Tumble (Dogwood Lane #1)(76)

If she cries, and I bet she will, I’ll probably break. This is my doing once again. This wound I’m getting ready to inflict was done at my hands even though I promised myself I’d never do it again.

I guess you can’t trust anyone. Not even yourself.

I wait for her feet to hit the hallway and for the mad dash to her bedroom. I wait and wait and wait, but it never comes. Heading for the stairs, I look up toward the hallway. Just as I put my hand on the banister, trying to decide whether I should check on her, her little voice calls out my name.

“Dad.” She says it in a way that’s not a shout and not a normal talking voice either.

I’m to the bathroom door in a half a second. “You okay, rascal?”

The door opens. Her eyes are filled with trepidation as she looks up at me, her hair wet from the shower. “Will you walk me to bed?”

“What’s this about?” I ask.

She shrugs. We make our way silently down the hall and to her room. She wastes no time climbing into her bed and getting buried under the blankets. Once she’s settled, I take my perch on the edge of the mattress.

Smoothing her hair off her forehead, I search her little eyes. “What’s going on?”

“Where’s Neely, Dad?”

“Home, I guess. I’m not sure.”

“Is she coming back?”

Emotion swallows me, sitting right across the bridge of my nose. I blink rapidly. I pray faster. I will myself to stay strong even though I want to go to my own room and fall face first into the mattress.

“She always told us she was going back to New York,” I say carefully. “We were expecting this, right?”

“No,” she says, the words padded with unshed tears. “She has to come back, Daddy. We have the Manicure Day.”

“And she really wanted to do that with you,” I tell her. “I know she did. She was really looking forward to it. But her boss called and needed her back soon, so she had to go.”

A solitary tear trickles down her freckled face. “She didn’t say goodbye?”

“She didn’t have time, baby girl. She told me to tell you she would miss you and she hated going, but she had to. She didn’t have a choice.”

I grip a handful of sheets and squeeze it with everything I have. Sitting here and answering her questions, lying to her, breaks my heart. I fight back tears of my own, both from watching her pain and acknowledging my own.

“Can’t you go get her?” Mia asks.

“I can’t. It’s not my place.”

“Why isn’t it? You’d go find me if I ran away, wouldn’t you?”

I take a deep breath. “I would find you in a second because you’re my child. It’s my job to find you.”

“Well, Neely is our family. Doesn’t that mean it’s our job to find her?”

“I know you love her. Heck, I do too,” I admit. “But she’s not really our family. It doesn’t work the same.”

Mia sits up in bed. Her pajamas, a gift from Haley decorated with little girls doing various gymnastics events, remind me of Neely too.

“But she is our family,” Mia insists. “I feel it in my heart.”

I give up. Batting back tears, I watch her eyes fill with her own. I want to tell her I feel it too. That I love her unlike any way I’ve loved someone before. That if I could go to New York and throw her over my shoulder like a caveman and carry her home, I would.

“You should find her, Daddy. Please.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Yes, it does,” she insists, her voice beginning to break. “If you love somebody, you look for them. You look and look and look until you find them. And I know you love her just like she loves you.”

My nose burns as I fight my emotions from getting the best of me. Instead, I pull Mia into my arms. She climbs on my lap and puts her arms around my neck. Her tears dampen my T-shirt, and I just want to hit a button and rewind some of this crap. Make it not happen. Unbreak our hearts.

I hold her like I used to, back when I had to walk her from the bathroom every night. Seeing my strong, sassy preteen hurting like this, so unsure, rips at the fibers of my soul.

“Madison ran away,” she sniffles. “She hid in the doghouse outside because her brother was being mean to her.”

“Running away is never good. You always talk to me if you have a problem. Got it?”

She nods. “Madison said she just wanted her brother to find her. That’s why she hid where she did, because she knew if he looked he’d find her there. He said he hated her and wished she wasn’t alive. It hurt Madison’s feelings. So maybe this is Neely’s way of doing that. Maybe we hurt her feelings.”

“No.” I pull her back so I can look her in the face. “We didn’t hurt her feelings. Her leaving isn’t about that.” I want to shake her, drive this point into her so deep she doesn’t forget it. “This has nothing to do with you. Nothing.”

I exhale, the weight of our world embedded in the sound. I hold Mia tight, as though if I squeeze her enough, it’ll put our hearts back together again.

We sit in the silence for a while, each of us lost in thought. I don’t know how to replace Neely in our lives. Certainly not with another woman. But there is a void that I don’t know how to fill, and I know Mia feels it too.