Chapter Thirty-Eight
Elise
The sheer volume of the environment hit me first. The chaos didn’t feel like a structural collapse; it was incredibly loud.
The heavy, overlapping smells of sugary sweets and damp winter coats pressed into the air, a thick wall of sensory data that would never exist in the climate-controlled rooms back home.
Dozens of voices layered over one another, alongside the rhythmic scraping of wooden chairs and the metallic clatter of a fallen utensil.
An occasional burst of youthful laughter rose high above the baseline before settling back down.
I paused inside the threshold, my eyes adjusting to the bright, amber-lit room.
Children were everywhere. A toddler dived past my knees, his socks sliding wildly against the polished floorboards while a teenager followed two paces behind, one hand held at a protective shoulder height in case the child lost balance.
A dense cluster of younger kids gathered around a low table, their heads bent close together over something sticky and vibrantly colorful.
Off to the side, two older boys were debating quietly, but with intense focus, whether their tower was genuinely taller or simply leaning.
No one was panicking. No one looked lost. The realization settled over me with absolute certainty: the room was holding.
An older woman moved through the crowded space without a single wasted motion.
She didn’t hover over any one child for long, but absolutely nothing slipped past her attention.
When a juice cup tipped on the counter, she caught it with a towel that was somehow already in her palm.
When a child’s voice strained toward tears, she appeared before the break occurred, crouching to safely redirect the energy before rising back into motion.
She spotted me and immediately angled in my direction.
“Elise,” she said, wiping her flour-dusted hands on her apron as she closed the distance. There was a profound, visible exhaustion shadowing her eyes, but it didn’t touch the warm tone of her voice. “Bella notified us you might be arriving. I’m Mabel. Welcome to the hub.”
I opened my mouth to say something standard, but a tiny, physical pressure tugged abruptly at the hem of my sleeve. I looked down.
A small girl with two uneven pigtails stared straight up at me, her expression serious in a way that didn’t logically belong on a face so young. “Are you Brady’s friend?”
“I am,” I said, dropping my voice to match hers.
Her eyes narrowed slightly, not with suspicion, but with intense evaluation. “Is Brady sad?”
My fingers tightened around the strap of my bag. “Yes,” I said carefully. “A little.”
“Can you fix it?”
I glanced toward the front windows, toward the dark beyond the warm glass, toward the place where Brady had gone with his father and all the unresolved friction remaining between us. “I don’t know,” I said honestly.
The little girl seemed to accept that. Children apparently tolerated insufficient data better than adults did.
“My brother knows how to build paper airplanes.” She held out a heavily creased sheet of notebook paper, already bent incorrectly in three distinct places. “Can you make one?”
I took the paper automatically, my fingers remembering the precise folds from childhood before my brain could overthink it. “I think I can manage that.”
She didn’t wait for me to finish the sentence before turning back toward her table, entirely confident that the job was already done.
Mabel’s mouth curved into a slight, tired smile. “We are running entirely on improvised solutions today.”
“I can see that.”
“The parents are all out on the search grids,” Mabel explained, her eyes scanning the room. “Our primary job is to keep the kids distracted. The teenagers are filling in wherever they can.”
I scanned the environment again, slower this time.
One teenage girl was braiding a younger child’s hair with the intense, delicate focus usually reserved for something fragile.
An older boy sat cross-legged on the floorboards, completely unbothered as a toddler climbed over his shoulders like he was a piece of living furniture that occasionally laughed.
Near the front window, two older kids had turned the marshmallow-and-toothpick activity into a collaborative project, calling out adjustments, balancing angles, and deliberately creating space for smaller hands to add uneven pieces.
There was noise, yes. But underneath it, there was absolute intention. And it was beautiful.
A helicopter passed low enough overhead to rattle the front windows.
The shift across the room was barely perceptible.
A few little faces tipped upward. A boy near the coloring table pressed his crayon too hard, snapping the red wax in half.
One teenager’s hand paused mid-braid. The toddler at my feet went still for the first time since I’d entered the room.
“Who wants cookies?” Mabel called, already moving.
