24. Az
— ? —
Az
By morning the storm has eased. We wake in the loft, pull on our clammy clothes, and head for the house. The mud is a lake and I’m standing in it up to my ankles, staring at the front door of my grandmother’s house hanging open like a mouth mid-scream.
“Okay,” Eli says, and before I can process what’s happening, he’s scooped me up, one arm under my knees, one behind my back, and he’s walking. Actually walking through the mud that tried to swallow my boots, carrying me and the weight of our daughter like I’m nothing.
“I can walk.”
“You can also let me do this.”
“I didn’t say I was going to stop you.”
He makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, almost not. The rain’s slowed to a drizzle, but water’s still dripping from his hair, from my hair, from everywhere. We look like we crawled out of a storm drain. Which, honestly, isn’t far off.
When we reach the porch, he sets me down carefully, and for a second his hands stay on my waist, steadying me. Then he looks at the door.
“Stay here,” he says. “I’ll handle it.”
“Nope.” I wrap my arms around myself, still shivering in his flannel. “You’re not going in there alone.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Rain drips from the porch eaves. Then he pulls out his radio.
“Dez. Front door’s open. Need a sweep.”
The response crackles back almost instantly. “Copy, team en route. Do not enter.”
We wait on the porch. Eli positions himself between me and the door, but he doesn’t try to send me back to the barn. His hand finds mine.
“Nobody came through the main gate,” he says quietly. “I checked with patrol on the way up.”
“So they came another way.”
“Yeah.” His jaw tightens. “They came another way.”
Dez’s next radio update is worse: someone cut through the new east fencing during the storm, below the camera line. The alarm logged a fault instead of an entry. They are closing that gap now.
Dez arrives with two deputies in under four minutes. They clear the house room by room while we stand in the rain, listening to the crackle of radio updates. My heart hammers against my ribs.
“Clear.” Dez appears in the doorway. “Sheriff Hernandez is on her way. You can come to the nursery threshold, but don’t touch anything.”
The walk down the hallway feels endless. Every door along it hangs open, untouched. The bathroom. The linen closet.
And then we reach the nursery.
Dez stands aside. A deputy with a camera is photographing something near the crib. Eli’s grip on my hand tightens.
I make myself look.
For a moment I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. The crib is fine. The dresser is fine. The walls with their hand-painted dahlias, the little paper stars Lupe hung, the rocking chair that belonged to Grandma June, all fine.
But on the changing table, every single outfit I bought for the baby is laid out.
Sorted by size. Newborn on the left, working up to three months on the right.
Like she went through every drawer, every basket, every carefully folded pile and organized them.
Like she was practicing. Like she was getting ready.
And by the crib…
“That’s the hospital bag,” I say, and my voice sounds far away. “The one Brynn packed. I had it sent up with the discarded nursery supplies. I left it boxed in the barn.”
It’s open now. Unzipped. And someone’s added things, new things I’ve never seen. A package of diapers. A blanket still in its wrapper. A tiny hat with ears.
“She restocked it,” Eli says, and there’s something hollow in his voice.
“Look at the mirror.”
He turns. On the mirror over the dresser, written in red lipstick, my lipstick, I realize, the one that was in my bathroom drawer, are the words: SEE? I’M READY.
I’m going to be sick.
I make it to the bathroom in time, barely, and Eli’s behind me, holding my hair back, one hand on my shoulder. When I’m done I just sit on the bathroom floor, shaking, and he sits down next to me.
“Hernandez is on her way,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“And then we’re talking about LA.”
I don’t answer. I just breathe.
The sheriff is a woman named Hernandez who I’ve known since I was sixteen and started driving too fast on the back roads. She’s got gray in her hair now and reading glasses she keeps pushing up her nose, and she takes one look at the nursery and says, “Well, that’s disturbing as hell.”
“Thank you for the professional assessment,” I say, and she snorts.
“Pregnancy hasn’t dulled your edge any.”
