Live to Tell (Live to Tell #1)(108)

Unless…

Unless she’s real.

She was there. On TV.

She does exist. She has a name—one he’s heard before in another place, another time…

Now, the name—her name—echoes back at him from the darkest recesses of his mind.

Elsa.

Groton, Connecticut

June

“Mommy…”

Elsa Cavalon stirs in her sleep.

Jeremy.

Jeremy is calling me.

“Mommy!”

No. Jeremy is gone, remember?

There was a time when that renewed awareness would have jarred her fully awake. But it’s been fifteen years since her son disappeared, and almost a year since Elsa learned that he’d been murdered shortly afterward.

The terrible truth came as no surprise. Throughout the dark era of worrying and wondering, she’d struggled to keep hope alive, while knowing in her heart that Jeremy was never coming home again. All those years she’d longed for closure.

When it came last August, she had braced herself, expecting her already fragile emotions to hit bottom.

Instead, somehow, she found peace.

“It’s because you’ve already done your grieving,” her therapist, Joan, told her. “You’re in the final stage now. Acceptance.”

Yes. She accepts that Jeremy is no longer alive, accepts that she is, and—

“Mommy!”

Jeremy isn’t calling you. It’s just a dream. Go back to sleep…

“What’s wrong?” Brett’s voice, not imagined, plucks Elsa from the drowsy descent toward slumber. Her eyelids pop open.

The light is dim; her husband is stirring beside her in bed, calling out to a child who isn’t Jeremy, “What is it? Are you okay?”

“I need Mommy.”

“She’s sleeping. What’s wrong?”

“No, Brett, I’m awake,” she murmurs, sitting up, and calls, “Renny, I’m awake.”

“Mommy, I need you!”

Elsa gets up and feels her way across the room as Brett mumbles something and settles back into the pillows. With a prickle of envy-tinged resentment, she hears him snoring again by the time she reaches the hallway.

It was always this way, back when Jeremy was here to disrupt their wee-hour rest—and when his palpable, tragic absence disrupted it even more. All those sleepless nights…

Brett would make some halfhearted attempt to respond to whatever was going on, then fall immediately back to sleep, leaving Elsa wide awake to cope alone with the matter at hand: a needy child, parental doubt, haunting memories, her own demons.

“Mommy!”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Shivering, she makes her way down the hall toward Renny’s bedroom.

The house is chilly. Before bed, Elsa had gone from room to room closing windows that had been open all day, with eighty-degree sunshine falling through the screens. Late spring in coastal New England can be so unpredictable.

And yet Elsa wouldn’t trade it for the more temperate climates where Brett’s work as a nautical engineer transported them in recent years. It’s good to be settled back in the northeast. This is home.

Especially now that we have Renny.

Her bedroom door is ajar, as always. Plagued by claustrophobia, she can’t sleep unless it’s open. That’s understandable, considering what she’s been through.

Whenever Elsa allows herself to think of Renny’s past, she feels as though a tremendous fist has clenched her gut. It’s the same sickening dread that used to seize her whenever she imagined what Jeremy had endured—both before he came into their lives, and after he was kidnapped.

But Renny isn’t Jeremy. Everything about her, other than the route she traveled through the foster system and into Elsa’s life, is different.

Well—almost everything. With her black hair and eyes, Renny resembles Elsa as much as Jeremy did. No one would ever doubt a biological connection between mother and child based on looks alone. But their bond goes much deeper than that. From the moment she saw the little girl, Elsa felt a connection.

And yet…had she felt the same thing when she first met Jeremy? There was a time, not so long ago, when her memory of her son was more vivid than the landscape beyond the window. Now it’s as if the glass has warped, distorting the view.

Now.

Now…what?

Now that I know Jeremy is dead?

Now that there’s Renny?

Elsa pushes aside a twinge of guilt.

Her daughter’s arrival didn’t erase the memories of her son. Of course not. She’ll never forget Jeremy. But it’s time to move on. Everyone says so: her husband, her therapist, even Mike Fantoni, the private eye who had finally brought the truth to light by identifying Jeremy’s birth mother.

“Why would you want to meet her now?” he’d asked Elsa the last time they’d seen each other over the winter.

“I didn’t say I want to…I said I feel like I should.”

“Has she been in touch with you?”

“No.”

“Then let it go,” Mike advised, and for the most part Elsa has.

She finds Renny sitting up in bed, knees to chest, her worried face illuminated by the Tinkerbell nightlight plugged into the baseboard outlet.

“What’s wrong, honey? Are you feeling sick?” Elsa is well aware that her daughter had eaten an entire box of Sno-caps at the new Disney princess movie Brett had taken her to see after dinner.