The room breathed again. Children turned, teenagers resumed motion, and the broken crayon was replaced by a blue one from a communal pile in the center of the table. The braiding continued. The toddler laughed and lunged toward the promise of the cookie tray.
No one in this room was pretending nothing was wrong. They were simply refusing to let fear become the only thing present.
“Elise?”
I turned toward the voice. A woman stood a few feet away, a wide metal tray of fresh cookies balanced expertly in one hand. She didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second before closing the physical distance between us and pulling me into a quick, warm, and enveloping arm hug.
My body went entirely rigid, my old instincts flashing warning signs at the unexpected contact. The faint scent of sweet perfume and commercial coffee clung to her. The sheer warmth of her made it impossible to step away.
“I’m Beth,” she said softly, breaking the contact but letting her hand linger lightly on my forearm, anchoring me there without force. “Brady’s mom. I am so incredibly glad you’re here.”
My chest tightened, the sudden pressure locking my lungs before I could draw a breath. Beth Holliston. The mother of the man who was missing. The mother of Brady. The woman whose family my father’s world had spent thirty years defining as the enemy.
I was a Steele. I carried the exact name that could fracture this fragile welcome in an instant, and yet this woman was looking at me with zero defensive armor. She didn’t look like she was measuring my worth or hunting for a crack in my defenses. There was no inspection. Just . . . grace.
If Beth knew my last name, would her hand still be on my arm? I didn’t know. That uncertainty sat under her kindness like a blade beneath folded linen.
“Would you like a cookie and some lemonade?” she asked.
“N-no, thank you.” I couldn’t imagine putting anything in my nervous stomach. “Lemonade,” I mused. “Not milk and cookies?”
Beth smiled despite the sadness in her eyes.
“Lemonade is the first choice of nearly everyone here. People practically wean their kids onto it. I don’t know why, but it’s been like that for as long as I can remember.
” She glanced at the full glass on the tray she was holding.
“There’s a woman who lives up on the mountain who makes it and ships it down.
People say it cures everything from headaches to body aches.
I’ve been drinking it for thirty years and will be having my fair share tonight. ”
“Evie the Oracle?” I asked, taking a guess based on what Brady had told me.
Beth smiled again. “Yes. They call her a healer as well. I wish she were here. I could use one of her calming tonics.
“We’ll find him,” I vowed in a whisper.
“Yes, we will,” she answered.
Beth studied my face for a brief, intuitive beat, her eyes softening as if she had filed a critical piece of information away for later. “Are you holding up okay under the pressure, sweetie?”
“I am.”
“Good.” She shifted the weight of the cookie tray toward a group of children who instantly swarmed her like a targeted wave. “If that changes, you come find me immediately.”
Her smile faltered for half a second. She was holding herself together, but barely. I remembered the Steele family I’d visited with Brady and impulsively hugged Beth, nearly knocking the tray out of her hands.
She laughed in surprise then hugged me back. “I’m glad Brady brought you.”
“I’m grateful to be here,” I managed to say.
Someone called her name and after a brief hesitation she hurried away with the treats a table was impatiently waiting for.
For a moment, I just stood there and soaked in what a concerned community felt like.
Despite the graveness of the situation, there was warmth and laughter and so much concern for each other I could only look on with wonder.
I had my family.
I’d begun to make friends in Basin Ridge.
But this? This was something else. I thought back to my initial conversation with Alethea and suddenly fully understood her message. When you come across beauty whether it is in a person, place, or whole community . . . you do whatever you can to protect it.
Through the front windows, I caught a glimpse of Brady outside near the curb, his head bent toward his father’s while police lights flashed red and blue across both of their faces.
Brady didn’t look in. I told myself that was good because he was focused on Evan, but it still hurt.
I had never put much stock in the value of regret, but I wished then that I could go back in time and start our relationship over.
Without lies.
Without tests.
Would he ever trust me again? I needed to believe he would.
Realizing I had folded one wing slightly lower than the other, I fixed it before the child could see, gave it to her, then tracked Mabel back down near the main counter. “Where do you need hands?”
