“Okay, you guys head for that clearing, but freeze when you get to the edge of it. Gabi will be right behind you. I need to go find a tree.”
The girls rolled their eyes at his code for having to pee, but it did the trick. They immediately turned and headed down the hill, leaving Gabi and Luke alone. He quickly unclipped his radio and handed it to Gabi.
“If I don’t signal you within fifteen minutes, just press this button to talk, and Oliver will be on the other end.”
“Wh-what should I tell him?”
Luke pulled out a map and pointed to a spot. “Give him these coordinates right here, and he’ll send one of the teams your way to get you out of the woods.”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll be fine. When the team gets to you, send them up to this spot. I’ll leave an obvious trail so they can follow me to her.”
He unholstered a pistol she didn’t even know he’d brought, and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh, God.”
“Do not freak out right now, Gabriela. Freaking out is the worst thing you can do.”
“Okay. I know.” She fought to control her racing pulse. “I’m trying. I’m sorry.”
He turned her shoulders. “I’ll whistle when it’s okay to come back. Go. Catch up to the girls. And if you get into any trouble, use this.” He handed her an air horn. “And the radio.”
“Okay. All right.” She clipped the radio to her own backpack, and slid the air horn into a loop of fabric. “Go find her.”
As she stumbled down the hill, her vision clouded by a stream of tears, the entire summer flashed through her brain, as well as vivid scenes from the school year. She’d plucked Sam out of a hellish foster home, but what had she thrown her into? A boarding school where the girls treated her like shit, and then a camp where she continued to struggle, and now what? Things were so bad for her that she’d fled in the middle of the night into a strange forest.
That had been preferable to the life she was living.
Gabi took a catchy breath, realizing that in her zeal to provide an opportunity to Sam and Eve, maybe she’d called it completely wrong. She’d had some idealized, rose-colored vision of how it would go—like a Hallmark movie where the two girls were plucked out of obscurity by a caring, devoted woman, and went on to have beautiful, successful lives because of her efforts.
Bullshit.
Eve and Sam had stuck out like sore thumbs from the day they’d walked onto the Briarwood campus, despite their new school uniforms and materials Gabi had purchased for them so they wouldn’t look and feel different.
But uniforms couldn’t cover up the scars of lives like theirs. New notebooks couldn’t mask the fact that they’d never owned a book in their lives. And Ralph Lauren bedding couldn’t make up for the fact that they’d both spent most of their lives not even knowing whether their current bed would last through the next month.
Dammit, maybe she’d been totally wrong. Maybe by bringing them to Briarwood, she’d only made things worse for them. The thought was sobering, and terrifying. She’d built her entire career on this drive to bring more opportunities to those who deserved them, and yet her first try was going up in smoke.
Literally.
She wrinkled her nose as she sniffed the air. Wait—she did smell smoke. Someone had built a fire. Could it be Sam?
“Smoke!” The girls came running back up the hill, pointing at the spot where they’d left Luke. “It’s coming from up there!”
She wiped her eyes quickly so they wouldn’t know she’d been crying, then put out a hand to stop them.
“Hold on a second. Luke hasn’t signaled us yet.”
“Signaled?” Madison looked perturbed. “He had to pee.”
“Right.” Gabi nodded like she’d forgotten. “And we don’t really want to walk up on him, right?”
Madison growled. “But we see smoke! It could be Sam! She was always the best one at starting fires.” She stepped from foot to foot, itching to go past Gabi. “Come on. We have to go check it out.”
Just then, they heard a piercing whistle coming from the same direction as the smoke. Luke!
“Is that the signal?” Eve’s eyes widened. “Can we go?”
“Yes!” Gabi practically pushed them by her. “Go! Go! I think he found her!”
Five minutes later, they emerged into a tiny clearing and broke into a run when they saw Sam lying on the grass against her backpack. Luke stood right next to her, digging into his own backpack, and when Sam spotted the girls sprinting toward her, she smiled wider than Gabi had ever seen her.
Eve, Madison, and Waverly slid their backpacks off and fell down on the ground beside Sam, hugging her while Gabi watched. She met Luke’s eyes, and he gave her a tiny thumbs-up. She turned away and blinked hard, trying not to let the relieved tears flow. Sam was okay. She was really okay.
“Gabriela, I need the radio.” Luke reached out for it, then called in their coordinates as he checked his compass, then the map.
Madison looked up. “This would be an awful lot easier if you could use a cell phone up here.”
“Nah. Cell phones are for sissies. I got this.” He turned away, walking a few steps toward the woods as he talked to Oliver.
“He’s such a dinosaur,” Madison grumbled.
“He has a GPS, Madison.” Gabi winked. “He’s just playing you.”
Madison narrowed her eyes as she watched Luke walk away. “Figures.”
