22

Anissa had no idea how long they’d been standing there, Gabe’s hands on her face, lips millimeters from her own.

She was mad. She had every right to be mad.

But . . .

He’d kissed her.

He . . . loved her?

“Um . . .” Anissa swallowed and tried again. “Gabe . . .”

Nothing worked. She couldn’t move or speak. Her body refused to cooperate. Probably because it was locked in a pitched battle between her mind and her heart. One of which was still furious. The other was . . . not.

For his part, Gabe was looking at her the way an astronaut looks at Earth. Like he could see his home but couldn’t quite reach it. His thumb brushed her cheek before he released her completely.

Her heart and mind continued to duke it out.

Say something.

What should I say?

“I love you too” works.

He lied to me.

Not technically.

He doesn’t trust me.

That was years ago. You didn’t trust him either.

Anissa couldn’t tell if the awkward silence bothered Gabe, although she was getting the impression he would stare at her until she said something coherent. She tried again. “Gabe—”

A sharp rat-a-tat-tat on the door sent her back three steps, but it was a full five seconds before the door opened. Ryan leaned in, holding the door in front of him. “Sorry if I’m interrupting, but, Anissa, I think you should let Ms. Brown know we have everything we need before you leave, don’t you? I’m sure she’s ready to see Liz.”

Anissa’s mind and body finally synced and she managed to say, “Yes, that’s a good idea,” without stuttering.

Ryan’s smile had a forced quality as he looked from her to Gabe. The sigh that followed filled the space with a melancholy vibe. Whatever he’d seen as he looked at the two of them, it hadn’t been good. “I’ll give you a minute.” He closed the door.

Maybe if she didn’t look at Gabe, she’d be able to speak. “I need to go.”

In her peripheral vision she could see Gabe cross his arms and lean against the two-way mirror. “Be careful.”

His attempt at nonchalance was so bad she risked a glance in his direction. He wasn’t looking at her but was staring a hole in the opposite wall.

She didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t the time or place to hash it all out. What had that even meant? That he was in love with her now? Had been in love with her then? That made no sense at all. He’d hated her. Well, maybe not hated, but strongly disliked.

But that kiss . . . it was different from their first kiss. Sweet. Tender. It was the kind of kiss lifetimes are made of. The kind of kiss a girl could imagine she’d still be getting fifty years from her wedding day.

A sharp rap on the door jolted her from her musing. She stepped around Gabe. She had to say something. Didn’t she? The problem was that she couldn’t think. She squeaked out a “Bye, Gabe” and got out of there as fast as her shaking hand could turn the doorknob.

An hour later Anissa was driving to Virginia.

She’d been following Tonya Davidson’s social media accounts since the moment she suspected Liz was Jillian. The family had moved to Galax, Virginia, eight years ago. From Tonya’s posts, Anissa knew the family was in town, but would they be home? She would drive all over Galax if she had to. But it would be best to have this conversation in a private place.

She made it out of Carrington and hit the highway before the tears burst from her eyes. She should have pulled over, but that would have meant her escorts—the car in front of her and the car behind her—would witness her breakdown. So, she kept her sunglasses on and the tears slid down behind them. She cried for Carly. She cried for baby Jillian and sixteen-year-old Liz. She cried for Tonya and Steve Davidson. She cried for Jillian’s siblings who had lived in the shadow of their sister’s disappearance and now would live in the chaos of her return. She cried for Velma Brown. She cried out to the God who she believed with all her heart had been there that day . . . and hadn’t stopped it.

And then, when she thought she’d cried all she could, a fresh wave hit her.

She cried for herself. For the girl she’d been and the woman she’d become.

A girl who’d blown it and paid for it.

A woman who’d had love in her hands and walked away from it.

How had she messed up this much?

A comment Mr. Cook had made during one of their many phone calls came back to her.

“I’ve known you a long time,” he’d said. “You have a lot of great qualities. But one thing you might want to work on is being open to the gifts God is trying to give you.”

She hadn’t understood. “Sir?”

