Chapter 15
Kayla
I was on the couch with my feet tucked under me, half watching William build a Lego fortress on the living room floor while I answered emails on my laptop.
Nothing urgent on the screen: a note from my editor about color palettes for the Barley finals, a shipping confirmation for the new pencils I’d ordered, the small administrative debris of a freelance life.
The house was quiet in the good way. Dinner cleaned up, the dishwasher humming its cycle in the kitchen, the last of the daylight turning the room warm and soft through the front windows.
William was narrating the construction under his breath, assigning roles to invisible soldiers, occasionally holding a piece up to the light to examine it before snapping it into place.
My phone rang.
I reached for it without looking, set the laptop aside, and tapped the speaker icon out of habit because my hands were full.
“Hello?”
“Kayla.”
I grabbed the phone and killed the speaker so fast I nearly dropped it. Pressed it to my ear and turned away from William in one motion, my heart already slamming.
“I think you’ve had enough time to get this out of your system.” Craig’s voice was in my head now, close and inescapable. “I’ve been more than patient. Most men wouldn’t have waited this long, but I’m willing to be gracious about it.”
I was on my feet and moving toward the kitchen before he finished the sentence, putting a room between his voice and my son.
“How did you get this number?”
“Come on. Don’t be dramatic. I’m calling because I care about you. I’ve given you space, I’ve let you play house in your little mountain town, but it’s time to stop with the games. You know you’re not built to do this alone. Come home, act like an adult, and we can put all of this behind us.”
“Mom!”
William was in the kitchen doorway. He’d abandoned his Legos and was bouncing on his toes, his face lit up, one hand pointing back toward the living room. “I just saw Jolly through the window! He’s going toward the trees. Can I go after him?”
Craig was still talking in my ear, something about how he’d been more than reasonable, and what registered from William was: Jolly. Can I go. The routine. The fence. Pinecones.
I covered the mouthpiece with my palm. “Sure, buddy. Go play with Jolly.”
He was gone. The front door opened and closed, and I heard his sneakers on the porch steps, and then I was alone with Craig Dutton’s voice pressed against my ear. At least William didn’t have to be nearby.
“—listening to me? Kayla. I asked you a question.”
“I heard you.” I stood up and crossed to the kitchen, bracing my free hand on the counter. “And the answer is no. The answer has been no for six months. It’s going to be no forever.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it. Every word. Do not call me again. Do not email me. Do not contact me in any way. We are done, Craig. For good.”
He chuckled. That particular low, patronizing sound he made when I said something he found amusing in its wrongness. Like a parent listening to a toddler explain why bedtime shouldn’t exist.
“You’re cute when you’re fired up. You know that? Always have been. But let’s be honest. Who else is lining up? You’re a thirty-one-year-old single mom with a dead husband and a kid who barely talks. I was doing you a favor, and deep down, you know it.”
I should have hung up. Every therapist-approved instinct I had was screaming at me to end the call. But something in me, something stubborn and furious and tired of being talked over, needed him to hear it.
“You were never doing me a favor. You were a mistake I made when I was lonely, and the only good thing that came out of knowing you is that I’ll never make that mistake again.
You are toxic. You are cruel. And if you ever come near me or my son again, I will use every email you’ve ever sent me and I will bury you. ”
Silence. Then another chuckle, softer this time. “We’ll see.”
I hung up. Set the phone on the counter and pressed both palms flat against the surface, arms locked, head down. My pulse was hammering. My jaw ached from clenching.
I breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way my therapist had taught me. Four counts in. Hold. Four counts out. Again. The kitchen was quiet. The dishwasher hummed. Nothing in the room had changed.
I did it three more times before my hands stopped shaking.
Then I looked out the back window.
The yard was empty.
No William at the fence gap. No small shape crouched in the grass. No sound of pinecones hitting cedar or laughter carrying over the top rail.
“William?”
I crossed to the back door and stepped onto the deck.
The yard stretched out in front of me, the fence gap visible at the far end.
Maybe William had gone through the hole over to Ben’s yard.
I supposed that was inevitable, but I’d have to talk to him about it.
He couldn’t just wander over to Ben’s house anytime he felt like it.
“William! Time to come inside!”
Nothing.
I went back through the house and up to my bedroom window, the one that looked down over both backyards. Ben’s yard was visible from here, the whole stretch of it, from the back deck to the fence line.
Empty. No William. No Jolly.
Had he come inside while I was talking to Grade A Asshole? I hoped not. Hoped he hadn’t heard any of that conversation.
I checked William’s room. The bathroom. Back downstairs, through every room, calling his name louder each time. The house echoed back at me, hollow and useless.
Then I heard an engine in the driveway. A truck door. The familiar sound of a tailgate lowering, a crate being opened.
I went to the front window.
Ben was in his driveway. Jolly jumped down from the back of the truck, harness still on, and shook himself. Ben reached back into the cab for something.
They’d just gotten home. Both of them. Together.
My hand found the wall because the floor had tilted. William had said something about Jolly. He’d asked to go, and I’d said yes. But Jolly was here. Jolly was right here in Ben’s driveway. Jolly had never been home.
I was out the front door before I’d finished forming the thought.
Ben saw my face and went still. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t find William.” The words came out high and strange. “He said he was going to play with Jolly a sort time ago. I was on the phone. He’s not in the yard, he’s not in the house. But Jolly’s been with you.”
Something behind his expression recalibrated. I’d seen it before when he’d demonstrated training exercises at the assembly. The shift from person to operator. Everything nonessential dropping away.
