She tiptoed into the living room and picked up the house phone. When she clicked it on, an unfamiliar woman’s voice filled her ear.
“Hang on—hello?” her father’s voice interrupted.
Suspicion squirmed through Keira, making her nauseous all over again. She dropped the phone back into its cradle and went, as instructed, to her room.
? ? ?
Keira lay awake, waiting for her mother.
Her eyes were closed so tightly that she could feel her lashes against her skin. Behind her lids, there was nothing but darkness, shot through with colors like the northern lights. As long as she stared at that emptiness, as long as the pillow stayed smooth beneath her cheek, she felt okay.
She wondered if Walker was calling her. Texting her. She wondered what her mother would think. If Keira’s phone went off incessantly, her mom was likely to label him a stalker before she’d even paid for the crackers and soda.
I’ll lie here until they go to bed. And then I’ll find a way to talk to Walker.
Her brain ached from trying to wrap itself around what had happened tonight. The headache pounded relentlessly against her temples, a steady bass beat of pain. She felt herself shutting down as the terror and postvomiting weakness tugged at her. She slid into a sleep that was more protective than restful, her body pausing reality in the hope of letting her mind catch up.
When she woke, it was instantaneous—a sudden leap into consciousness. Keira sat bolt upright in the dark bedroom. There was a glass of ginger ale on the table next to her bed. It looked flat, like it had been sitting there for hours. The clock beside it said 3:22 a.m. Keira swung her feet over the edge of the bed, thinking only of getting a phone—any phone.
It wasn’t until she had a hand on her doorknob that she heard the television murmuring in the living room. The sound of her mother, coughing quietly, rattled down the hall.
She was still up?
Dammit. God DAMN it!
Raking her hands through her hair, Keira threw herself into bed, flopping back against the pillows. She wondered briefly if Walker was lying awake, as confused and scared as she was. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he actually knew what was going on.
Keira lay in the dark with her hands tucked behind her head, listening to her mother wandering around in the night. She waited. She drank the mostly flat ginger ale. Her mom couldn’t stay up forever.
But she might as well have—Keira slipped back into sleep before her mother went to bed, if she ever did.
Then next thing she knew, there was light filtering through her closed eyelids, and a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake.
“Honey?” Her mother’s voice was catastrophically quiet.
Keira opened her eyes. Her mother looked haggard.
“Unnh . . . yeah?” Keira managed, struggling to sit up.
“I’m sorry to wake you. I have to run out for a minute, and I wanted to make sure you were okay before I left.” Her mother studied Keira. “How are you feeling? I didn’t hear any more vomiting last night.”
“I feel fine,” Keira said as convincingly as possible. It was hard to focus with the voice at the back of her mind yelling, GET THE PHONE. CALL WALKER. CALL WALKER. PHONEPHONEPHONE.
“That’s good. I’m glad.” Her mother looked exactly no happier than she had when she woke Keira.
“Mom, what’s going on? You look like someone died or something.”
For one instant, her mother’s face looked as raw as a scraped knee. “I wasn’t going to tell you about this until later—until you’d had a chance to wake up.”
The back-of-her-mind voice shut up about Walker for a minute. “Tell me about what?” Keira asked carefully.
“Keira, you know things have been difficult between your father and I for some time now. Yesterday, after I left to get your ginger ale, he made . . . I came home and he was on the phone. . . . ” Her mother cleared her throat. “Well. I’ll spare you the details. Everything sort of came to a head. We’re going to spend some time apart and see if having a cooling-off period will help us straighten things out.”
Keira’s vision swam. She recalled the strange woman she’d heard when she’d picked up the phone last night. Her parents had always had an up-and-down relationship. It was like hurricane season—periods of stormy ugliness followed by stretches of relative calm. She’d known that they weren’t exactly in one of their blue-sky times, but she hadn’t suspected that her dad was seeing someone else.
“Are you getting divorced?” The question came out as a squeak.