“You serve a big God, Anissa.” Mr. Cook’s chastisement always came with a healthy dose of positive observations. “You’ve always known him to be the kind of God who does big things. But sometimes even people who serve a big God can make the mistake of putting God in a box. A big box, to be sure, but a box all the same.”

Anissa grabbed a tissue from the box she’d put in her front seat in case the Davidsons might need it.

“Oh, Lord, what have I done?” She whispered her confession. “How have I only imagined that you work in one way, when I know you are the God of infinity? I still don’t see how there could be any good from Carly’s death. Any good from Jillian’s disappearance. From thirteen years of pain for her family. For me. I don’t understand and I know I never will. But when did I stop believing you could—or would—give me anything good? When did I stop seeing my job, my friends, my life in Carrington as a gift from you? As your plan for me? When did I get it in my head that you would only give me the minimum?”

She blew her nose.

Gabe was not the minimum. Gabe was . . . more than she could have ever imagined.

But she’d closed that door. Literally and metaphorically.

Could she trust God with her shattered heart . . . again?

The tears ran out, but the prayer, the pondering, continued. Mile after mile. An hour into the drive, she got a text from Leigh. She had the car read it to her.

Velma told her. It was . . . tense. Liz yelled at Gabe big-time, but he handled it. He’s got a really good way with teenagers. Anyway, I think Liz understands now. She doesn’t want to leave Velma, but she’s willing to see Mr. and Mrs. Davidson whenever they want to see her. She’s a very empathetic girl. I have hope that God is going to do something amazing out of all of this.

Until the moment she pulled into the family’s driveway, Anissa had no idea how she was going to say what she’d driven two hours to say.

Before she’d put her car in park, Tonya Davidson stepped onto the front porch.

As soon as she opened the door, Tonya called out, “Anissa? Is that you, hon? What are you doing here? Why didn’t you call?”

Steve joined Tonya on the porch and Tonya clutched his arm. “Anissa’s here.”

They watched her approach. Eyes wide, darting. Nostrils flaring. Heads shaking. It took Anissa a moment to realize that they’d caught her before she had a chance to fix her face or her eyes. She must look like she’d cried for hours. After all these years, they would interpret her sudden appearance to mean she had bad news.

Anissa jogged up the steps. “I found her. Alive. She’s alive.”

Tonya sagged against Steve. Steve wrapped his arms tight around his wife, his own shoulders shaking as enormous tears dripped from his chin into her hair.

Anissa kept talking. She knew they would need all the details, but for now, they needed to hear only the most pertinent points. “She was adopted by a family that loved her. Her adoptive mother had no idea she’d been kidnapped. She believed the adoption was legal. But you need to know that she has loved Jillian—she loves Jillian—with everything in her. Your girl has been safe and warm and fed and loved.”

Steve pulled Anissa into a hug with Tonya and they all cried. It didn’t take long for Tonya to recover enough to ask the most pertinent questions of all.

She looked at Anissa’s car. “Is she here? When can we see her? When . . . when can we get her back?”

Anissa pulled her phone from her back pocket. “She’s in Carrington. She had a bad cryptosporidium infection. But she’s doing fine, and she was released from the hospital yesterday. She’s with her adoptive mother, Velma, at a friend of mine’s house.”

Tonya’s disappointment was palpable.

“I have a picture though.” Anissa turned the phone around. Tonya took it from her like a sacred chalice. She and Steve studied the photograph, with awe and love and joy and confusion all fighting for dominance on their faces.

“She has your laugh, Tonya,” Anissa said. “She goes by Liz. That’s the only name she knows. And she’s a delight. She spent the better part of the past week encouraging a young patient who’d tried to commit suicide after . . .” Anissa couldn’t keep going. “She’s amazing.”

Steve studied the photo. “Does she know?”

Anissa nodded. “She does now.”

“When can we see her?” Tonya asked. So much hope. So much emotion in those five words.

“Tonight.”

Gabe paced the deck at Ryan and Leigh’s house.

Liz sat on the dock below. Alone. What must she be thinking?

