daddy looked sad and angry and she didn’t know why. She didn’t understand why they were here.
Daddy had said a big long word, something like say—no, not say. Sy. Sy-ky-a-tist? Laura hadn’t heard it before, and she didn’t know what it meant, and everything was so quiet in this room. Like you weren’t supposed to talk here at all. Even though there was only Laura, her mom and dad, and a woman behind a big shiny desk near the door, she felt like she’d be told off if she said anything.
“Laura Frost?” A big door at the other side of the room opened soundlessly, and Laura stared up at the woman who had opened it. She was beautiful, with long shining dark hair like a princess, and she knew Laura’s name.
“… Yes?” Laura said, at length, her voice small and quiet, not sure what she was supposed to do. Her mother’s elbow landed in her side, trying to push her forward.
“Come on in,” the princess said, and Laura got down off the chair, following her with wide eyes.
Halfway there, she stopped and turned and looked at her parents. They were still sitting on the chairs. Neither of them had moved. Weren’t they coming, too? Her mother nodded encouragingly, but both of them still sat blank-faced, like she had done something wrong.
They had yelled at her when she told them about the dog. Was that why she was here?
Laura turned and walked after the woman, into the big office room, unsure what was going to happen to her now.
Laura gasped, her eyes flying open as she surfaced from the dream. No, a memory, she thought. That had all really happened, when she was just a little girl. No bigger than Amy was now, really. Or Lacey.
She sighed to herself, sitting up and trying to chase those old ghosts out of her head. After the first time she made predictions that had come true, therapy had become a habit. That was, until she learned to never talk about her visions, to never tell people what she saw. The therapist had declared that there was nothing wrong with her, and deep inside, Laura had known there was.
She shook her head at her own self, at these memories surfacing just now when she could do without them. She needed to concentrate, not get stuck in the past.
She stretched her arms above her head, feeling the cricks in her muscles from the tiny sofa she’d managed to find in an abandoned office. It was still dark out, which was lucky. No one had come in to wake her up—or to find an FBI agent unexpectedly curled up on their sofa, which might have been an unpleasant surprise for both of them.
Why had that memory come up now? It had been five or six years after that when Laura first felt the shadow of death around her father. When she first had a vision of his death, of his body propped up and shrinking in a hospital bed, bald and prickled with wires and tubes all over. She’d been too afraid to say something then. The therapy was still too recent a memory. She hadn’t wanted to cause trouble again, so she’d kept what she saw to herself.
When he’d been diagnosed at long last, Laura had a vivid memory of the moment the specialist had delivered the news that it wasn’t going to be possible for him to make it out alive. He’d said it in a soft and gentle way, aware of the fact that he was talking to a wife and a teenage daughter. But Laura had never been able to forget the way he had delivered it: the exact words he had said.
“If we had caught this sooner, we might have been able to do something—but I’m afraid it’s too late.”
It had been too late because she’d kept it to herself. Stayed silent. She had watched him die a slow and painful death, losing his dignity, every single element of life that might give him pleasure. Swapping it all for just a few more months of chemo-ridden life, with his family forced to sit at his bedside and watch. And now it was happening to Nate, and she still couldn’t say a word. If she did, she risked losing her job, being committed, losing the only people she cared about. Being pushed even further back from the possibility of getting visitation rights with Lacey.
How many times in her life had Laura been forced to stay silent and watch things unfold, even when she already knew how they would go? How many time
s had she said nothing?
Yes, there were times she had stepped in. So many times she’d managed to find a way to make an impact. But there were so many other times, too, when she had tried yet failed to change fate.
Too many failures on both sides. Too many silences. And now it was happening all over again. Nate. Amy. The killer.
What would she do, Laura wondered, if anything ever happened to Lacey—because she was no longer close enough to her daughter to see it and stop it?
Laura grabbed her phone and dialed Marcus’s number, needing to hear her daughter. Needing it, with everything she was. Every fiber, every bone. The line rang and rang, until finally Marcus’s voice kicked in, telling her to leave a message.
Voicemail. Laura ended the call, taking a breath. Of course he wouldn’t be awake yet. That would be too much to expect.
She only had to wait a moment, lingering in the disappointment, before the phone buzzed. A wild flare of hope spoiled to sickness as she read the text Marcus had sent her.
What the hell, Laura. It’s five in the morning. Leave us alone.
Laura bit her lip hard. She’d probably made things worse now. Why was she only ever capable of making mistakes when it came to the people she loved?
She wiped her hands over her face, rubbing her eyes and trying to force herself out of this funk she was in. The dreams and the text had done nothing for her mood, even if she did feel physically a little better thanks to the sleep. She had to get up, get moving, get back to the case.
But first, there was someone else whose fate she needed to check up on.
She dialed another number, seeing dawn just beginning to arrive through the windows and knowing that it was early. Maybe too early. But it was always worth a try.
