Page 92 of Sterling Clay

I pace the house, no longer able to ask the same question I’ve asked for the last hour.

Where could they be?

My family has rallied around me. Stone arrived first with Knox on his heels. Then Sebastian and Ford surprisingly came together as Enya and Adara went to stay with Cadence and the girls. Vale also dropped Hudson off with Cadence, and my sister is here keeping the coffee pot full. Even Judd is present.

As Ford had an incident this summer with his little June, he understands my fears for Dutton. Sebastian also sympathizes as a lunatic had once cornered Enya and Adara.

“Shouldn’t we be out there?” I wave toward the wall of windows. “Doing something.”

Stone has already made the all-call for a missing child and mother, both potentially in danger. He told me the first forty-eight hours are crucial. Being that it’s after five at night, the November sky is dark, the mountain air is cold, and I’m struggling not to fear the worst.

“Perry?” Stone glances at me as he answers his phone, which turns my head.

Perry called me a few times earlier in the day, but as I’m still not speaking to him, I didn’t answer.

I signal Stone to put Perry on speaker phone. As I’m amped up, I’m itching for a fight with my old friend because I’m thinking that mothertrucker he brought to the Halloween party has something to do with this situation.

Stone clicks the phone over to speaker, and before I talk, I hear Perry in mid-sentence. “. . . the contents of a purse were spilled in the front seat. Didn’t look like anything was taken. Leather bag on the floor. Wallet still present. Cash in the side pocket. No cell phone, though.”

I glance at the phone that has been laying on the peninsula counter between my kitchen and living room area. I plugged it into the charger, hoping Mavis might call her own phone for some silly reason.

“Any sign of struggle in the car?” Stone asks, calm and professional.

I close my eyes at the thought and swallow hard.

“As I told Harris, we didn’t notice anything. He inspected it for traces of blood or injury.”

Bile rises up my throat.

“Airbag had exploded, so that might have hurt. Cracked windshield. Kid car seat still intact in the backseat.”

“Where are they?” I snap, rushing toward Stone, who holds the phone away from me as if I’ll try to snatch it out of his hands.

“Clay?”

“Perry, I swear to God if this has anything to do with—” Knox’s hand on my bicep shuts me up.

“You need to let Stone handle this,” he mutters beside me.

“Thanks for the update, Perry,” Stone interjects.

“Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t get to it earlier. With the black ice this morning, there’s been a slew of vehicles off the road. I’d been trying to call Clay all afternoon once we pulled this one from the ditch and found the wallet.”

I close my eyes again. If only I’d answered my phone earlier. If only I’d insisted we stay home today. If only I’d told Mavis and Dutton I loved them.

The idea of loving hard and then losing them was exactly what I feared most. That I wouldn’t survive the loss, but I wasn’t giving up. Mavis was coming home to me. With Dutton.

I don’t hear the rest of the conversation between Perry and Stone as I head to my room, step into the closet and find Mavis’s butterfly shawl hanging on a hanger. She told me she’d been fortunate not to lose it in the house fire. Something about having it professionally cleaned as the fabric was so delicate, so it wasn’t in the house fire.

For about five seconds earlier in the day, I thought that Mavis might have left me. That living out here wasn’t enough for her, like I’d asked her only a few nights ago. Or that the man who’d peeped in the window had something to do with Mavis’s past and she ran. Or that she simply had a change of heart and didn’t love me.

But I didn’t want to believe any of those things about her, about us, and the butterfly shawl hanging in the closet, which is something so precious to her, and the findings of her scattered purse, tells me Mavis is in trouble.

“Butterfly,” I whisper, pulling the flimsy fabric to my nose and inhaling Mavis’s intoxicating floral scent that lingers in the fabric. “Please be safe. Come back to me.”

Or better yet, I’ll come find you.

With newfound determination, I return to the living room. “I’m going out. I need to do something.”