She’d screamed at him after Velma told her. “You knew! You knew and that’s the only reason we’re here! That’s the only reason you care! I’m just a case to be solved!”

He’d let her yell at him because he knew she needed to yell at someone and she was afraid to yell at her mom. And when she ran back up to her room and slammed the door, he patted Velma’s arm and told her not to worry about it. That he’d been accused of much worse, by much worse people.

She’d eventually left her room and they’d let her go outside without stopping her.

Maybe by now she’d calmed down.

He walked to the dock, and when she didn’t tell him to go away, he slid off his shoes, rolled up his pant legs, and took a seat three yards away. He dangled his feet over the edge of the dock, cooling them in the water, and started talking.

He shared the parts of the story that were his to tell. He left out the parts that were Anissa’s.

Clearly Anissa needed to fight her own battles and didn’t appreciate it when he tried to fight them for her.

He told Liz about Jeremy and Brooke, and why he and Anissa had been at the hospital that day. That Anissa had recognized her immediately. That it was nothing short of a miracle that they’d been in the right place at the right time. About how he’d been taken by Liz’s joy. Her zest for life.

She was listening. He knew that much. At one point, she’d pulled off her own shoes and stretched her long legs toward the surface of the water.

He kept talking.

He wished Anissa was there, the way she’d been there the day he’d talked to Brooke in the hospital, to give him little signals to let him know he wasn’t messing this up. But she wasn’t. And even if she had been, there was no guarantee the message would have been positive.

After a while, Liz faced him, threw her hands in the air, and said, “How am I supposed to handle this? Can you tell me that? I’m not an idiot. I get that the Davidsons”—the name rolled off her tongue like it was a foreign word she was trying to get the hang of—“are my biological parents and that they never wanted to lose me, so I can’t be mean to them. I can’t leave them to be miserable. But my mom is sick. She might even be dying! What am I supposed to do about that? Leave her? Go live with my stranger-parents?”

She pulled in a shuddering breath. “No matter what happens going forward, someone is going to be hurt.”

“That’s one way to look at it.” He couldn’t argue with her on that. “There’s a minefield ahead of you for sure. But . . .”

Liz cut her eyes at him like she was daring him to find a way to make any of this better.

“Maybe a better way to see it is that, no matter what happens going forward, all of us will be different. And we’ll get to decide whether that change is good or bad.”

She frowned but didn’t argue, so he pressed on.

“We’ll all be more sympathetic. More loving. More willing to forgive. At least I know I will. I watched you with your mom. I know she hurt your feelings by hiding her illness from you, but you forgave her. You recognize that she isn’t perfect and she made a bad decision, but you still love her and you’ve forgiven her.”

“She’s my mom. She’s not hard to forgive.”

“Fair enough. But it was still a good example for me. There are people I need to forgive. For a lot of things. Some grudges I’ve been holding on to for a long time. And it’s time to put all that aside.”

“You mean about Paisley, don’t you?” Liz gave him an all-knowing smirk.

“Paisley is one thing. Yes.”

Liz grinned a little.

“But there are other people I need to forgive for hurting me. For messing up my life. They don’t even know they did anything wrong. Or they don’t care. Either way, I need to forgive them. Not for their benefit, but for mine.”

“What does this have to do with the fact that my birth parents are on their way here?”

“Because no matter what happens over the next few weeks, there are bound to be mistakes that will require forgiveness. I can almost guarantee you there will be hurt feelings and hard words and aggravations, and when it’s all said and done, the one thing you have control over is whether or not you’ll forgive.”

Liz didn’t answer. Her gaze followed a boat as it pulled a wakeboarder into the cove. The rider held on tight as the boat turned, his speed increasing with every second until the boat was straight again and he was jumping the wake on the way back into open water.

When the silence returned to the lake, Liz’s sighs were easy to hear. “Even the guy who took me away in the first place?”

Why did she have to ask him that? “That’s a tough one. That might be one that takes a lifetime to manage.”

“Probably.”

Gabe didn’t try to add anything. She stared at the water and so did he, watching the random bubbles popping up on the lake from unseen fish.

