Chapter 39 Chloe
CHLOE
I’m dreaming of the lake again, although this time, the water’s as warm as some tropical sea. I float on my back, staring up at a bright, turquoise sky, and when strong hands wrap around my waist and pull me under, I don’t fight it.
Theo, I whisper, his name turning into a stream of silvery bubbles.
Some kind of sonic jangling cuts through the water, and his hands slip away from me, and I’m left floating on my own. The jangling doesn’t disappear, though. It gets louder and louder until I—
Until I gasp awake, blinking in the bright morning sunlight. The jangle, I realize, is my phone. It beeps over to voicemail as I try to get my bearings about me.
“Theo?” I sit up, tossing the blankets aside.
My bed is empty, and I feel a kind of hollowness at the sight of it, even though last night when I asked him to come to bed with me, I didn’t fully understand why.
I didn’t fully understand why I asked him to fuck me in the kitchen, either, or why I had him choke me, or why I came so hard from it. Twice.
“Theo? You here?” I grab my phone and squint down at the caller.
Sofia Social Worker
I freeze, suddenly not focused on Theo’s whereabouts. I fumble to play the voicemail.
“Hi Chloe, it’s Sofia Barrera. I know it’s been a few months since we, uh, spoke, but I have some questions I wanted to ask you.”
My heart thuds. She never calls me. I was the one calling her, desperate to set up a time to see Oliver, to make sure he’s okay.
“If you could give me a call back when you get a chance, I would really appreciate it.”
Is there a tight quiver of worry in her voice?
My whole body goes numb except for my heart, which pumps so furiously I feel like I can’t catch my breath.
Every time I called Sofia, she told me the same thing: I’m not family.
She understands my concerns. They want to smooth the transition as much as they can.
With shaking hands, I call back. She answers on the first ring.
“It’s Chloe.” I stumble into the living room, bright with sunlight. There’s no sign of Theo anywhere. “Chloe Monroe. You just called—”
“Oh, yes. Chloe.” Sofia sounds harried, I think.
Worried. “Thanks for calling me back. I was just calling because—“ She hesitates for a second, and I stop in front of the picture window and shove the curtain aside to look at the snow-covered trees of Theo’s peninsula. I’m sure that’s where he went.
“Because I was wondering if you had heard from Oliver lately.”
“Heard from—” I shake my head, my heart still pounding. “No, I’ve been out of power for the last three days because of the storm. I—he never texted me or anything. Is he okay?”
Sofia takes a deep breath. I hate that fucking sound. It’s what she does right before she delivers bad news. “Please,” I say, whipping away from the window and pacing across the living room. “I understand that I’m not family and that there’s a certain way of doing things, but I really do worry—”
“He’s missing,” Sofia says.
Every system in my body seems to stop.
“Missing?” The word echoes around in my ear. “How the hell can he be missing?”
Sofia takes another deep breath that, on the phone, sounds like the blizzard. “His foster family woke up this morning to find his bed empty and some of his clothes missing. His backpack, too.”
I think of that backpack, covered in green and blue dinosaurs.
“He had been—unhappy.” Sofia hesitates. “He was having trouble adjusting, given everything that happened. It was—one of the reasons we didn’t want him to have contact with you.”
I squeeze my phone, my heart thumping. “If I heard from him,” I say numbly. “I would tell you.”
“I know you would. The police are aware and are out looking for him, but I wanted to give you a heads up in case he did try to contact you.”
“Did he leave a note?” I ask. “Anything? Some sign of where he was going?”
He thinks Theo is a ghost.
“No, nothing that the family was able to find.”
And ghosts don’t die.
“Where was he living?” I ask, my chest tight.
Sofia hesitates again, the silence thudding on the phone. Then she says, “Rockingstead.”
“That’s only forty-five minutes away!” I’m genuinely shocked; I thought for sure they had taken him to Charlotte or Asheville. One of the cities.
“Yes. Like I said, we were trying to make the transition as smooth as possible.”
I breathe out. That makes sense. Still, my heart is hammering even faster. If he’s only forty-five minutes away, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that he’s trying to make his way back to Theo.
Or to me.
No, I think numbly. No, it was always Theo he thought would protect him. Theo the ghost.
But god, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Not in the snow and the cold.
“If I hear anything,” I say. “I’ll call you right away.”
“I’m going to give you some other numbers, too,” Sofia says. “The police contact. Oliver’s foster parents.”
“Of course.”
She rattles off the numbers, and I scribble them down on a napkin in my kitchen. When I hang up, I stare down at them, terror gnawing at my heart.