“Okay, hang on. Tell me what happened. He said he was going to play with Jolly?”
I rubbed my head, trying to think of exactly what William had said. I’d been so busy trying not to lose my shit with Craig…
“Uh. He said something about seeing Jolly through the window. That he wanted to play. So of course, I said yes. Wait, no. He didn’t say play.” I closed my eyes to try to bring back his exact words. “He said Jolly was going toward the trees and asked if he could go after him.”
There were a couple of trees in my yard and Ben’s but none so large that he could be hiding out there.
And then it hit me. Oh my God.
“He went out the front door. Not the back. He thought he saw Jolly and went out the front door.”
My voice cracked. Ben was already pulling his phone from his jacket. “How long ago?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen? Twenty minutes? Oh my God, he asked if he could go, and I said yes. I thought he meant the backyard trees.” I started scanning the neighborhood. There was no sign of him anywhere.
And if Jolly was here with us, nobody was protecting him.
Ben had the phone to his ear. “Donovan. I need you at my house. Now.” A pause. “Kayla’s son is missing. Six years old, been gone approximately twenty minutes. Left the house on foot heading toward the tree line north of the neighborhood.” Another pause. “Call the department. Get bodies out here.”
He hung up and crouched in front of Jolly, both hands on the dog’s head. Jolly’s ears came forward, reading Ben’s energy the way he read everything. Instantly, completely.
“Donovan is five minutes out. We’ll get other officers here too. You said he thought he saw Jolly and that Jolly was headed toward the trees?”
“Yes.” I was trying to keep my terror in check. I hopped up in the bed of Ben’s truck and stood to get a clearer view of the neighborhood. I didn’t see him anywhere. “He must have seen a dog and, at a distance, thought it was Jolly.”
Ben unclipped Jolly’s leash and grabbed a flashlight from the cab of his vehicle. “Let’s go.”
“Yes. Let’s go.” I hopped down from the bed and met him at the back of the truck.
We moved quickly down the block, where the properties ended and the tree line started. The light was thinning fast. Another twenty minutes and it would be full dark, and my six-year-old was out here somewhere in shoes he hadn’t tied properly since last week.
I was calling William’s name, my voice too loud for the quiet street, not caring.
“William! William, where are you?”
Ben moved beside me with Jolly off leash, the dog ranging ahead with his nose working the ground. Not a formal search command. Just Jolly doing what Jolly did, reading the world through channels I couldn’t access.
We hit the tree line. The pines closed in overhead, cutting what was left of the light. The ground was soft with needles, and the underbrush was thick enough that I couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction.
“William!”
My voice came back to me off the trees, flat and small.
Oh God. I forced air into my lungs. I could not fall apart.
Ben put his hand on my arm. “Keep calling. I’m going to let Jolly work.”
He moved ahead with the dog, and I watched Jolly’s body language shift.
His nose dropped lower. His pace changed—still fast, but purposeful now, weaving between trees with an intensity that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with recognition.
He knew what he was looking for. He knew who.
Headlights swept across the street behind us. A car door, then footsteps, and Ben’s partner Donovan appeared at the edge of the trees.
“I’ll cover the neighborhood streets. Vance is two minutes out.”
Ben didn’t turn around. “Head a block east. She thinks he went north into the trees.”
Donovan was gone.
A minute later, another car. A man I didn’t recognize jogging toward us with his phone in his hand.
“Garrison. What do we know?”
“Vance.” Ben didn’t stop moving. “Six-year-old boy, twenty minutes, went out the front door heading north. Thought he saw Jolly near the tree line.”
“I’ll work the perimeter, loop around from the east and push inward.” Vance was already veering off. He glanced at me once, brief and reassuring. “We’ll find him, ma’am.” Then he disappeared into the trees at an angle.
Then it was just me and the darkening woods and Ben’s flashlight moving ahead through the pines.
I kept calling. My throat was raw.
Up ahead, Jolly barked.
One sharp, urgent sound. Then another. Then a volley of barking that split the quiet wide open, and Ben’s flashlight swung toward the sound and held.
I ran.
Thirty feet into the trees, past a fallen log and a cluster of brush that tore at my shins, and there he was.
William was sitting at the base of a ponderosa, knees pulled to his chest, arms wrapped around them. His face was streaked, and his body was rigid. A six-year-old boy sitting perfectly still in the dark woods because he’d stopped believing anyone was coming.
Jolly reached him first. Crashed through the brush and pushed his whole body against William’s side, nose in his neck, tail going, and the rigidity broke.
William’s arms came off his knees and went around Jolly’s neck.
He buried his face in the dark fur, and the sound that came out of him was the rawest thing I’d ever heard.
I was on the ground beside them before I knew I’d moved, pulling William into me. He came without letting go of Jolly, so I held them both, my son and the dog who’d found him, and pressed my face against William’s hair.
“I’m here. We’ve got you. You’re okay.”
He was shaking. Small, hard tremors that ran through his whole body. His fingers were cold where they gripped my shirt.
“I couldn’t find him.” His voice was muffled against my shoulder. “I saw him going into the trees and I followed but then I couldn’t find him and I couldn’t find my way back and it got dark—”
“I know. I know, baby. But you’re safe now.”
Ben’s flashlight found us from a few feet away. He stayed back, giving us the space, but I could feel him there. Steady, solid, the calm center of a night that had tried to shake everything loose.
He keyed his phone. “Donovan, we’ve got him. He’s safe. Call Vance, stand everyone down.”
I held William tighter. He held on to Jolly. Jolly held still, his body pressed against us both, patient and warm like this was exactly where he was supposed to be.