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Oh God, I’ve lost her.
After I’d combed the room five times and scoured the bathrooms, I ran out of the restaurant to the brightly lit entrance in front of the parking lot.
“Lexi! Lexi!” a bright little voice yelled out.
My head swung to the right. Beckett stood motionless beside my little sister, holding her hand.
“Maizy,” I gasped, my arms flying out. She let go of his hand and ran into my outstretched arms. “Don’t you ever leave me like that, do you understand?”
“Uncle Beck gave me a ring,” she said, holding up a plastic toy affixed to her finger.
I glared at him and he shrugged, walking away.
But something else made me uneasy—Maizy would have never left that room by herself. Beckett lured her out of there on purpose just to scare me.
It worked.
He’d resorted to a low tactic by taking advantage of my sister’s trust in order to threaten me. At least, that’s what it felt like. Beckett wasn’t aggressive, nor did I take him for the kind of guy who would kidnap a child. He had a mouth on him when he drank, but I’d never seen him do anything like this before, and what gave me chills was how smooth he was when I caught him in the act, and how casually he walked away.
“Let’s go, Maizy.”
I tossed her ring in the trash and she started to cry, so I picked her up. “Sweetie, don’t be mad at me.”
Tears streamed down her ruddy cheeks and her mouth was agape. “But that wasmyring,” she whined.
“Maze, can I tell you something? It’s a secret.”
She nodded and wiped her nose.
“Never take a ring from a boy unless he’s your prince.”
Something sparked in her teary eyes.
“Remember how you said you wanted to marry a prince? Well, if you take a ring from another boy before you meet the prince, then he won’t marry you.”
Panic flooded her eyes. “But I tookthatone!”
“No, it doesn’t count because I threw it away. That’s the rule. Your big sis has to take it off and then the spell is undone.”
She smiled and hugged my neck. Maizy loved stories about magic and spells. In her eyes, the world was nothing but a fairytale. Adults were blind to the magic that existed and only little kids could see it.
“Come on, little girl. Time for us to go home. You know, you’re getting way too heavy for me to carry,” I grunted out dramatically. “Are you sure you’re not hiding a moose in your pocket?” She giggled and rested her head on my shoulder.
That did the trick, and Maizy hummed one of her favorite songs for the rest of the ride home.
* * *
After a grueling dayat work on Saturday, I threw my keys on the bar and collapsed on my sofa. The neighbor downstairs decided to have a party and the music thumped against the floor, rattling one of the pictures on my wall.
All these months, I’d managed to successfully avoid telling my mom about my breakup with Beckett. She liked him, and that made it more difficult. After the other night, I decided to let the cat out of the bag because I was afraid of him showing up at her house. When I finally confessed, I left out the part with Maizy because I still didn’t know what to make of it myself. It wasn’t a deliberate threat, but it just left me with a sick feeling. Mom didn’t say anything and it was probably for the best. If she had defended him and gone on about forgiveness, I might have sped out of there at ninety miles per hour in “angry mode.”
A woman screamed downstairs and laughter followed. I wondered what Wes would have thought about my life. I still saw him as the cool guy and he might have gone downstairs to join them. But he would be thirty and who knows… maybe married. It was hard to imagine him as anything but the young man I once knew.
I could still remember the last time I saw him, two nights before the accident. I was living at home and he stopped by to have a talk with Dad. He walked me into my bedroom and told me I needed to get a full-time job and move out. I’d been slacking off at my job because I hated flipping burgers. Wes shared his concern with me and wanted to know if Dad had been giving me a hard time. He told me about a job at Sweet Treats and suggested I could move in with him until I found a place. “Call me tomorrow and we’ll go to a movie,” he said.
God, why didn’t I call him? I ended up blowing him off and it had become one of the biggest regrets of my life. A last chance to see him, or maybe that could have changed his fate and he would never have gone out on the night he died.
Suddenly, a knock sounded at my front door. I catapulted off the sofa and grabbed the fireplace poker—my weapon of choice.
