AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She heard his loud voice urging his mom to let him go. She didn’t look back.
“She said she’d take me!” he cried.
Oh, shit.
“Who did?” the mom asked suspiciously.
“She did!”
And then Zora heard running footsteps behind her. The boy’s. He caught up to her with a determined look on his face. “You didn’t wait!”
“Excuse me,” his mother said. Zora glanced back at her, heart pounding. “Don’t talk to my son anymore. If I want him to go to the toy store, I’ll take him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Zora said staunchly.
They were standing in the center of the mall by now. Tyler was gazing at her with an angry expression. “You said you’d take me,” he insisted.
“I don’t know what’s going on. Just stay away from me.” The woman grabbed her son by the shoulders.
Zora was so shaken she nearly peed herself.
“Ma’am . . .” They both turned to see a woman in a navy-blue suit approach from the store. She had a tiny badge on her breast.
“Oh, fuck!” Tyler’s mother exploded, then said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take it.”
She handed over the silver bracelet she apparently still had clutched in her hand as she’d chased Zora out of the store.
Zora turned away from the whole scene and walked stiffly down the mall and out a side door. She found her way back to her car and sank behind the wheel. Tears filled her eyes.
After a few moments, she turned the ignition and drove herself home. Brian was still in his office, and she almost banged on his door but didn’t.
Instead, she went into their master bedroom and changed her clothes, putting on some comfy Lululemon pants and a top. She wandered into the kitchen and found some chips and a dish of pico de gallo and took them both into the TV room, where she’d seen the news about Tanner yesterday.
She watched HGTV blankly and ate her chips. It was 5:00, and the news would be on again soon. The whole world would learn of Tanner Stahd’s death.
Feeling really low, she took her empty bowls back to the kitchen and went to her bedroom, where she’d thrown her coatdress across her silk duvet. Digging in one of the pockets, she drew out the silver bracelet, identical to the one the woman had accidentally run out of the store with.
Opening the bottom drawer of the bank of drawers designated as hers in the walk-in closet, she added to the small pile of keepsakes she’d been “
given” by the major retailers in the mall. She’d been very careful about not being caught, but today had been a close one.
She heard the door to the office squeak open, and she hurriedly tucked everything away and walked back into the bedroom. She was hanging up her dress when Brian stood in the open doorway.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, and only then did she realize how shaken she was.
“I was at the hospital when it happened,” she said tearily.
“What?”
“When he died. I was there.”
Brian’s face slackened. “Tanner?”
“Yes. Isn’t that what you were going to say?”
He was gobsmacked. “No.”
“What is it?”