Gabi crouched down beside Sam, touching her hand as the dogs jumped up to kiss her cheeks with their cold noses. The poor girl had dirt everywhere, and for the first time, Gabi noticed her right boot was off and her ankle looked huge. Before she could formulate the best way to start talking with Sam, the teenager saved her the trouble.
“Gabi, do you remember that day back in June when you came up to the lounge to deliver our doom?”
Gabi’s eyebrows went upward. “Yes?”
“And remember how you admitted you were plotting our murders?”
“I don’t think I ever admitted that, really.” Gabi smiled. “Considering, maybe. But definitely not plotting.”
“Well, I was just thinking that the murderous feeling you had then is probably nothing compared to the one you have right now.”
“Not true.” Gabi shook her head. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Gabi?” Sam’s eyebrows matched her own. “You are a seriously sucky liar.”
“True, but I’m not lying right now. I’ve been far more worried than mad this whole time.”
Eve nodded. “It’s true, actually. She didn’t even threaten to leave you out here for the bears once.”
“Thank you, Eve.” Gabi rolled her eyes. “See? I even let them call a search team.”
“What?” Sam’s eyes looked suddenly frightened. “Oh, God. I’m in so much trouble. I was already in so much trouble. But now?” She laid her head back on her backpack, closing her eyes. “I’m dead.”
“Actually, you’re not.” Madison pointed to her. “Disgusting and dirty, but definitely not dead. What the hell happened, Sam? Why did you take off without telling us?”
Sam kept her eyes closed for a long moment, then opened them. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Luke came back over just then, clipping the radio back to his pack and pulling out a med kit. He pointed to Sam’s ankle and raised his eyebrows.
“Okay, team. What do we have here?”
All three girls leaned over to view her purple, swollen ankle. It was at least sprained badly, maybe broken. Gabi glanced at Sam’s eyes. The girl had to be in some serious pain.
Waverly tipped forward onto her knees. “She’s got a sprain or a break. We need to splint and wrap it, and somehow we’re going to need to carry her out of the woods, because there’s no way this girl can walk on this foot.”
“Good,” Luke replied, handing her a med kit. “Go to it.”
“Me?” Her eyes widened.
“Yup.” He shrugged. “You diagnosed the problem, you get to direct the treatment. Eve and Madison? Do what she asks.”
Gabi watched as a glow came over Waverly’s face. Then she turned to Madison, and probably for the first time in her life, gave her a command. Madison, probably for the first time in her life, merely nodded and did exactly as Waverly directed.
As Gabi watched, she felt Luke’s eyes on her, but when she looked up to meet them, he suddenly got busy with the map.
“We’re about two miles in from the road right now,” he finally said. “We’re going to need to do a carry.”
Sam’s eyes widened. “You’re going to carry me out of here?”
“You have a better suggestion? Feel like walking on that ankle?”
Sam winced. “No.”
“Then we’re carrying.”
“Okay,” she whispered. Then, as Gabi watched her, huge tears started dripping down her cheeks toward her ears. She closed her eyes, wincing as Waverly picked up her ankle to wrap tape around it. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why did you take off, Sam?” Luke’s voice was conversational, nonconfrontational, like they were just sitting around the campfire discussing why someone’s favorite food was spaghetti instead of steak.
“I—don’t think I can explain it right now.”
“It’d be really helpful if you could, because guess what? A hell of a lot of people are going to be asking.”
“I was—scared.”
“More scared than heading out into the woods in the middle of the night was likely to make you?”
She nodded miserably. “Yeah.”
“Why, Sam? What in the world were you scared of?”
She shook her head, looking at the girls, and Luke seemed to understand at the same moment Gabi did. He cleared his throat and put his hand on Waverly’s shoulder.
“Okay, team. Let’s give the ankle a break for a minute. We need to make a litter for her. You remember what we need?”
Eve nodded. “We’re really going to make one?”
“Unless you want to carry her piggyback, yeah. We’re going to make one.” He pointed at the edge of the clearing. “That looks like a good spot there. Take my hatchet and see what you can find.”
Gabi’s eyes widened, but Luke put up a hand. “Gabriela, if you say anything about sharp objects right now, I might just leave you out here.”
Gabi buttoned her lip, suitably chagrined. As the girls headed away from them, Luke positioned himself at Sam’s ankle and resumed the splinting job Waverly had started. He wound tape around and around her foot and calf without speaking, and Gabi waited him out, not even really knowing why she did.
Finally, he looked up at Sam. “What got you this scared, mermaid?”
At his use of the affectionate term, Sam’s face completely crumbled, and tears poured out of her eyes. Gabi crouched down and took her in her arms as the girl sobbed. For two full minutes, her tiny body shook, until it finally seemed she was empty. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, then crashed back onto her backpack.
She looked from Gabi to Luke and back again, then took a deep, pained breath.
“I’m pregnant.”