Mabel didn’t answer right away. Her gaze moved past my shoulder, executing a sweeping scan of the room, tracking a dozen independent pieces at once.
Then she looked back at me, her eyes dead-on.
“The physical search out on the mountain is already massive,” she said quietly.
“Anything you can do in here to keep the little ones happy would be a huge help.” She nodded toward the room full of kids.
“Some of them know why their parents left this morning,” Mabel continued, her voice dropping into a lower, protective register.
“Some of them don’t.” She stepped a fraction closer, her tone carrying the weight of absolute trust. “Can you handle the main room for a few minutes while I pull more supplies from the back?”
I glanced back at the room, the unpredictable movement, the shifting emotional needs of thirty or so children. Every instinct I had ever been taught warned me of the risk. There were too many unknowns. Too little control. An infinite number of ways for things to fall apart.
And then the small girl with the pigtails tugged at my hand again, holding up a sticky marshmallow with total, unadulterated expectation. “Want a bite?”
She’d already sampled it.
I inhaled deeply, shook my head and forced a brave smile. “No thank you.” Then to Mabel, I added, “I’ve got this. Go.”
Mabel squeezed my shoulder once, a firm, grateful pressure, and disappeared through the kitchen doors.
“Want to help me build something?” the little girl asked.
“Sure,” I answered quickly and we made our way over to her lopsided and suspiciously sticky looking structure.
“Okay,” I said, picking up a wooden toothpick and assessing the sagging marshmallow tower with careful attention. “If you don’t spread the weight across a wider base, the whole thing is going to collapse. You need to build it stronger at the bottom.”
“She can use some of my marshmallows.” The little boy beside me leaned in immediately, his eyes laughing. “I ate some of her base.”
“But I licked some to stick it back together,” the little girl proclaimed.
“I see that,” I murmured, a small smile breaking through my defenses.
Another boy grabbed three toothpicks and jammed them straight into the center. “I just stab it until it stays up.”
“No,” I said quickly. “If you pull weight from the center without support, you’ll compromise the entire structure.”
His face fell. The effect was immediate and unpleasant. Too direct. I had saved the design but crushed the kid.
I softened my voice. “I mean, your idea is good. It needs support so it can stay up. If we make the base wider first, her middle section can go higher without collapsing. Do you want some marshmallows of your own to stab? I mean build with?”
His face cleared. “I do.” He looked at the tower again, then at me. “Can I make one like hers?”
“Sure,” I said, and something in my chest pulled tight. “And with more toothpicks you might not have to lick anything.”
The children looked at me like I was missing the point of the activity.
Around us, the room kept moving in its beautifully unscripted rhythm.
A toddler laughed so hard he lost his balance and rolled onto the carpet.
Someone clapped. A teenager called out a request for clean napkins.
Beth passed directly behind my row, brushing her hand lightly over my shoulder without breaking her stride.
The small girl with pigtails launched the paper airplane. It shot forward six feet, dipped hard left, and landed in a cup of crayons. She gasped as if she had witnessed a miracle. “That was amazing.”
“It was, but if you . . .” I stopped when I saw some of her joy leave her face.
In my family, good was never good enough.
And great was only better until another idea came along that improved the process.
Never being satisfied with the state of any of our projects was what kept us innovative, but I hadn’t realized until then how much that philosophy had been integrated into my whole framework.
What would I have wanted my father to say if he saw me do something as nonsensical as flying a paper airplane?
I clapped my hands together and said, “You’re right. That was amazing! Do it again.”
With a huge smile she ran off to do that.
I looked back at my marshmallow architects in time to see that the little boy who had eaten the base of the girl’s building was devouring his own. Not being able to help myself, I laughed.
And he laughed.
And the little girl licked a marshmallow like she was making one side into glue and stuck it to the base of her structure then smiled at me proudly.
It was then that I realized I wasn’t on the outside looking in. I was a fully participating part of a group that trusted me without a logical reason to do so. And because of that, the truth I was carrying felt heavier than ever.