“Clearly it’s going to be a wild Friday night.” Ethan smirked.
“Is that all you want?” The waitress looked unimpressed, but her smug expression didn’t seem to bother Ethan. When he nodded, she shrugged. “Whatever.”
“You could have ordered something stronger,” Nora told him when the waitress was gone. “Just because I’m not drinking doesn’t mean you can’t.”
“I happen to love a good Arnold Palmer.”
“This one’s terrible.”
Ethan grimaced. “I’ll try to choke it down.” He reached for a handful of her untouched popcorn and tossed the whole bunch into his mouth.
They were quiet for a few minutes, the noise and laughter of the bar crowd washing over them. Conversation would be difficult, and Nora couldn’t decide if she was grateful for the chaos or discouraged by it. She had hoped that Ethan’s appearance would temper things with Donovan, but now that Donovan hadn’t showed, Nora felt vulnerable and awkward. Scared of things she couldn’t name.
“What now?” Ethan said, angling himself across the table.
“I don’t know,” Nora said again. “He won’t stop until he finds them.”
The waitress appeared at Ethan’s elbow and plunked down an overfull glass. Iced tea and lemonade sloshed on the table, sending syrupy rivulets across the worn wooden boards. Both Nora and Ethan scrambled for napkins while the waitress walked away unconcerned.
“Well, let’s do something about it,” Ethan said.
She had done something about it. Or tried to. Only a few days ago, on a lazy Tuesday morning, Nora showed up at the farmhouse. It was Nora’s day off and she had a date with Tiff and Everlee, a morning of antique store shopping followed by a trip into Rochester for a root beer float at Bea’s Cafe—Everlee’s choice. But when she knocked on the door at ten, no one answered. The cars were in the yard, the shades drawn as if no one was up even though it was the middle of the morning. Even though Everlee was a habitual early riser and an enthusiastic door opener. Usually all Nora had to do was walk up a few of the porch steps and Everlee would come running, alerted by the high-pitched cry of the creaky stairs and so eager for company Nora couldn’t help but feel like the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol. If only she carried an oversized check for a million dollars.
A ripple of concern made Nora shiver, and she knocked again—harder this time. The doorbell had never worked, so she jogged back down the stairs and made her way around the house to the door that opened onto the mudroom and the dark little kitchen at the rear of the house. She knocked again, banging her hand on the wooden frame until it was red and aching. And then the door swung open.
It was unlocked. It was an invitation.
Nora crept through the dirty kitchen, dishes abandoned on the table, Donovan’s gray socks lying limp across the radiator as if he had thrown them there to dry. The house smelled at once stale and sharp, the acrid tang of something chemical and elemental making Nora’s nose wrinkle. Her heart dropped like a stone and settled deep in the pit of her stomach. She was nauseous, terrified.
“Everlee?” Nora called, bypassing Tiffany entirely. There were times her friend made her so angry she wanted to throw things. To punch holes in walls and swear until her mother’s ears burned from hundreds of miles away.
Tiffany was brash and foolish, selfish and immature. But she was also a woman who had never really had a fair chance in life, who had been abandoned and forgotten and cast aside. Nora had seen that deep hurt the moment she laid eyes on Tiffany Barnes in first period English their freshman year of high school. The girl was all arms and legs, too much makeup and too much hair. She was raw and hurting, and doing a poor job of covering it up in a tank top that she kept yanking down to expose her nonexistent cleavage and jeans so tight Nora spent the majority of the period worrying that the girl with the long brown waves wouldn’t be able to stand up again when the bell rang. She pictured the stiff lurch of a Barbie doll and determined that when the class was over she would be there to help lift her up. Turned out that Tiffany could indeed stand on her own, but over the years there were many other instances when the job fell to Nora.
Was that what had drawn Nora to Tiffany? Her need? Maybe, in the beginning. But it wasn’t long before Nora began to see her not as a project but as a friend, a girl with a killer sense of humor and a sarcastic streak that never failed to make Nora laugh so hard her sides hurt. And all those things, those good, kind, real things inside of Tiffany only added up over the years. She wasn’t perfect, but she was Nora’s best friend. Everlee’s mother. For better or worse, they were bound together.
But there were times, like that morning, in a house that was dark and forbidding and filthy and cold, that Nora wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled. What were you thinking? What in the world were you thinking?
Tuesday morning, when Nora found Donovan, he was passed out on the couch in the farmhouse. He was wearing a pair of pajama pants and nothing more, his thick, hairy chest naked and shiny as he sweat off the high. Both of his arms were full-sleeve tattoos, sexy if not for the fact that pressed beneath one of them, pinched tight between the back of the couch and the crush of his rank body, was Everlee. Her eyes were huge and frantic, her cheeks crimson from the heat of his burning skin and the fear that choked her. And she was choking. Nora could see that the second she laid eyes on the child—mouth wide, lips thin and bluish, tearstains tracking from lash line to chin.
Nora was across the room in seconds, hands under Everlee’s arms, lifting her up and away with no regard for Donovan as he slept. No, he wasn’t sleeping, he was unconscious, and he didn’t so much as twitch when Nora wrenched the little girl from beneath him. She gathered the child close and left the house without a second thought about his well-being. Or Tiffany’s, for that matter.
It was hatred that bubbled up in Nora’s chest. Thick and viscous and black as bile. She wanted to take Everlee far away, to call child protective services or maybe the cops. But even as she buckled her into the back seat (no car seat, no booster, nothing at all), Nora knew that getting law enforcement involved wasn’t an option. It never had been.
Instead, Nora texted Tiffany one word: Now. It looked innocent enough glowing on the screen of her cell phone, but it meant so much. Everything they had planned for, all the weeks of watching and waiting, of scrabbling together money for papers and possibilities, had come to this. They couldn’t wait any longer. It was now or never.
Now what?
Tiffany was gone. She had abandoned their plan and her daughter.