“If anything, it’s sharper. I have constant heartburn and I haven’t slept in a week. I’d fight God right now if he looked at me wrong.”
Deputy Morris photographs everything. Another deputy, young, nervous, trying too hard, dusts for prints. Hernandez sits me and Eli down at the kitchen table while Lupe makes coffee nobody wants but everybody needs.
“Walk me through it again,” Hernandez says.
“We were in the barn,” Eli says. “It was raining. When we came out, the front door was open.”
“And you were in the barn because…?”
“We fell asleep in the loft.”
Hernandez raises an eyebrow at me. I shrug.
“We had a thing to work out.”
“All night, during the storm.”
“We have a lot of things to work out, Sheriff. Not all of them keep business hours.”
She writes something in her notepad. I resist the urge to lean over and see what.
“The hospital bag,” Eli says. “Az threw it in the barn weeks ago. After Brynn, after the thing with Brynn.”
“The thing with Brynn being the attempted slap Ms. Moore reported?”
“The thing with Brynn being that she tried to slap a pregnant woman and I decided jail was too kind. Yes.”
Hernandez’s mouth twitches. “Understood. So the bag was in the barn. Now it’s in the nursery. Restocked. Which means someone knew where it was, retrieved it, added items, and placed it by the crib.”
“While writing creepy messages in my lipstick, yes.”
“We’re taking the bag and everything in it as evidence,” she says. “Is anything missing? Besides the lipstick?”
I think. “I don’t think so. I’d have to look harder. But nothing obvious.”
The nervous deputy appears in the kitchen doorway. “Sheriff? The rental car. It was ditched at the trailhead. Hired in Cody Larkin’s name.”
I feel Eli go very still beside me.
“Cody,” he says.
“That’s my ex,” I tell Hernandez. “We dated in college. He’s been-”
“I know who he is. We pulled his background after the incident with Ms. Hollister.” Hernandez closes her notepad. “He’s the one who funded her rental, correct?”
“That’s what the rental company confirmed to the deputy.”
“Well, now his name’s on a car abandoned half a mile from a break-in at your property. We’ll put that with the rest of the evidence and follow up at his last known address.”
“And Brynn?”
“We’ll find her too.” Hernandez stands, gestures to the nervous deputy. “Rivera, get Ms. Moore set up.”
“Set up with what?” I ask.
Rivera reaches into his pocket and pulls out what looks like a necklace. A simple chain with a pendant the size of a quarter, not decorative, clearly functional, with a small button on one side.
“Panic pendant,” Hernandez says. “Press and hold for three seconds, it sends an alert to dispatch with your location. Works anywhere you have cell coverage. It is not a live tracker. Each successful press sends one location. If the signal fails, it holds that alert until it can connect. Victim assistance program. We figured you’d rather have something discreet than a big ugly wrist alarm. ”
I take it from Rivera. It’s lighter than I expected. The chain is long enough to tuck under a shirt.
“I’m not really a pendant person.”
“Wear it anyway,” Eli says. His voice is rough. “Please.”
I look at him. Then I put the chain over my head, let the pendant drop against my chest, and tuck it under my shirt where no one can see it.
“Happy?”
“Getting there.”
Hernandez and her deputies leave with promises of updates and patrols. Lupe goes to her room looking exhausted and ancient in a way she usually hides. And Eli turns to me with that look in his eyes, the one that means he’s about to say something I don’t want to hear.
“LA,” he says. “Tonight. I’ll have Dez bring the car around and we can be back at the house by-”
“No.” I don’t even have to think about it.
“Az, she got into the nursery. She touched the baby’s things. She wrote on your mirror-”
“I know what she did. I was there. I threw up about it.” My hand finds my belly.
“So come back to LA. There’s a gate, there’s a security system, there’s-”
“There’s also a house everybody knows is yours,” I say. “I don’t want to leave here out of panic and hand her the win. Can Dez make this house secure tonight? Actually secure, not just tell us he’ll try?”
