“Leave her child?” Jenna asked. “Like I said, she wasn’t a perfect mom. And Ursula, her daughter . . . she’s shown it a little bit.”
“Wild?”
“Not that so much,” Jenna said. “Just . . . unhappy, I guess. Kind of an angry kid once she hit her teenage years. A couple of weeks after Celia disappeared, she got into a fight with a girl at school. No big deal, really. No one was hurt. They pulled Ursula off the other girl before it got too bad.”
“And if her mother just disappeared, you could understand her anger.”
“Sure. Look, Celia could be impulsive. She could be emotional. Every once in a while, she’d get mad at me and shut me out. She did it about four years ago.”
“Why?”
“We were out with friends, and I mentioned this guy she hooked up with in college. She and Ian were on a break back then, and I thought all our friends knew she had this thing with this guy on the swim team. Apparently not everyone did. She froze me out for two weeks. I didn’t even know what my crime was.”
“So she had some places she wouldn’t let people go.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
But Sally looked as though she had something else on her mind, something else she wanted to say.
“What?” Jenna asked.
“It’s nothing. It’s—I’m sure you’ve thought of it. It’s kind of a morbid thought.”
Jenna didn’t push her, but she knew exactly what Sally was thinking. She knew the same question lurked in the minds of everybody in town. Yes, if Jenna had been on time, Celia might not have been taken.
But what if she’d been on time and suffered the same fate?
That scenario ran through Jenna’s mind at least one hundred times a day. She couldn’t count the number of nights she lay in bed, the room and the house dark, the red glow from the bedside clock in her peripheral vision. She felt the guilt—and she felt a painful, almost sickeningly sweet sense of relief.
What if she’d been there? And what if she’d been the one taken away?
And every time Jenna considered her life—all the things she had and all the things she would have left behind. Like Jared. Her mother.
Everything.
And she always reached the same conclusion: When push comes to shove, she wouldn’t have traded her life for Celia’s. No way. No way.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The rain let up, but Jared didn’t notice. He walked through Caldwell Park, his feet splashing through small puddles, which would soon be turning to ice, the sweat from his exertion drying and cooling against his skin. His heart still thudded but was slowing down, and the frantic energy that had been running through his body since he first approached Tabitha’s house wound down like a clock with a dying battery.
He couldn’t believe he’d thrown a rock through Tabitha’s window.
They couldn’t have seen him, could they? He felt sick to his stomach, like a child in trouble with his parents. Which made him think of home. He pulled out his phone.
His mom would be freaked. He wandered around in the cold and the wet while she sat at home stewing. And they hadn’t even talked about Tabitha, about her being in the house. In his room, on top of him after school.
Hell, that was unlikely to ever happen again. If she knew or suspected he’d been spying on her and then busted her kitchen window while her dad stood and watched—he could kiss all of it good-bye.
Her dad. He couldn’t get the image out of his head. His hulking size. Those meaty hands.
That kiss.
But girls kissed their fathers all the time. His own mom occasionally pecked him on the cheek, even as a teenager, although he squirmed away when she did. But that was on the cheek. And she knew he couldn’t stand it. He knew she did it just to irritate him.
He wished he could erase the image. He wished he never looked.
Honey, where are you? Getting late.
He wrote back: On my way home. No worries.
He stopped his wandering and headed in the direction of their house.
He told himself to be calm. No, Tabitha and her dad hadn’t seen him throw the rock. Tabitha told him to go home, and as far as she knew, he did. They couldn’t see out the kitchen window into the darkness. And even if they’d caught a glimpse of him running away in the night, he’d have been a darkened shadow, a figure in a heavy coat moving away. It could have been anybody.
But where had the anger come from, the insanely spiking jealousy that drove him to do something so out of character? He knew some of his friends—acquaintances, really—liked to go out and damage property from time to time. They smashed pumpkins in the fall. They lit discarded Christmas trees on fire after the holidays. Jared never went along. They weren’t his good friends, and he didn’t want to get caught. He hated getting in trouble with his mom. It rarely happened, but when it did, she conveyed her disappointment loud and clear. He hated that part the most. The disappointment, the tone in her voice and the look in her eye that said I expected more from you.