“Do you think they’re nice? The Davidsons?”

The fear in her voice was a vise on Gabe’s heart. “I’ve never met them. Anissa thinks they’re wonderful.”

“And you think Anissa is wonderful.” Liz didn’t state it as fact as much as a taunt.

“That is none of your business,” he said, softening the words with a wink.

Liz laughed. A real laugh. “I think you’d make a great couple. She’s gorgeous, with that long hair, and have you noticed her biceps?”

Gabe wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond to that. Of course he’d noticed Anissa’s biceps. He’d noticed everything about her. But that wasn’t a conversation he was comfortable having with a sixteen-year-old. Thankfully, Liz kept going with barely a pause. “She’s so healthy and fit. Is she a vegan?” Liz’s horrified expression pulled a laugh from Gabe.

“She is not. She eats a lot of salads. And a lot of fish. She grew up on an island and seafood makes her happy. But she eats junk food too. She loves pizza. And Coke. She’s barely human until she’s had a cup or three of coffee in the morning. She loves cupcakes, but she does this thing where she breaks off the bottom and puts it on the top so the icing is in the middle, and then she eats it like a sandwich.”

Liz’s eyes widened. “That’s a great idea.”

“Oh no. Not you too. I can’t have two weirdo women in my life, decapitating their cupcakes. Cupcakes are supposed to be eaten the good old-fashioned way.” Gabe pounded his fist on the dock.

Liz’s giggles bubbled out of her. “’Cause you’re so old? What exactly is the old-fashioned way to eat a cupcake?”

“You bite into it, and if you get icing in your nose, then that’s just an unfortunate side effect.”

They both laughed. “I can’t see Anissa wanting to get icing in her nose,” Liz said.

“Good point.”

“But if she eats junk food, how does she stay so fit? She just looks strong.”

Liz’s words rang with admiration. Gabe got a feeling he might know where this line of questioning was coming from. Liz’s skin was still pale from her recent illness and her body was thin, but not in a healthy way. “Well, she doesn’t eat junk food all the time. Remember. Salads? Fish? Lots of both? But she exercises too.”

“A lot?”

“Almost every morning, unless she’s working a case and can’t go. She usually goes for a run on the weekend. And, of course, she swims.”

“Brooke said you called Anissa a fish.”

“You didn’t notice her gills?”

“She doesn’t have gills.” Liz jumped to Anissa’s defense.

“Okay. Fine. But she can hold her breath for a freakishly long time and she is the strongest swimmer I know.”

“Stronger than you?”

“Way stronger.”

The sound of doors opening and closing and then footsteps on the deck had them both turning around. Leigh leaned over the rail and called out, “I have supper ready. I wish you would come eat something. Velma says pasta is your favorite, Liz.”

“We’ll be there in a minute.” Gabe flashed her an okay sign.

“Pasta?” Liz rubbed her hands together.

“Are you drooling?” Gabe asked.

“Maybe.”

“Well, if you aren’t, you should be. Leigh makes her own pasta. It’s tender and delicious. Want to go find out what version she went with tonight?”

“I guess.” She stood, picked up her shoes, and squared her shoulders.

“It’s not the guillotine, Liz. It’s just dinner. Take it one thing at a time.”

Gabe followed her to the house. Lord, help us get this sweet girl through the next thing after dinner, because it’s going to be loco.

He couldn’t believe what he was seeing through the scope of the .270 hunting rifle, but there was no doubt about it.

That girl was Jillian Davidson.

And she wasn’t three years old anymore.

Anissa had to be involved. He wasn’t sure how, but if Jillian Davidson was hanging out with Anissa’s main squeeze, then there was no way Anissa wasn’t aware of what was happening. If he kept watching long enough, maybe she would show up.

But if he couldn’t get his hands on her by tomorrow . . . A new idea was forming. One that was sure to get him close to Anissa Bell—and eliminate the one person still alive who could identify him.

He’d done all the time in jail he was going to do. This time he wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He would get his revenge—and get as far away from here as possible. Live his life where no one would know what he’d done. Or care.