Wish You Were Gone(93)

“I mean… it was her idea.”

“Don’t try to shirk responsibility here, Hunter,” Emma said. “That girl may be your sister by blood, but this is your house—our house. We do not—”

“Wait. You know about Willow?” Hunter asked.

Emma shot him a steely look. “I know about a lot of things.”

Hunter rubbed his face with two hands. “I don’t think I even want to know what that means.”

“We can talk about it later. Tell me what happened with Kelsey,” she said, looking at the closed door to the guest room.

“I honestly don’t know. I heard all this screaming and banging and then Joey came running upstairs and said Kelsey’s losing her shit, and when I came down, all these people were in the basement and she was swinging a bat around.”

“She what?”

“I know. It was intense. But then she just sort of stopped and went quiet and, like, deflated. That’s when I called you.”

“Did she say anything?”

“I don’t know—it all happened in five seconds,” Hunter said. “I know she was screaming at people to leave.”

“What people?” Emma asked, the tiny hairs on the back of her neck rising.

“People. I told you, they were watching her.”

“Hunter…”

He went pale at the strain in her voice. “What?”

“Were any of those people filming?”





EMMA


The video was difficult to watch. Kelsey was like a tornado of grief and misery and anger, blazing a whirling trail of destruction through her father’s sacred space. Thank God Willow had had the sense to hit the floor and crawl into a corner. If that bat had caught her in the right spot in the wrong way… Emma didn’t even want to think about it.

Emma forced herself to watch the footage again and again and again. She forced herself to really look at her daughter, to truly see her. By the time the sun started to turn the sky pink and then purple outside her window, she felt she knew, for the first time, what living this life had done to her little girl. The last few times she watched the clip, she couldn’t stop her eyes from trailing the arc of the bat.

Around six o’clock in the morning, eyes dry, the skin around her mouth tight, Emma put the computer aside and went to her daughter’s room. She used her own key to get inside; Kelsey was still asleep in the guest room. Her daughter’s bed was perfectly made, her laptop closed on one pillow. On her desk was the stationery set James’s mom had sent her from France all those years ago, the blotter off-center and crooked. Emma walked past the desk to the bed, still looking awkward to her in its new position under the bay window.

She now understood why Kelsey had placed it there.

Emma crouched at the end of the bed, hooked her fingers around the baseboard rungs, and pulled. The legs against the wood floor made a screeching sound as they inched forward. She glanced over her shoulder, but there was no movement in the hallway. It took her thirty seconds to pull the bed far enough away from the wall. Her stomach felt coiled like a spring as she found the wonky board and pressed it with her toe. The board creaked, as she knew it would.

She remembered when James had discovered this flaw. The Realtor had said it would be easy enough to fix, but James had pried the board up to peek beneath and said no way. It would be the perfect spot for one of their future kids to hide their stash. She and James had both laughed.

Emma thought of the look in Kelsey’s eye in the video clip. She thought of her daughter, swinging that bat. As she slowly crouched in the sunlight, she could still hear James’s laugh, echoing back through the years.

She tugged up the floorboard.





KELSEY


11:59 p.m.

1 hour and 16 minutes before the accident

All she was going to do was grab the box of her dad’s crap that Willow had told her to stash in the garage. She’d said she was going to pick it up this afternoon. That this would be their last score. She loved using that word, like they were drug addicts or something. Like being like drug addicts made them cooler. Willow had no fucking idea how the world really worked.

Kelsey knew. She knew that if she didn’t put this stuff back where it belonged before her father noticed, she was going to get her ass handed to her. Earlier, in the light of day, she’d felt brave, defiant, like she didn’t give a shit what her dad did. But now… now it was getting late and he’d be home any minute, and the cold sweat of terror prickled her spine. The later he was, the drunker he was. And the drunker he was, the meaner he was.

She didn’t bother to flick on the lights. She ran to the corner and tugged out the box. The Jeter bat stuck out the top at an odd angle and got snagged on a tarp. She yanked, and it was that half second that cost her. There was a click and a groan. All the lights blazed on and the garage door began to open.

Kelsey froze. She could run, but then he’d find the box sitting here in the middle of the garage floor. Or worse, he’d run over it and crush its precious contents. By the time the flight half of her reflexes really took hold, it was too late. The door was fully open. He stopped the car at the top of the steep driveway and got out. Kelsey could see right away that the situation was not good. Her father stepped sideways, one foot crossing in front of the other, and steadied himself on the open door. His hair stuck up on one side. There was something wrong with his face.