“No. I need Bell, and she needs me. I trust her,” Eden calls over her shoulder.
“Eden!” Holly hurries to catch her. Bell sees Holly and frowns. She holds her arms up and begins turning in a circle, spinning faster and faster. The feathers on her shoulder are so bright they seem to glow. Bits of gold shed from them, dancing through the air.
“Take care of Jack,” Eden says. “Don’t let him . . .”
But her words are lost as a flock of starlings swoops into the atrium. They circle around and around, matching Tinker Bell’s rhythm. Faster and faster, lower and lower, until they are a diving, churning curtain blocking Eden and the alley from view. Beneath the rushing of the wings Holly hears the faintest sound, like tiny golden bells.
“Eden!” Holly calls, frantic. For a split second the birds part and Holly can see her. She’s leaning into Tinker Bell’s embrace, their heads touching. Jealousy and fear flare in Holly, white hot. And then the birds close in and rise. A cyclone of feathers darkens the sky. She covers her head with her hands. The tourists closest to her do the same, while the security guards stand openmouthed. And then the air is still. Holly lowers her arms.
Tiny bits of golden dust, already fading, speckle the floor. All around her tourists whisper and point, but the birds are gone.
And Eden and Tinker Bell have vanished.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Holly searches the atrium for hours. She knows they must be gone, but still she enters every store, every restaurant. She runs through the adjacent streets and alleys, calling for Eden until her throat is raw, until the security guards stop and ask if she’s lost her child.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes.”
They ask for a description so they can help her look.
“She’s thirteen,” she says, then corrects herself. “She’s twenty-five. She’s . . .”
Gone.
They back away from her. One of them mimes drinking. Another, more compassionate, quietly mentions calling the police for help, pulls out her phone.
“Yes,” Holly murmurs. “Thank you. The police. I’ll do that.”
She leaves. Goes home. Crawls into her bed without even taking off her shoes and stares up at the ceiling. Her leg is throbbing. She needs to regroup. To rest for a minute. To stay here for the next century.
She keeps seeing the way Eden looked at her at the end, just before she ran to Tinker Bell. The way she’d said, “I trust her.” As if Holly were a stranger.
All this time, Holly has been picturing her sweet little girl, but it turns out she really doesn’t know her daughter at all. The baby in her memory is unchanging, static. Just like the toddler in her photograph. Neither have kept pace with her actual daughter. Eden has been maturing, learning, listening this whole time.
No matter what Holly does next, whether she gets up or stays right here, Eden is gone. She’ll either die a wrinkled old lady in a matter of months—at best, a year or two—or she’ll disappear forever, to a place Holly has never been and cannot follow. Either way, Jack’s death is inevitable.
Holly has fought and clawed and done unspeakable things for her children. And none of it matters. Not one thing she’s done has changed either of their lives, has saved either one of them. She might as well have died with Jack after the car crash. She closes her eyes and sobs.
* * *
When she opens her eyes, Jane is standing over her.
“Jesus.” Holly sits up, pushing her hair out of her face, dragging her sleeve across her nose. “What? Jack? Is he okay?” And then she remembers. No matter what she does, Jack is doomed. Both her children are. How could she have forgotten, even for a second?
Jane purses her lips, looks at Holly’s sleeve with distaste. “Jack is fine. Isn’t it time you got up?”
Holly lies back down. “Close the door on your way out.”
Jane ignores this. “I wanted to tell you I’m going out. And that man is here again.”
“What man?”
“That detective. Cooke. With the . . .” Jane waves her right hand in the air. “He’s most persistent. He’s been calling the house—I have no idea how you’ve managed to sleep through it. When I wouldn’t wake you, he just showed up. Quite nervy if you ask me.”
“Where is he?”
“I left him sitting on the front steps. I refused to let him in. Not after what happened last time. Not after hearing”—she lowers her voice—“who he’s like.”
Holly turns onto her side, away from her mother. “Good. Tell him to go away.”
“I have. I have also threatened to call the police, and do you know what he did? He laughed.” Jane’s voice quivers in outrage.
“I can’t deal with this right now.” Holly doesn’t have the strength to tell Jane about her meeting with Eden, about Jack’s fate.
Jane pokes her. “Well, I certainly am not going to be responsible for him. I have dinner plans.”
“Leave him there then.” Holly pulls a pillow over her face and hopes Jane will get the hint.
“Absolutely not. What would the neighbors think?”
Holly wants to sleep, wants to cocoon herself in dreams for a thousand years, wants to wake and sleep, then wake again so she can have those precious few seconds of not remembering. But she knows how relentless Jane can be.
“Fine.” She rolls to the edge of the bed, stands up. She doesn’t bother to change, to wash her face or comb her hair. Jane follows her out of the room.
“You’re going out like that?” her mother asks. “What is your plan? To frighten him away?”
Holly ignores the gibe. “Where’s Jack?” she asks. She wants him as far away from this potential dumpster fire as he can get.
“Nan took the boys out for dinner,” Jane says. “They left about an hour ago.”
Holly stumbles down the stairs, unlocks and opens the front door. Christopher Cooke is sitting on the top step, dressed in his bike kit, leaning against the railing.
“Evening,” he says. He looks her up and down. “Or is that ‘Good morning’ for you?”
“Go away,” she says blearily. Her message delivered, she starts to shut the door. But before she can, he sticks his hand in it. She stops, then realizes he’s actually put his prosthetic out. She draws back, ready to slam the door shut.
“I wouldn’t,” he says. “It won’t hurt me, but it will leave a nasty dent in the wood.”
“Move.”
“It looks like you’ve had a rough evening already,” he continues, as if she hasn’t spoken. He glances at his watch. “And it’s only seven.”
“You need to leave.”
A Mercedes barrels out of the driveway. They both turn to watch it go. Jane has apparently decided to go out the back way. She comes within mere centimeters of knocking down Christopher’s bike, and the thought of that, as well as the way Christopher swears when he thinks that’s what’s going to happen, is the only thing in this miserable evening that has the power to make Holly smile. At the last second, Jane swerves and the bike remains standing.
Christopher shakes his head, returns his attention to Holly.
“I have some news,” he says. “And you’re not going to like it.”
“I don’t care.”
He studies her. She has no idea what he sees, but he looks so long, so deeply at her that it is as if he’s looking inside her. No, not exactly inside, but through, as if there’s something on the other side of her he’s seeking, as if she’s transparent.
“What?” she asks, more to stop him from staring than anything else.
“I need to talk with you.”
“You’re not coming in,” she informs him. “You’ve done enough damage.”
“All right.” He thinks for a moment. “Then come out with me.”
She gestures at the doorway, the steps on which she’s now standing.
“No, I mean really come out. With me. I promise it won’t take much time.”
Holly has the sense that if she refuses, he’s not going to go away anytime soon. She could try to wait him out. Or she could call the police, but that threat—at least from what Jane said—doesn’t seem to bother him. The path of least resistance is to do what he wants.