The Mother's Promise(42)

“Mom, please.”

Zoe’s face was hot, and sweat poured from her underarms. Her mom looked bewildered. Zoe hated herself for asking—she knew the tickets had cost a lot of money—but she had to get out of there.

“Fine,” her mom said finally, stalking out of the line. Zoe was right on her heels. But she was walking in the wrong direction.

“Are we going home?” Zoe called after her uncertainly.

“Nope.”

“Mom!”

Her mom marched into the gift shop and grabbed the lion’s head off the stand. She winced as she handed over her credit card and, a minute or two later, she slipped it over her head and returned to the line.

“Mom, what are you doing?” Zoe asked, astonished.

“No one is looking at you now,” she said, winking at Zoe through the eye slits. “They’re looking at me.”





29

That evening, as she lay in her hospital bed, Alice was worried. Had she done the right thing, letting Zoe go back to Kate’s? After all, she didn’t know the faintest thing about Kate, other than that she was a nurse with a soothing bedside manner. Her husband could be a pedophile, an abuser! Sure, Kate said she had been background-checked. (Briefly Alice wondered why she had been, but manners had stopped her from asking. Manners! Who cared about manners—this was her daughter!) Then again, there were plenty of criminals with clean records. Weren’t there?

She took a deep breath. Get it together, Alice.

Alice was not a conspiracy theorist. Growing up, she had been schooled in the idea that people were, by and large, good. If something went missing, it probably hadn’t been stolen, you’d most likely lost it. The government was not in cahoots with pharmaceutical companies to make you ill so they could make money. The world these days was much the same as it had always been—with good people and bad people. She had always felt strongly about this. She still did. But fifteen years ago, she’d been exposed to the bad. Worse, she’d invited in the bad. She thought now of that strange, horrible night. The glass of red wine she’d gulped down. “I insist,” she’d said.

She dragged her phone from her bedside table and saw that Zoe had already sent her a text.

Hey Mom everything is fine. I have a room with its own bathroom! Hope you’re okay. Zoe.

Alice put down her phone. Everything is fine. Why did Alice not believe that? After all, things always seemed like they were fine—until they weren’t.





30

“Are you sure Zoe’s all right?” David asked, climbing into bed beside Kate. He had a book in his right hand and his reading glasses perched on his nose.

“Actually I’m not,” Kate said. Zoe had spent the entire evening in her room and hadn’t even answered the door when Kate knocked to tell her dinner was ready. When Kate had let herself in, she’d found the door to the bathroom door closed, so she’d left her plate on the bed.

“Poor kid,” David said. “What will happen to her if … her mother doesn’t make it?”

“I have no idea. Usually there are oodles of family members around. I guess if no other family members come out of the woodwork, and if she’s under eighteen, she’ll go to a foster family.”

“And if she’s over eighteen?”

“Then she’s on her own.”

“Jesus.” David closed his eyes. “Can you imagine Jake or Scarlett on their own?”

Kate put a hand on his. “It would never happen to them. There are too many people who would want them. You and me, Hilary and Danny, uncles, aunts, cousins…” As she said it, Zoe’s fate seemed especially unfair. How did Scarlett and Jake have so many people and she had none? “Maybe I should check on her again?” she said.

David touched her shoulder. “Wait.”

She paused.

“Can we talk a minute?” he said. “I feel like things aren’t right between us.”

Kate hesitated for a moment before returning her legs to the bed.

“Can I just say I’m sorry?” he said, removing his reading glasses. “I know how hard all of this has been on you. I want to help you, but I feel like we’re just … out of touch with each other. I want to give you everything you want, Kate. It kills me that I can’t give you this.”

She drew herself over to him, taking his hands. She had a feeling that this was the opening she’d been waiting for. “You can, David. If we don’t give up, we can still have it. I know it hasn’t been easy, but don’t you always say ‘nothing worth having is easy to get’?”

He let out a long, slow breath. All at once Kate got the feeling this wasn’t the direction he wanted the conversation to go.

David rubbed the bridge of his nose between two fingers, his eyes settling in the middle distance. “Think of it this way. What if you wanted to run a marathon even though every time you ran it caused you enormous pain? What if each time you set out on a run you ended up hospitalized and immobile for weeks? Would you expect me to support you then?”

“No,” Kate said. “But the situations are different.”

“How?”

“Because you’ve already run two marathons!” she cried. “And, since I’m the one who is willing to put in the training, you owe it to me to at least let me try for one.”