Chapter 180

That night, Miles and I have our third and fourth round from the privacy of my bedroom. My body is pleasantly sore and sated. I’m ready to drift off to dreamland. I’m fairly certain Miles is already there, wrapped around me protectively.

I feel safe and happy here beside Miles.

Despite everything in my past, nothing can touch my moments with Miles. I’m incredibly grateful for that, and for my parents for sparing no expense with my therapists growing up.

I wonder if any of them would be willing to talk to me now, take me on as a client again. It’s something to consider, in the morning.

My eyes grow heavy, and they are nearly asleep.

Then, my phone starts to ring. It startles me straight from my sleepiness. What if somethings wrong with the girls?

My phone is on the nightstand, I can easily reach it from here, so I do. The Caller ID reads, Mom.

My fear remains but it shifts now, away from worry over my daughters and worry instead to my sister.

I answer at once. “Mom? What’s going on?”

“It’s Thea,” Mom says, her voice quick and fearful. She’s panicked in a way I haven’t heard since Thea went to the hospital the last time.

“What happened? Is she in the hospital?” I ask.

Beside me, Miles immediately comes back to life. He pushes himself up and looks down at me worriedly while I talk and listen.

“No, Esther. She’s just… gone.”

“Gone? How could she be gone?”

“I went to check on her before I turned in for the night, but she’s gone. She’s just vanished. Esther… I can’t do this again…” She starts crying hysterically.

“You won’t. We’ll find her. Where’s dad?”

“Looking. He’s checking the hospitals. Oh, Esther…”

“I’ll look, too, okay. I’ll bring her home to you, just like I did last time.”

It’s hard to understand Mom through her sobbing, but I think I hear her agree.

“Stay near the phone,” I tell her, and hang up.

“What’s going on?” Miles asks. Immediately I fill him in.

“Shit,” he says and hurriedly gets out of bed. I do as well, rushing to put clothes on.

“Dad’s checking the hospitals. He’ll likely go to a few of her favorite places after that, but most of the stores will be closed this time of night,” I say. “We should check other places. Less obvious ones.”

I try to pick up a shirt, but I keep dropping it. Three or four times, I pick it up and immediately drop it back onto the ground.

Miles, fully dressed now, notices. He approaches me and catches my hands. Only when he’s holding them do I realize how much they are shaking.

“Breathe,” he reminds me.

“Thea’s out there… God knows where she could be…”

“You can’t help her if you aren’t calm yourself. What do they say in the airplanes? Put the oxygen mask on yourself before helping the person beside you. You need to breathe, Esther.”

Nodding, I close my eyes and try to calm down. I force myself to breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Miles asks.

I peek open my eyes enough to see the open concern in his. “She’s missing.”

“No,” Miles says, “I mean, do you want to talk about the last time this happened?”

“How did you know?” I ask him. As he hesitates to answer, I piece it together on my own. He must have been able to figure it out from listening to me talk to my mom. “She was kidnapped before, as a child, before my parents adopted me.”

It’s another wound of the past. For so long, I believed that Mom and Dad only adopted me as a replacement. While I’d been the only child, they doted on me just as they do now with Thea. But unlike now, when they were kind to me, I could see the hurt in their eyes. The festering bullet holes in their heart that would never heal.

They lost a child. There’s no coming back from that.

“My parents thought she was dead. But I wanted to believe differently,” I tell Miles.

“These people had saved my life, rescuing me from that orphanage. The only thing I could do to repay them was try to do the same with their biological child.

“When I first told them my plan, they were angry with me. They didn’t like being reminded of the past, and I suspected that they were afraid of losing me too. I was too young then, to do anything anyway.

“But as I got a little older, a little smarter. I started researching in secret.

“Eventually, I found her along with other children who had been kidnapped. I was just a teenager then, but they were all younger.”

“You saved them,” Miles says. “You saved a lot of people that day.”

“All I did is repay a debt,” I say. “A debt I’m still repaying, and will for the rest of my life.”

Miles rubs his thumbs comfortingly across the back of my palms. “There is no debt,” he says. “You are family to Thea and your parents. And those children…” He glances away. “I am sure they are beyond grateful.”

“A lot of good my rescue would be if it happened again…” My heart aches, but I feel stronger. Talking about it has helped. My hands aren’t shaking as hard anymore as I pull them from Miles’s grip and reach for my shirt once more. This time, I don’t drop it.

“You are so strong,” Miles says. “The strongest woman I know.”

I don’t feel very strong. “All I’ve ever done is survive.”

“That’s not true,” Miles insists. “If it was, you would have left your sister and lived your life believing like your parents did, that she was dead. But you refused to take no for an answer. You sought her out and saved her life, and so many others.”

I still don’t believe it, but… “I’m ready now,” I tell him. “You should stay.”

“Like hell,” Miles says.

“People will ask questions if you are seen.”

“Let them ask. I don’t care. I’m not going to leave you to face this alone.”

He has that stubborn look about him, the one that says he won’t change his mind. I don’t have time to argue. If my sister has been taken, the faster we act, the faster we might find her unharmed.

As we rush out the door, Miles quickly conveys the situation to his security that move at once, fanning out the search.

As Miles and I pile into the backseat, with a security man behind the driver’s seat, the two men look at me. Miles asks, “You know her best. Where should we go?”

Assuming she hasn’t been kidnapped, or she isn’t hurt, I try to imagine myself in Thea’s shoes. Maybe she sneaked out.

If she did, where would she go…?

Oh. Oh, no.

The answer is so obvious, I want to throw up.

Looking at Miles, I say, “Garnar’s.”

The driver moves at once, driving too quickly through the sleepy suburban streets. It doesn’t take long until we pull in front of Garnar’s house.

And see Thea on her knees, pounding with both hands on the front door.