The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(90)

The next page is Victoria-Bliss, the brilliant blue and black of the Mexican Bluewing as dramatic as the rest of her coloring. Like Inara’s, the first picture was clearly taken at or just after the hospital, but in the second, she’s at a beach, wearing the bottom of a bathing suit, blue ruffled boy shorts, jumping off a squat rock into foaming waves. Her arms are up like she’s jumped from a greater height, her feet kicked up behind her.

There’s Ravenna, her leg swathed in bandages from a heavy chunk of falling glass, white and palest yellow and orange picked out against her dark skin. In the new one, maybe Ravenna, maybe Patrice, or maybe something wholly new delicately balanced between them, she’s dancing en pointe in cropped leggings, one arm crossed over her chest, the other arm and one leg fully extended. Strong, graceful, secure in her stance despite the pouring rain. There’s hope for her, with luck and the formidable attention of the Sravasti women.

All of the surviving Butterflies, then and now, healthy and mostly happy. Healing. The last of the first set of pages has Keely, just twelve years old when she was kidnapped. She wasn’t in the Garden long enough to be tattooed with wings, so unlike the other girls, her current photo is fully clothed. She struggled for a long time with the aftermath, not only with being assaulted and kidnapped when so much younger than the others, but with the widely varying public responses to her. Now, a few months shy of sixteen, she’s beaming in the photo and holding up her brand new learner’s permit.

This was Priya’s project this summer. I continue slowly flipping through pages showing the girls in parts of their new lives, and some where they’ve clearly gotten together for group shots. There’s one of Inara and Keely that makes my eyes burn with tears. Inara protected Keely in the Garden, and did her best to help her afterward, and here they are on the page, sprawled out on a blanket in the sunshine with eyes closed and mouths smiling.

Completely unaware of the water balloon about to land on them. That’s . . . that’s really a hell of a shot.

But it’s so normal and healthy, and God, these amazing girls have come so far.

The very last picture has all seven of the survivors, caught midjump in a yard or field, all of them wearing white sundresses and their hair down, with the filmy, brightly colored butterfly wings kids use for dress-up or Halloween catching the sunlight. They’re all laughing.

“Some of the others were getting frustrated,” Inara says, leaning against Priya. “Sometimes your recovery plateaus, and it was hard to convince them that they were still improving. Priya and I cooked up this idea, so they’d be able to see it. But we wanted it for you guys, as well. We’ve haunted you for a while, and you adopted us, and I think we’re the only ones who’ve been watching to make sure you heal, too.”

Victoria-Bliss balls up a napkin and tosses it at Eddison, purposefully shorting it so he doesn’t have to grab for it. “We’re grateful. We know you haven’t seen most of the others since just after the trial, when Mrs. MacIntosh told us about the scholarships she was setting up for us. So we wanted to give you new pictures, so you don’t only think of back then.”

“This is amazing,” I whisper, and I lose the battle with the tears that slide down my cheeks. But Vic has them, too, and even Eddison is trying very hard to look stoic.

“The second one, Mercedes, is just for you,” Priya says.

“Does that mean I should open it in private?”

“Up to you. I just meant the boys aren’t getting copies down the line.” She sticks her tongue out at Eddison’s fake pout. “No one else gets vacation photos from Special Agent Ken.”

“Although,” Inara muses, “his book is going to have a few extra pictures of when Special Agent Ken and my little blue dragon traveled to meet the girls.”

He looks both flattered and horrified. “Christ,” he wheezes.

All three girls give him wicked smiles.

Stacking the other book on top of the first, I open it and find a picture of eight-year-old Brandon Maxwell, the kidnapping victim in my very first case as an agent. He sits with his parents, teary but beaming, a bright green bear in his lap. Next to that is a new picture, a little grainy like it wasn’t entirely focused, of an eighteen-year-old in an orange-and-white cap-and-gown graduation set, beaming with a mouth full of braces and a battered, faded green teddy bear on top of his mortarboard.

“What is . . .”

Every page. Every page has a picture from our case files of one of our rescued children with their bear, and a picture from this summer. The kids range in age from twenties to single digits, and they all . . .

“We got permission from Agent Dern,” Priya says as I keep turning pages. “We weren’t sure if contacting the families was actually allowed, but she said as long as Sterling did it and no private information was shared, it should be all right.”

“Eliza?”

“It’s your ten-year anniversary with the Bureau,” she says with a smile and a shrug. “I told them we were putting something together for you, and if they were willing, if they still had the bear, would they mind emailing a picture of kiddo with the bear. We probably got about twenty-five percent. Pretty awesome, really. They emailed them and we printed them off.”

There are pictures of Priya in there, twelve years old and on the too-skinny edge of a growth spurt, blue streaks in her dark hair. There’s one where she’s sitting curled around the bear, scowling at the journal in her hands, a never-ending letter to Chavi. There’s another one her mother must have taken that perfectly captures Priya’s fury, Eddison’s shock, and the bear in midair on its collision course for Eddison’s face.