Then I wrench away, leaving them on the counter so I can get dressed and make my way to Theo’s peninsula.
I drag Oliver’s boat into the water and row as hard as I can.
The wind scouring across the lake is the coldest I’ve ever felt, even after living in Boston.
It seems to sweep down from the north like it wants to flay my skin from my bones, and I can barely keep a grip on the oars, even with my thick woolen gloves.
The waves are choppy, too, and I splash and heave my way across the water until I finally run aground on the snow-covered shore.
At least I manage to get out of the boat without falling in the fucking lake.
The woods are another matter. Everything is blanketed with snow, thick and pristine, and it makes the already intimidating woods feel completely unnavigable.
I don’t have much of a choice, though. I trudge parallel to the woods, trying to find some hint of the path that led to the graveyard. That’s when I stumble across indentation in the snow: Footprints. Sled marks.
No. Boat marks.
I suck in my breath. So Theo found a boat to cross the water. I hadn’t really thought about it until now. Part of me thought maybe he swam.
I follow the tracks into the snowy woods, my boots sinking deep enough that the snowmelt seeps in and freezes my feet. I keep going, though, fighting through the burn.
“Theo!” I call out, my voice ringing into the silence. “If you can hear me, please come out here! I need to talk to you.”
The tracks take me to a clearing that it takes me a second to recognize as the graveyard.
Everything’s untouched, save for a delicate trail of bird tracks cutting across the open space.
The wind shakes the trees around, throwing off old snow that clings to my hair.
“Theo!” I shout again, more desperation in my voice. “Please! It’s about Oliver!”
Silence.
I trudge on, weaving through the trees, my breath tight and panting and my feet burning. I have the thought that maybe he isn’t here after all. That maybe I’m the one chasing ghosts.
And then I hear something crunch in the silence of the snow. My skin prickles with heat.
I whirl around and there he is, caged in by the skinny pine trees, wearing the coat he stole his first night back, his hair damp and clinging to his cheeks.
“Theo,” I breathe out, and I’m struck with a sudden, overwhelming sense of relief at seeing him.
I plunge forward, gritting my teeth against the burning freeze in my feet. “Oliver’s missing,” I call out, swiping the tree branches away. “His social worker just called. He’s—”
Theo catches me, grabbing me by the arms. I blink in surprise at how fast he moved. I thought he was just standing there, watching me suffer.
“You’re in pain,” he says.
I sway in the snow. “It doesn’t matter,” I gasp. “Oliver ran away from his foster family.”
Theo’s eyes narrow, and he studies me, like he doesn’t understand what I’m saying.
“He ran away!” I cry. “Last night. I think he’s trying to get back to you.”
This time, Theo’s reaction is immediate. He sweeps me up in his arms and plunges forward, kicking up fans of snow as he moves. I cling to his jacket, my whole body shaking. I hadn’t realized how cold I’d gotten.
“I don’t know for sure,” I say, my breath puffing out. “The social worker told me the cops are looking for him—”
Theo makes a kind of scoffing sound.
“But I know you could find him more easily. Couldn’t you?”
We burst out of the forest, Theo’s cabin rising up in front of us.
I stare at it, feeling vaguely dizzy. All I can think about is the polite cop who interviewed me at the sheriff’s station.
He had drawings of you in there, Ms. Monroe.
He almost certainly would have killed you if you hadn’t killed him first.
A falsehood I never bothered to correct.
Theo sets me down on the porch. “Where was he?” he asks, his eyes hard and glinting, his hands shaking a little.
“Rockingstead,” I say. “Not far at all. I didn’t realize—”
Theo shoves past me and slams into the house, the door banging on its frame. I blink, vaguely stunned. I wasn’t sure what reaction I expected from him. It certainly wasn’t this.
“Theo?” I hear the quiver of fear in my voice, but I go into the house anyway. It feels stale and closed off, even more than it did six months ago. Theo’s thumping around in the kitchen. “Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you—”
I stop in the doorway. Theo slams open kitchen drawers, one after another, clearly looking for something, and the fear tightens in my chest. Because what else do you keep in a kitchen but knives?
We found a stash of weapons. More axes, hunting knives, a machete…
But what Theo finally pulls out of one of those drawers isn’t a knife at all. It’s a map, ancient and faded, that he spreads out over the kitchen table and then hunches over, tracing along it with his finger.
“What are you doing?” I breathe out, even though I already know the answer. I can feel it, pulsing in the air between.
Theo looks up at me from the damp fringe of his hair, his expression hard and determined.
“I’m going to find Oliver,” Theo says, “before the police do.”