Don't Look for Me(70)

He pulls me back to the window. Presses my face to the wood until it scrapes my skin. I can feel the small splinters as they enter and dig their way through the flesh.

“Look,” he says calmly, though his strength feels like an explosion against me.

I do as I’m told. I look at my precious daughter through the hole.

“I have her now. Nod if you understand.”

I nod. I do exactly as I’m told.

“I think she would make a good mother, don’t you? And a good wife.”

A cry leaves my mouth. I can’t hold it in.

“She is so lovely. Every inch of her, so, so lovely. And she is in love with me.”

He lets go of me and I fall to the floor.

“Nod if you understand,” he says again.

Again, I do as I am told.

Of course I understand.

If I am not the best mommy to Alice, he will take my daughter.

But then I also know the truth.

He is delusional, thinking she loves him. Thinking whatever it is they’ve shared will last beyond this morning. She will grow tired of him before the sun goes down.

And yet, it doesn’t matter.

He will take her anyway. But first, he will kill me.

Unless I can stop him.





36


Day sixteen





It was only a few minutes before the door opened again and Reyes appeared. He shrugged once more, then walked back to the car.

“The place looks abandoned. No heat. No water. I checked every room in case … but no sign that anyone’s been living there.”

Nic stared back up at the house.

“We have to find out what the story is with this place.”

“We will,” he said. Then he leaned over to kiss her again.

He started the car and pulled forward.

Nic looked back one last time, at the window with the wood and the metal.

“Did you see the room with the boarded window? There are metal slats on the outside.”

“Yeah,” Reyes said. “Strange, right? But the window inside was broken. Maybe they didn’t want to pay to replace the glass. I told you, no one’s lived there for a while.”

They drove through the gate. Reyes stopped. Got out.

“I’m just going to close it. Leave things the way we found them. Probably shouldn’t have come without a warrant.”

Nic didn’t turn around to watch him, though his image in the side mirror caught her eye.

He closed the gate.

But then he replaced the chain—which was not how they’d found it—wrapping it three times as though he knew that would be the right number. And then he did something else.

Something that made her gasp one breath of air.

He took a padlock from behind a post—as though he knew it would be there, just like he knew about the chains—and he put it through the loops of the chain, locking it shut.





37


Day sixteen





I watch the car drive away. I watch the man, the monster, drive away with my daughter.

Now, more clanking on my prison bars. Alice is there with her Sad Face.

“Come over here,” she says.

She wants to comfort me. The chaos of the morning, the violence, has made her hungry.

I don’t move. I can’t.

“Come here!” she demands, and I see Angry Face coming. She points to the camera in the corner of the room, reminding me that he is watching.

She does not need to say the rest. That he has my daughter. That he will take her and kill me if I do not behave.

I manage to walk across the floor to the grate. My skin stings in the places where the splinters of wood have entered.

“Sit down,” Alice says. Sad Face has returned. She is volatile now, and I have to calm her. I have to feed her need to empathize with me, to comfort me.

So I sit.

“Give me your hands,” she demands.

I give her my hands.

She holds them tight and presses her cheek into them.

“What will happen to you if I have to have that new mommy? What if she’s not as good a mommy as you are? What if she only loves him the way you only love me?”

She begins to cry now, tears of empathy as I knew she would, and I can feel her calming. She presses my hands to her wet little face and cries into my skin.

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I will be better. I will make him happy so you don’t have to get a new mommy.”

She looks at me as though I’ve just tried to tell her the sky is purple. We both know what Mick wants.

He wants Nicole.

But I remind myself that Mick is not the only one in this house with power.

He has physical strength. Metal bars. Locks and keys and Dolly’s eyes. But I have those apples and inside of them, in their tiny seeds, is everything I need to take him down.

I watch Alice melt in my presence. And I think something else. Something about power.

“Have you ever tried an apple muffin?” I ask her. She looks up at me with wonder. As though it sounds delicious, and like something we will do together. And I think, Mick may have my daughter. But I have his.





38


Day sixteen





“I’m sorry that was a dead end,” Reyes said to Nic as they turned back toward town.