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“Then it’s simple. We keep them apart,” Chris said. “As long as you’re away, Amy will stay with me and Lacey is with her dad, anyway. And when you’re back, we just have to make sure the two of them aren’t together until we get to the bottom of this. If they aren’t together, then what you saw can’t happen. I’ll see if I can stay home for a few days, or maybe take Amy to visit with my mom and dad for the rest of the week. That way, she’s far away from here and absolutely safe, and if Lacey’s far away from her, then Lacey is safe too.”
“Okay,” Laura nodded. “Okay, yes. Do that.”
“Will it work?” Chris asked, and when Laura realized that the confidence he’d been projecting had unstable ground, she felt it crumbling beneath her feet as well.
“It will keep Amy safe,” Laura said, and she found her throat choking, closing up, thinking of Lacey alone in that bedroom with no one to cling onto, no one to keep her safe. “I… I’ll make sure Marcus keeps Lacey for a while. I won’t have her over on weekends until it’s over. Like you said, if they’re far away from the place where I saw them, they should be safe.”
“Alright,” Chris said, and breathed heavily. “Christ, Laura.”
“I’m sorry,” Laura said, the word coming out half as a sob, feeling like she was the one who had brought all of this on them. She would never give up her power so long as it was keeping the people she loved safe – but there were times when selfishly, cowardly, she almost wished she didn’t have to be the one to know.
“We’ll get through this, whatever it is,” Chris said. “We’ll keep the girls safe. That’s what matters most of all. And as soon as it’s over, we can all be together again. As soon as we know that they’re safe.”
“Okay,” Laura said, hoarsely, her voice barely above a whisper. She cleared her throat. “I’d better go. We’re still on this new case.”
“Alright,” Chris said. “Be safe, Laura.”
“You too,” she said, hanging up and dropping her head into both hands this time. She felt the heavy warmth of Nate’s reassuring hand on her back, but it didn’t take away the fear of what she had seen. The fear of something happening to her daughter.
“What do you want to do now?” Nate asked, and there were so many things swirling around in Laura’s head that for a moment, she couldn’t even conceive of an answer.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hayley stumbled a little as she walked away from the bar, cursing her stupid heels and her stupid drunk feet and her stupid sense of balance. She shrugged her zipped hoodie higher up on her shoulders and threw the hood over her head, grabbing the material tighter around her body as she started to walk.
She wasn’t supposed to be walking. She hadn’t planned on walking. But the stupid bouncer had told her she was too drunk to drive and had taken her stupid car keys when she got them out, and had insisted on telling her to call a cab or let him do it for her. And she hadn’t wanted to explain to him that she couldn’t afford a damn cab. She couldn’t afford a damn drink, but it was the only thing that got her through the week. The last thing she could manage was a cab on top of all the extra drinks she shouldn’t have had.
Not that she had paid for all of them. Hayley swung her long, dark hair over her shoulders, nearly toppling over with the extra sway it gave her, pursing and then parting her perfectly glossed lips as if blowing a kiss to some invisible person in the distance. She had done pretty well tonight. She could have had her choice of men to go home with.
Only, she didn’t want to go home with any men. She wanted to go home on her own. So now she was stuck walking because she wasn’t allowed to drive her own damn car, and she couldn’t afford a stupid taxi.
Hayley shoved her hands into the pockets of her hoodie, scowling at everyone and everything, even though the whole road in front of her was basically deserted.
At least it was a quiet back road she was walking down. She wouldn’t have to deal with cat calls for the short shorts she’d gone out in tonight, paired with the kind of shoes that were usually referred to as stripper heels. Hayley had the ability to balance well in really, stupidly tall shoes, so she wasn’t going to waste it – not when men seemed to enjoy it so much.
But there were times when you didn’t want that kind of attention, and trying to walk home in the middle of the night was one of them. Hayley wasn’t dumb enough to accept a ride from some stranger pulling up alongside her. No way. Back here, no one was going to bother her, so she could just focus on getting back home quickly.
She did sort of wish there were streetlights along the route, but her eyes were starting to adjust now anyway, so it was going to be fine.
Hayley stopped walking for a moment to reach down and adjust one of the straps on her left ankle, and when the clattering of her heels stopped for a moment – she heard it.
A footstep.
She turned quickly, dark hair whipping around behind her. She almost went over onto the sidewalk, instead awkwardly moving from a flamingo pose to crouching on all fours, one of her hands still on the buckle. It was in the right place now, anyway. There was a man behind her.
He was a ways down the road, like he had left the bar a couple of minutes after she had. She could have sworn he had stopped walking when she did, only dropping that one footstep, like it was a mistake and he hadn’t meant to be heard.
But now he was walking on towards her again, and even in her present state, a spike of fear cut right through the alcohol and deep into Hayley’s brain.
There was a man following her. And whether he was deliberately following her, or just coincidentally taking the same route, they were alone on the road together in the dark. Hayley knew enough to know that there was no way she could be sure this situation was safe, and that meant she had to get out of it as soon as she could.
She stood up straight and started moving, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. When she focused like this, she could manage to go pretty fast, even when drunk. The alcohol was starting to siphon off a little bit now that she was realizing that she was in a serious situation. The cold was helping, too. The shoes were tall, but the sidewalk was flat and straight, and she knew this area well, and if all she needed to do was walk then she could put all her energy into it.
Hayley walked as fast as she could for a long stretch, for as long as she could bear, without getting an update on how close he was, and then she risked her balance for a moment to look behind her.
He wasn’t there.
At least, not within the range of her vision – because she could only see so far in the dark. And if he was far enough behind her that she could no longer see him…
