Page 19 of The Lovely and the Lost

Bella was out there.

And I’m not.

“Bed’s all yours,” I told Free.

On nights like these, I preferred the floor.

Girl shouldn’t have eaten the berries. She lurches forward, stomach on fire. Hurts. It hurts. Everything inside her comes up.

Again. And again.

Finally, she collapses. She can smell the sick—smell it everywhere. Girl trembles, tries to push herself to all fours.

Bad things.

Bad things happen with that smell. She has to get away before—

I woke crouched in the corner, my hair stuck to my face with sweat. Moonlight kept the room from utter darkness. I could make out the outline of Free’s form on the bed. Slowly, I remembered where I was,whenI was.

“Kira.” I whispered my own name under my breath. Over and over, I said it, an audible reminder of who I was—and who I wasn’t. Slowly, I came back to myself.

One to ten?I could hear Cady asking.Eight.It had been months since the last nightmare, years since I’d had one that vivid.That real.I didn’t need any of the specialists I’d seen as a child to tell me that the hunt for Bella had triggered something in me.

The last psychologist Cady had taken me to—the only one who hadn’t made me feel like an animal trapped in a hole—had told me that she could help me remember, if that was what I wanted.

She’d also told me that the brain repressed memories for a reason.

I pushed myself off the floor, digging the heels of my hands into the wood floor harder than I had to. I stalked out of the room and down the stairs. I needed space. I needed air.

I needed to breathe.

But as my hand closed around the knob on the front door, I heard the murmur of voices coming from the kitchen and turned toward them.

“You won’t sleep tonight.” Ness’s voice was matter-of-fact. Without meaning to, I crept toward it, in time to hear the reply.

“Cady knows her way around the wilderness.”

“Of course she does,” Ness replied evenly. “And of course that doesn’t matter. You’re her father. Worrying is what you do.”

I came to a stop just outside the kitchen door. The light was on inside, but the hallway was dark—better to mask my presence.

“I’ve missed this,” Ness commented after a long silence.

“Coffee you didn’t have to make yourself?” Bales asked gruffly.

“Worrying about them,” came the reply. “Knowing enough to know what we should be worrying about.”

There was a long pause. “Cady’s the one who chose to leave.”

“The one who didn’t even tell you she was pregnant,” Ness said. “I know.” She paused. “Would it have made a difference if she’d told you?”

I came to you,Cady had told her father.Do you remember that? Do you remember me begging you to help us find Ash? I would have done anything to get him back, and you wouldn’t even pick up a phone.

I missed Bales’s reply to his housekeeper’s question—if he’d answered it at all. There was almost a minute of silence before he spoke again. “You never blamed me.”

“Blame doesn’t change things, Bales Bennett. You, of all people, should know that by now.”

There was another pause, and I heard the light clink of a coffee mug being set down. “Mac came back to town,” Bales commented. “For the search.”