The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(74)

Sterling doesn’t ask how it went when I get in the car. She just starts it up and pulls out onto the road, headed to Manassas and home.

Home.

“Can we stop by my house?” I ask once we’re on the highway. “Something I need to do.”

“Of course.” She watches me from the corner of her eye, most of her attention still on the road. “Cass called. So far the search of Gloria’s house hasn’t turned up anything suspicious.”

“Are you serious?”

“They’re still looking. Watts and Holmes have her at the station, but they haven’t questioned her yet. They’re waiting for the results.”

“This is a terrible day, Eliza.”

“Yes.”

My house looks the same, my cozy little cottage with its quiet colors and Jason’s flowers blooming along the walk and the front of the porch. I’m not sure why I expected it to look different. It feels different now. Shouldn’t it look different as well?

But it doesn’t, and the keys open it same as ever, and aside from the dust that’s accumulated over the past eleven days, the inside is also unchanged. Siobhan never kept very much here, just some clothes and toiletries and a couple of books by the bed. Her absence hasn’t changed it.

Even the bedroom, the bed still unmade and probably still smelling of her a bit. I haven’t been in it since the night Emilia Anders knocked on my door. The black-velvet bear sits on my nightstand, and dozens of relatives line the shelf that wraps around the room.

I’ve never likened the sight to my family’s neighborhood before.

Grabbing trash bags out from under the kitchen sink, I stalk back into the room and pull bears from the shelf, shoving them into the bags. But every last goddamn bear is off the shelf, even if some of them are spilling across the floor. My hand closes around the black-velvet one, with the faded red heart and the smart bow tie, and I . . . I can’t.

Clasping him to my chest and trying not to think of Ava holding those damn angel bears the same way, I lean against the wall and sink to the floor, my feet sliding into the space under the bed. After a few minutes, Sterling picks her way between the bears, not stepping on any of them, and moves some aside so she can sit next to me.

I’m not sure how long we sit there in silence. Long enough for the light coming through the windows to shift to dusk, for shadows to stretch across the room and distort perspectives.

“Once upon a time, I was the youngest of nine,” I whisper eventually. “I used to share a room with my two next youngest sisters, but when I was five, I got my very own room up in the attic. I was so proud of it. It had a pretty pink canopy princess bed, and a white chest for dress-up clothes. And it had a lock all the way up on the top of the door where I couldn’t reach. The night of my birthday party, my very first night in the room, I found out why.” I turn the bear so he’s braced against my thighs, his worn face more squashed than usual. His stuffing is so old, he doesn’t bounce back the way he used to. “For three years, my father molested me, and the rest of the family ignored it. My siblings, all the adults, they knew, but the people of their generations, back in Mexico . . . you just don’t talk about things like that. So they closed their eyes and turned away.”

“Three years,” Sterling repeats, her own voice whisper soft. Maybe it’s the kind of secret, maybe it’s the twisting light vanishing across the bedspread. There’s something about the moment that says anything louder will shatter.

“My father also gambled. The family didn’t know about that. They would have been less forgiving. All the different pieces of the family relied on each other to get by; his gambling meant he put the whole extended family in jeopardy. He got in over his head with a private group. He couldn’t even sell the house to cover it. The entire neighborhood was family, so he would have had to explain. It wasn’t enough to cover it anyway.”

“So he gave them you.”

“He sent me to play in the woods behind the house, and when no one could see me, they grabbed me. They had a cabin deeper in the woods, too deep for anyone to really go.”

“How long?”

“Two years.” Sometimes I wake up and can still feel the rough boards beneath me, and the manacle around my ankle, hear the heavy chain that rattled across the wood with every movement I made. “There were some other kids there. Collateral, maybe, or winnings. They were never there long, but a couple of the men had taken a liking to me. Said they liked my fear. I’d been there almost two years when I got a chance to escape. The cabin wasn’t well-made; the wood wasn’t finished. We’d had a wet summer and everything was rotting, and I pulled up the ringbolt attached to my chain. Wrapped it around me like a feather boa so it wouldn’t clank, tiptoed past the men as they were sleeping, and ran like hell into the woods.”

“You don’t like woods,” she says after I fall silent. “Eddison always goes in, if there’s a way for it not to be you.”

“Sí. It was night, and dark, the trees too thick for moonlight. There were little ravines all over. I ran and ran and ran. I fell so often, but I dragged myself back up, more and more scared every time. And I couldn’t find a way out. I was too afraid to scream. Maybe it would bring help, but it was more likely to bring the men.”

“They found you?”