Hadley & Grace(85)

When the morning finally brightens enough to turn the room gray, she gets the boys up and takes them to the dining room beside the lobby for breakfast. Skipper eats cinnamon oatmeal as Hadley spoons small bites into Miles’s mouth. Miles gurgles and spits with delight, and the sight is almost enough to unclench the panic strangling her heart.

Grace and Jimmy arrive a few minutes later, Grace tense, Jimmy relaxed. Grace leans down and kisses Miles on his head, her lips lingering. Jimmy rests his hand on her back. The hurt between them is gone, dissolved into a new perspective that no longer allows room for old wounds, and watching them is like staring into the sun, warm and blinding and painful.

For the millionth time, Hadley searches her brain for an alternative, some other way to get through this.

“It’s time,” Grace says, her voice raspy from a night of emotion.

Jimmy lifts Miles from his car seat and flies him around like an airplane before depositing him in the baby pack Hadley has strapped to her chest. Hadley also holds Skipper’s hand. Jimmy carries the empty car seat. Grace carries nothing.

Jimmy kisses Miles gently on his head, kisses Grace passionately on the lips, then strides away, his head held high, his gait long and sure—a bona fide hero—not the illusion of a uniform but the character of the man who wears it.

Grace watches him go, her chin thrust out. “Let’s go,” she rasps, going for bold confidence but failing.

Hadley follows her through the lobby, hobbling as quickly as her injured ankle will allow, and Skipper hustles beside her, aware of how important it is for him to keep up.

They walk outside. The sky is a soup of dark clouds that weighs the air and makes the morning dim.

They reach the street, wait for the traffic to clear, then jaywalk to the motel on the other side.

“Hurry, Champ,” Hadley encourages. “Faster.”

“Private,” he corrects her as he picks up his pace, all of them almost running now.

Hadley’s eyes dart around the parking lot for the Economy Suites. Tony’s car is parked in the third spot, exactly where Mattie said it would be. Four spots away is a green Fiat with no one in it. Other than that, the lot is empty. Maybe Grace was wrong? she thinks as she continues to race for Tony’s car. Maybe they’re not here?

Daggers of pain shoot through her ankle, but she doesn’t slow, the car now only twenty feet away. She glances at the window of the second room on the bottom floor. In the lower-left corner is a two-inch square of yellow—a Post-it Note placed there by Mattie signaling that the plan is a go.

She lunges for the back door of the car at the exact moment the door to Mattie’s room opens, and tears fill Hadley’s eyes at the sight of her baby running toward them.

Hadley pulls Skipper with her into the back seat as Mattie yanks open the passenger door.

“First Base!” Skipper yells as Mattie throws the striped bag on the floor and leaps in after it.

“Hey, Champ,” she says, turning back to look at him.

The car is rolling before her door has closed.

Miles squeals and kicks in his pack against Hadley’s chest as they drive over the curb to bounce onto the road. Half a second later, Hadley crouches over him and reaches out to brace Skipper as they’re thrown sideways when Grace whips around the next turn.

When she straightens, she cranes her head to look behind them, and her heart misfires when she sees a gray sedan racing behind them.

“You were right,” she says in disbelief, staring at the blue swirling light in the windshield.

Grace says nothing, her eyes tight on the road as she continues to gun it down the street.

Hadley can’t believe it. Until this moment, she didn’t actually believe anyone could predict so much based on so little. But Grace did. She said the feds were waiting, and they were.

The car skids into an alley, then banks sharply onto a side street.

“Seat belts,” Hadley yelps at the exact moment Skipper yells, “Red!” and Hadley looks up to see them charging toward an intersection with cross traffic moving steadily through it.

“Grace!” she screams.

Grace doesn’t hit the brakes. She doesn’t even slow. The car flies toward it at breakneck speed, and Hadley squeezes her eyes shut as she pulls Skipper against her and bends tight over Miles.

The car swerves and horns blare, but miraculously, when Hadley sits up, they are past it.

She looks back to see the sedan two football-field lengths behind them and counts the seconds between them. Four. Grace estimated they would need at least six for the plan to work.

They travel in the general direction of north, circumventing the town in a haphazard pattern that appears random but that Hadley knows is planned. They pass from the town into a residential neighborhood, then come out the other side into farmland, the fields recently cropped, leaving nothing but miles of stubbled gold around them—no place to run and no place to hide.

Grace floors it down the laser-straight two-lane road, and a moment later, the abandoned silos come into view, six massive concrete drums reaching for the sky.

“Seat belts off,” Grace says.

Hadley unhitches her belt and grabs Skipper’s hand as her other hand moves to hover above the door handle.

“Ready?” she says to Skipper.

He nods, a soldier set for battle. They practiced last night, pretending the bed was the back seat of Tony’s car.