“It’s not giving her anything. It’s being safe.”
“Then we ask him what has to change. And if he can’t do it tonight, we leave.”
“You mean that?”
“Yes.” I grab his arm, make him look at me. “I want my home. I want our daughter safe more. Both things can be true.”
We call Dez back. He walks us through new window locks, a reinforced study door, a guard at the house and another at the east service gate. The cut fence will be repaired before dark. Nobody uses the service lane without being checked. I make him repeat the plan until I can picture it.
Finally, Eli’s shoulders drop.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“I’m not going to overrule you. It’s your house.
Your farm. Your choice.” He runs a hand through his still-damp hair.
“And with your permission, I’m putting a cot beside your bedroom doorway.
And if anyone tries to come through that door who isn’t you or Lupe, they’re going to have to go through me first.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“I’m a dramatic person. You knew that when you married me.”
I almost smile. Almost. “Fine. Cot beside the doorway. But if you snore, I’m kicking you out.”
“I don’t snore,” he says, wounded.
“You absolutely snore. Like a dying walrus.”
“That’s slander.” He presses a hand to his chest.
“It’s truth. I have years of evidence.”
He pulls me into a hug then, and I let him. My face against his chest, his arms around me, the baby kicking between us like she’s trying to get in on the embrace. For a moment, just a moment, I feel safe.
Then I remember the lipstick on the mirror. SEE? I’M READY.
I hold on tighter.
I can’t sleep. So sometime after midnight I get up to start a hospital bag of my own. The deputies took Brynn’s navy bag and everything she put in it. I want clean things, chosen by us.
But the nursery’s already occupied. Eli’s on the floor in the dark, new supplies spread beside him, packing a bag by hand.
A plain black duffel. No tags. Nothing labeled with anyone’s name.
He’s doing it wrong, diapers where the snacks should go, four times too many onesies, a phone charger still sealed in its packaging, checking each thing against the pregnancy book propped open on his knee like it’s a bomb schematic.
“I didn’t want her first bag to be that one,” he says, not looking up. “She should get one somebody packed because they wanted to be there. Not because they wanted to take your place.”
I don’t help him. I don’t fix the diapers. I just lower myself onto the floor beside him and watch him get it wrong, one careful item at a time, and for the first time since we found the front door hanging open, the thing in my chest loosens.
3:17 a.m.
I wake up to nothing.
Not nothing-nothing. I wake up to the absence of something. The cot beside my doorway is empty. The blanket’s pushed aside, and there’s a light on somewhere, not in the house, but outside. Through the window I can see a faint glow coming from the barn.
A note on the pillow reads: Dez is downstairs. I’m in the barn for ten minutes. Radio beside your water.
My first thought is: she’s back.
My second thought is: Eli.
I pick up the radio. Dez answers immediately, tells me Eli is in the barn, and meets me downstairs. I pull on my robe and boots. He walks me across the yard, then waits at the door while I go in. The air smells like after-rain, clean and sharp, and the sky is full of stars.
The barn door is cracked open. The light is coming from inside.
I push through, and there he is.
He’s sitting on an overturned crate, guitar across his lap, facing the driveway. Like a guard dog with a better soundtrack. His back is to me, but I can see the tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers move across the strings without actually playing anything.
“You’re supposed to be asleep beside my door,” I say.
He doesn’t turn around. “Couldn’t sleep. Dez said he could cover ten minutes.”
“So you came out here to serenade the driveway?”
“Something like that.”
I walk around until I’m standing in front of him. He looks up at me, and in the dim light from the single bulb overhead, I can see everything on his face. The fear, the guilt, the exhaustion, the love.
Always the love.
“Come inside,” I say.
“I should stay out here. In case-”
“Eli.” I hold out my hand. “Come inside.”
He stares at my hand for a long moment. Then he sets down the guitar, takes my hand, and stands.
“Okay,” he says quietly.
And he does.