Cole
He was gone.
Literally gone.
I’d pulled away from the kiss with Allie and looked down for him, and where he was supposed to be was just a blank space, empty air.
I didn’t know if the security guard was going to be able to help, so after I told him what Declan looked like, I took off. No way in hell was I just going to stand around there waiting for someone else to find him.
I went all the way around the block, calling his name. I ran into Allie and her mother, and they looked startled to see me.
“I don’t see him anywhere,” I said. “I don’t know if he managed to cross the street or something. I’ve got to keep looking...” I looked at Allie’s mom. “Would you stick around here, in case the security guards find him?”
“Of course,” she said. “And I just know he’ll turn up, I just know it—”
I didn’t stick around to hear the rest of what she had to say. Of course it was going to be something hopeful, something reassuring, but those words rang hollow to me right now. Most people go through life thinking this sort of thing would never happen to them, that the stories they see on the news or read about online happen to other people, but never them.
But what happens when one day you are that person?
I’d already been that person once, with everything that happened with my sister, and now here I was, potentially that person again. My feet thudded against the concrete. Sweat trickled down my brow. Where the fuck was he? How could someone his size have gotten so far?
There was an easy answer to that, of course, one that I was trying valiantly not to let enter my consciousness. It muscled its way in, though.
He got that far because someone took him.
And once that thought was forefront in my mind, the onslaught followed. A deranged murderer took him. A sociopath. A pedophile. A sick, twisted person who was going to torture him.
I tried to push that thought out of my mind, but when I did, I was suddenly imagining Declan, him being somewhere with people he didn’t know, wondering where I was, why I was letting this happen to him, why I wasn’t coming to save him.
I shook my head and yelled his name louder. I asked people if they had seen him. Some people looked concerned, others looked a little wary, but all of them shook their heads. No, they hadn’t seen him. He seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
There was no worse feeling than being completely helpless. And that was exactly how I felt as I power walked down the street, yelling Declan’s name. I could hear the note of desperation in my voice.
I stopped walking for a moment and tried to take a deep breath. My shoulders were practically up to my ears, and my jaw was clenched; my whole body felt flooded with cortisol. I was standing outside a frozen yogurt place; the Children’s Museum was across the street, a few buildings down from where I was. I could see Allie; she had just come back out. She was alone, craning her neck up and down the street as if that might somehow make Declan appear. She hadn’t found him yet. I hadn’t found him yet. But I had to keep looking.
I was about to start walking again when I happened to look into the frozen yogurt shop, the glare off the window shifting enough that I was able to see inside. And there, at one of the tables, was Declan.
I just stood there, frozen in place, unable to believe my eyes. He had a cup of frozen yogurt that he was eating with an orange plastic spoon. He was sitting at a table with a group of other children, 6 or 7 of them, maybe. It was a large table, and there were two young women at it, too, sitting at the end. They had a bunch of balloons attached to a baby stroller that was parked next to them.
Declan looked up right then and waved.
I walked inside, trying to take deep breaths. Part of me wanted to yank him out of that chair and shake him. Part of me wanted to run over and hug him and never let him go. But instead, I walked over and forced myself to smile.
“Hey, bud,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m eating frozen yogurt with my new friends,” he said.
The two girls at the end of the table looked at me in confusion. One of them craned her neck around to look at the table behind her where a woman was sitting with a girl who looked to be maybe 7 or 8. Then, they both regarded me again.
“Um...do you guys know each other?” the girl with brown hair finally asked.
“Uh, yeah, we do,” I said. “This is my son, and he somehow snuck away and ended up over here.”
The two girls looked at each other. “I thought that was his mom,” the other one said, nodding to the woman behind us. “I thought he had just come over from that table and wanted to sit with Oliver and his cousins. It’s Oliver’s birthday,” she added, as if that somehow made a difference.
I nodded slowly, took another deep breath. This wasn’t their fault, those two girls, even though
I felt an involuntary surge of anger toward them.