Live to Tell (Live to Tell #1)(6)

“Look around?” he echoes incredulously. “How would I ever be able to—”

“You need to do this, Nick, because, believe me, Sadie will never be able to function without Fred.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line.

Lauren begins slicing the white flesh of the apple with rhythmic little jabs of the knife.

“Sadie won’t be able to function?” Nick finally echoes in her ear. “Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”

“Hell, yes, it’s dramatic. She’s four, Nick. Think about it. First you left, then Ryan and Lucy did, and now Fred’s gone…”

And that means I’m all she’s got…and I’m overwhelmed, so step up, dammit!

“I’ve got a client meeting. I doubt lost and found will even be open by the time it’s over.”

“Then go check before the meeting.”

“I’m in the middle of a workday.”

“You’re not too busy to take five minutes out for your daughter. And anyway, you’re right across the street from Grand Central,” she reminds him pointedly.

He sighs. “Okay. I’ll go check when I have a chance. What am I looking for, exactly?”

“A pink stuffed rabbit.”

“Got it. A pink stuffed rabbit that answers to Fred.” He snickers.

There was a time when Lauren might have cracked a smile. But now her face feels as brittle as the rest of her. “Call me when you find him.”

“You mean if I find him.”

Him. Good. Small triumph.

“If he’s not in the lost and found, then check the floor on the entrance off Lex, and check Hudson News.”

“Which Hudson News?”

“The one just off the main concourse.”

“There are about a hundred Hudson News stands off the main concourse.”

“A hundred? Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”

Touché, Nick.

He sighs. “I suppose you want me to check them all.”

“Only if Fred’s not in the lost and found,” Lauren tells him, and hangs up.



It’s been over fourteen years since Jeremy vanished, yet every moment of the horrific aftermath remains fresh in Elsa Cavalon’s mind.

She relives the nightmare daily: realizing her son was missing, searching the house, calling Brett at work, calling 911, calling Jeremy’s name through the streets of the neighborhood until she was hoarse.

“It doesn’t go away.”

Elsa didn’t make the statement, but she might as well have.

“No,” she agrees with Joan, her latest therapist, seated in a chair opposite her. “It doesn’t go away.”

She isn’t sure what they were talking about, exactly—her mind tends to wander during her sessions. No. Not just then. Her mind wanders always, no matter where she is, to the past, and Jeremy.

It doesn’t go away…

The pain? The regret? The guilt?

No matter. None of it goes away.

“You constantly go over every detail in your mind, looking for clues,” she tells Joan. “Even after all these years, you think there might be something you missed.”

Joan nods.

“You wonder what really happened that day. You wonder what’s going to happen today—whether a police officer is going to show up at your door and tell you they found him. But not him. His—”

Her voice breaks. She can’t say it.

His remains.

Chin in hand, Joan sits silently waiting, the way therapists so often do, for Elsa to regain her composure.

Intimately familiar with the process, she’s been through more than her share of shrinks since her son disappeared.

The first, when they were still in Boston, was Dr. Hyland. She was the one who told Elsa that she had only two options.

“You can either curl up and die, Elsa, or you can go on living.”

Elsa didn’t care much for Dr. Hyland.

There were others. They move a lot because of Brett’s job as a nautical engineer, and he insists that wherever they land, she get herself right into therapy.

In Virginia Beach, she saw grandfatherly Dr. Saunders; in San Diego, a tattooed woman named Hedy; in Tampa, the effete John Robert—pronounced Jean Robacute;ere, though he wasn’t French.

Here in coastal Connecticut, it’s serious, bespectacled Joan.

None of the trained professionals can give Elsa the answers, or the forgiveness, she so desperately needs. None of them can convince her that what happened to her son wasn’t her own fault, on some level.

They merely help to keep her going, reminding her of the possibility, however slight, that Jeremy himself—or the truth about what happened to him—might someday surface. That wisp of hope keeps her alive.

Hope, and the medication she’s been on since her suicide attempt years ago, not long after she lost Jeremy. Antidepressants, they’re called. As if swallowing a pill could magically erase one’s bleak state of mind and make the world right again.

It can’t. But swallowing enough pills could make it all go away—or so she decided one morning just before they moved to Virginia Beach. She had made the choice between Dr. Hyland’s options at last. She had chosen to curl up and die.