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Indecision warred on her face. Finally, she glanced around and motioned for me to move. When I stopped at the SUV Nico had bought and insisted I drive, she snapped, “No! The car over there.”
Fear shot through me as I glanced at the car parked the wrong way in front of my house. I thought if we took the SUV, we stood a chance of Nico finding us because I knew it had a location program on it. Now all I had was my phone, and if it died, we were well and truly fucked.
“Buckle her in, then you drive,” she demanded. “Hurry.”
With shaking hands I buckled Ehria into the car seat. Worried it didn’t fit her properly, I hesitated.
“Get. In.” The woman was losing patience, and I didn’t want to give her a reason to change her mind, so I quickly got behind the wheel. She got in the back seat next to my daughter. It made my heart stutter. There was an apple core in the cup holder. Thinking quickly, I grabbed it with my right hand as I turned in the seat.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I switched it to my left hand.
“Turn around and drive!” she barked.
Doing as she said, I tossed the apple out the door and into my yard by the driveway. I had no idea if Nico would see it or if an animal would run off with it first. I had to do something, though.
“How did you get into the neighborhood?” I asked as I pulled away from the curb. At one time, I might’ve been a trembling mess of panic and uselessness. Thanks to my ongoing counseling, my beautiful daughter, and Nico’s support, I was stronger than the woman I’d been a year ago. That didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified; I was just better at holding my shit together.
She ignored me, and I cast a glance in the rearview mirror. What I saw stunned me. The woman was staring at my daughter with awe and tears shimmering in her dark brown eyes.
“Please don’t hurt her,” I whispered.
At my plea, the woman looked up, and our eyes met in the mirror. With an almost regretful expression, she sighed. “It’s not me you need to worry about.”
I was afraid of what she meant by that.
When we left the neighborhood, I noticed the car we were in had one of our neighborhood scanners that opened the gates for us. The woman either lived in the neighborhood, or she’d stolen the car. The strip was made to separate if removed, so she couldn’t have stolen it from another vehicle.
Shit, what if the apple belonged to one of our neighbors because this was their car?
She instructed me on where to drive. My heart bottomed out as the miles slipped away. My phone vibrated in my back pocket over and over. Thankfully, with the sounds of the road, she didn’t hear it. I prayed Nico and the club would be coming for us soon.
As the miles slipped away, I began to lose hope as each glance in the rearview mirror didn’t show the cavalry coming to the rescue. My old anxiety and insecurities clawed at my throat. Then I thought of the sweet little girl in the back seat relying on me and took a deep, grounding inhale.
“How much further?” I asked when we’d been on the road for three hours and were closing in on Minneapolis.
“It doesn’t matter,” the woman murmured.
“Well, it does, because Ehria will be waking up soon to eat,” I said as my breasts tingled and ached, signaling my milk coming down.
At the mention of my daughter’s name, the woman gasped, and I noticed her eyes go wide in the mirror.
“E-Ehria?” she stammered.
Thinking I may have hit a sympathetic nerve by giving my daughter a name, hope bloomed in my chest. “Yes. Ehria Angeline. We named her after her father’s mother and my mother.”
A tear ran down her face, and she took a shuddering breath. A delicate hand covered her mouth as she looked out the window and sniffled.
“Ma’am?” I asked her when she didn’t answer me about stopping.
“We’ll be stopping soon,” she said in a tone that sounded choked up.
Heart hammering, I continued to drive until she spoke up again.
“Take the next exit, then take a right.”
Driving with an unknown destination was nerve-racking, but knowing we could be nearing the end of the journey with an unknown future might’ve been worse. I followed her directions until I stopped at a gas station. I thought we were gassing up, but she told me to pull around back.
“Get out,” she told me. “You can come back here to feed her.”
