Page 98 of Rule the Night

I nodded. I knew what it was like to worry about the people I loved, but I wasn’t a parent. I didn’t know what it felt like to have been there when my child took her first breath and to know she’d taken her last breath alone and scared and far too soon.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I won’t stay away so long again, I promise.”

She nodded.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Really?”

“I’m as okay as I can be, Maeve.” I recognized the exhaustion in her voice, the resignation, even as I knew it was a thousand times worse than my own.

“Would it help to go back to work?”

“I don’t know if I can.” She filled the dishwasher with soap and closed it. It started with a quiet churn. “I don’t know if I’m that person anymore.”

Another thing lost to Chris. To Ethan Todd.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked her.

“Help me prep the garden for winter in a few weeks?”

I smiled. “I’ll be here.”

“How’s Dad?” I asked even though he seemed okay, because my dad always seemed okay but I knew no human on the planet was really okay all the time.

How could we be?

“He keeps busy,” she said.

We all coped in our own ways. My dad went to work, baked food that made other people happy. My mom stayed home and worked in the garden. Simon and Olivia went to school, tried to forget.

And me? Well, I was still quietly working to wipe Ethan Todd off the face of the earth.

And now I was pretty sure he was close to home.

61

MAEVE

I drove awayfrom my parents feeling both better and worse than when I’d arrived. Better because my family always made me feel better. We’d been to hell and back, but we’d done it together, and that was something Ethan Todd could never take away from us.

Worse because I knew they were still hurting, and I really, really hated that.

I wound my way out of the back streets around Blackwell Falls and headed toward Main Street, but instead of turning left toward Southside and the loft, I turned right.

I followed Main out of town to Old Mountain Road, stopped at the red light, and started up the mountain, following the directions I’d plugged into my GPS.

Most of the mountain houses were second homes, owned by city people who came to escape the heat of the city in summer, to get their fill of apple picking and take pictures for their social media profiles in fall, and to ski in winter.

I didn’t know the area well. I didn’t ski and other than the few times Bailey and I had gone hiking with friends in college, I’d never had any reason to be on the mountain.

It was dark beyond the street lights that illuminated the road, the Blackwell Preserve stretching wild and ominous into the distance. Hikers routinely got lost in the summer — and sometimes even in the winter — and at least one person drowned in the Blackwell River every summer.

I felt utterly alone as I wound my way up the mountain, and for the first time since I’d found out the Butchers were tracking me, I was glad for the app on my phone. At least if something happened to me, they would know where to start looking.

I’d planned to remove the app from my phone, but I’d searched high and low and had never been able to find it, so whatever they’d installed was hidden from view.

I approached the final turn on the GPS and slowed down. There wasn’t a single other car on the road, and I hesitated before turning onto the narrow road winding up the mountain, feeling like one of those too-dumb-to-live heroines I screamed at in bad horror movies.

Except I wasn’t here to do something stupid. I wasn’t here to do anything at all.