Alison brightened and ran over to grab her My Size Barbie. “I know! Let’s rescue this girl, she got kidnapped like those little girls you saved, Daddy.”
Feeling the color drain from his face as his daughter thrust the giant doll at him, he couldn’t even respond.
“Here, you hide her, you can be the bad guy, and we’ll come find her and arrest you.”
“No,” he said, averting his eyes and putting his hand up to cover the doll’s face.
A lump sprung up in his throat unexpectedly, and he knew playtime was over.
Alison frowned up at him, her little mouth turned down unhappily.
“Why don’t you guys go get a snack,” he suggested. “Your mom’s in the kitchen.”
“She’s making dinner, she’s not gonna let us have a snack,” Alison said.
“Just… I have to go in my office,” he said with less patience than he intended. “Go see your mother.”
The furrowing of her little brow deepened and she gave him her angriest pout. When it achieved nothing, she sighed loudly and stomped over to put Barbie on the couch, then she said, “Come on, Braden.”
“But I thought we were gonna play,” he whined.
“My dad said no,” she said accusingly.
Ethan sighed, closed his eyes, and passed a hand over his face, swearing under his breath.
Since it was the only place he could retreat to without leaving the house, Ethan hid out in his study, closing and locking the door behind him.
Collapsing into his big leather chair, he let his head fall back, closing his eyes and letting out a world-weary sigh.
A minute later he touched the mouse, moving it to wake his computer monitor up and leaning forward to type in his password. Once everything was loaded and his desktop popped up, he stared at the black screen—it used to be a picture of Amanda and the kids, but ever since he got back, he found the picture too distracting. Too depressing. A nice black screen didn’t judge him.
He navigated to his bookmarks—he had the fucking page bookmarked—and located the folder and page that he wanted.
A moment later, the news story loaded with the picture of the girl sitting on a picnic table, a blue binder and her cell phone beside her, a big smile on her beautiful face, her gray eyes clear, happy, everything a 17-year-old’s should be. She wore a denim mini-skirt with a blue and black V-neck top (which several dickheaded commenters had some fun with—obviously the only way the putrid little pissants could feel good about themselves) and she looked so…young. Not child-like by any means, but still…young.
He didn’t know why he kept looking at her goddamn picture. It wasn’t like he needed visual reminders; he thought about it all the time. Thought about her all the time. Wondered how she was coping, if her life was returning to some state of normalcy, hoping that she didn’t see the same news stories he’d seen.
It wasn’t uncommon for him to check out her social media accounts when he had a spare minute, just to see if there was any indication, but she had no online presence whatsoever. Since she had updated them once every day or two before the kidnapping, he took that to mean she was still in a bad place. Even her friends had stopped leaving her comments, and just the night before, he noticed the boy who had been listed as her boyfriend no longer had a visible relationship status, though Willow’s still said she was in a relationship. Whether or not that meant anything
, he didn’t know.
It wouldn’t surprise him if the relationship had crumbled. She was a teenager in a relationship with another teenager trying to cope with everything; he was a grown-ass man in a long-term relationship with his wife, the mother of his children, and he could barely keep his own relationship afloat after everything that had happened.
Amanda was a patient woman, or else he would already be in the dog house.
Finally he took one last look at the happy girl in the picture and closed the window, leaning back once more, still feeling restless.
The little black corded phone on his desk caught his attention. For no good reason that he could come up with. He had a separate line in his office, obviously, since he needed privacy for the business-related calls he made.
Over the years he had successfully reunited so many missing girls with their families, helped put an end to the horror they were facing—those that had actually been kidnapped, and a couple of times, even those who hadn’t, but weren’t as street-smart as they thought they were—and it felt like all the good he had done was wiped clear by the one unforgivable instance where he had harmed instead of helped.
For a few minutes, he took turns alternately staring at the phone and staring out the window. He needed to get it together. Get the girl off his mind so he could go have dinner with his family and pretend to be a normal person.
Instead of doing that, before he could talk himself out of it, he grabbed his phone off the desk, set it down in his lap, and dialed the girl’s number.
His heart pounded faster; he knew he was making a mistake. He needed to leave her alone. It wasn’t like he could ask her how she was doing.
After two rings, just before he was about to hang up, she picked up the phone.