44
Lila
I had barely reached the parking lot when Jade’s phone buzzed in my hand. The sound stopped me beside the car, and my fingers shook so badly I nearly dropped it.
Unknown: before you leave delete these texts and toss the phone.
I stared at the message, then deleted the thread before fear could talk me out of obeying.
Throwing away Jade’s phone felt horribly final, one more piece of her disappearing while I had no idea where she was, but if whoever had her was watching me, I couldn’t risk hesitating.
I hurled it into the hedge, heard it vanish in the leaves, and got behind the wheel.
The drive became a blur of images I couldn’t control.
Jade crying. Jade tied somewhere dark. Jade trying to be brave because she thought I would want her to be.
Jade wondering why I wasn’t there yet. I gripped the wheel until my hands hurt and forced myself back to the only thing I could control.
Get there. If someone expected me to choose between my life and my daughter’s, there had never been a choice.
The address led into a quiet neighborhood of trimmed lawns and dark windows, so ordinary it felt wrong.
When I parked, the tracker tag on my keys pressed into my palm.
Evan knew about it. If anyone realized I was gone and thought to look, maybe it would give them something to follow.
I shoved the keys deep into my jeans pocket and walked to the house.
I reached the porch with my pulse blurring the edges of everything. I knocked, and Dr. Mason Reid opened the door.
For a second my mind refused to make him fit. Mason with the careful smile and familiar doctor’s face. Relief flashed across it when he saw me. “Lila,” he said, as if my arrival settled something. “Come inside.”
I stayed where I was. “Where is my daughter?” The terror behind the question made my voice sound thinner than I wanted, but I held his gaze. If he knew where she was, I needed to see it in his face.
His relief vanished. “What?” The confusion looked real, which frightened me more than guilt would have.
“My daughter.” I stepped closer. “You texted me on her phone. You said if I wanted her back, I had to come here. You got me here. Where is Jade?”
Mason glanced toward the street before lowering his voice. “Come inside,” he said again. “You can’t stand out there.” He was more concerned with getting me through the door than answering me.
“Mason, where is she?” I could hear my breathing getting rough, each inhale too shallow to satisfy my lungs. The porch light buzzed above us in the quiet.
“Lila.” He swallowed, his certainty beginning to fracture. “Please. Just come in.”
Every instinct told me to run, but Jade was missing and Mason knew something. I crossed the threshold. The door clicked shut behind me, and I turned on him. “Start talking.”
The house smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and roasted food. Ordinary. Domestic. Wrong. Mason kept one hand on the knob before finally easing it away. “Lila,” he said carefully, “why don’t you come sit down for a minute?”
“No.” I stayed close to the door, unwilling to let him decide where I stood or how this conversation happened. The cold leaking around the frame touched the back of my hand, reminding me the outside was still only a few feet away.
His brow pinched. “You’re upset.” He sounded like a doctor trying to manage a frightened family member, and hearing that familiar professional tone turned against me here made my skin crawl.
“My daughter is missing.” I held onto the flatness in my voice because the fear underneath it was too big.
“I can see that.” He lifted one hand in a placating gesture. “That’s why I’m saying we should sit and talk. Let me explain some things first.”
“No. You can explain them standing right there. Where is Jade?” I shifted enough to keep the door in the edge of my vision.
His mouth tightened. “You’re coming in hot.”
A sharp laugh tore out of me. “Coming in hot?” Anger was easier to stand inside than panic. “Someone texted my daughter’s phone and said if I wanted her alive, I had to come here alone. So yeah, Mason, I’m not exactly in the mood to ease into this.”
Confusion flickered across his face again. He looked toward the living room as if the room itself might explain why I had arrived like this. “Lila, please. Just come sit down. I’m trying to help you.”
“Then help me. Tell me where she is.” I didn’t move. His fixation on getting me to the couch had become one more thing I refused to give him.
His eyes went to the couch. “You’re not in a state to hear this standing up.” The line sounded rehearsed, like he had imagined this conversation enough times to know where he thought I should be sitting.
My nails bit into my palms. “I am in exactly the right state to hear where my daughter is.”
Mason dragged a hand through his hair and started pacing. “This isn’t how I expected this to go.” Two steps one way, two back. The calm doctor was slipping.
I tracked him with my eyes. “Expected what to go?” He stopped long enough to study me, searching for a version of me that apparently hadn’t shown up.
“I need you to lower your voice,” he said finally. The request came out controlled, but his shoulders had gone tight enough to betray him.
“You need to tell me where Jade is!” My control snapped with the words, loud enough to bounce off the walls and make the quiet house feel suddenly too small for either of us.
His expression hardened. “I need you to stop yelling at me.” My terror had become an inconvenience to him.
“I am going to do a hell of a lot more than yell at you if my daughter is hurt!” The threat tore out of me before I could soften it, and that stopped him cold.
That was when I understood what I was seeing. Mason wasn’t frightened because I was in his house. He was frightened because I wasn’t behaving the way he expected.
He approached more carefully, no longer trying to steer me toward the couch. “Lila... did somebody tell you Jade was here?” His voice had changed too, stripped of the practiced calm.
The question hollowed me out. “What?” My heartbeat stumbled. Mason looked as lost as I felt now, the certainty he’d greeted me with beginning to fracture.
“Did somebody say she was with me?” His confusion no longer looked rehearsed. He was watching me for an answer now instead of trying to control mine.
“You texted her phone.” The accusation weakened under the first crack in my certainty, and I hated how quickly that uncertainty got under my skin.
“No, I didn’t.” He answered too quickly to sound calculated. Color had drained around his mouth, and the change in him looked real.
Rage came fast because believing him was worse. “Do not lie to me.” If Mason hadn’t sent those messages, then I had obeyed somebody else all the way to his door.
“I’m not.” Both hands came up. “I swear to God, I’m not. I never texted Jade’s phone.” He looked pale now, almost as if he had just realized he was standing inside someone else’s plan.
“Then how the hell did I end up here?”
Mason opened his mouth, stopped, then tried again. “I thought...” He shook his head. “I thought you were coming because you finally wanted to talk. Because you were ready to listen.” Something wounded crossed his face. “I thought Jude said you were coming.”
Cold slid over my skin. “Jude,” I repeated, every convenient run-in suddenly crowding into my head. “What does Jude have to do with this?”
Mason looked toward the front window, then the hall. That hesitation told me enough to push harder. “How do you know him?” His jaw flexed. “Mason.”
I stepped closer. “How do you know him?” He still wouldn’t answer, and the silence between us stretched until I could hear the house humming around us. “Mason.”
He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “It wasn’t like that at first.”
My whole body went rigid. “At first what? You need to start making sense!”
“He found me online,” Mason said, backing farther into the room. “Or... not exactly found me. We sort of found each other.”
“What does that even mean?” The house suddenly felt too warm, and I became aware of how far inside I had drifted while following his pacing with my eyes.
He looked away. “I was posting.” Shame touched his face too late to reassure me.
“Posting what?” His hesitation stretched until my skin crawled. I let the silence sit instead of filling it for him. “Mason.”
“There’s this forum. Men talking about women who make you think you matter, make you think it’s becoming something real, then act like you’re crazy when they decide they’re done with you.”
Disgust rolled through me. “You were on some sad little forum talking about women?” The absurdity would have been pathetic anywhere else.
“It wasn’t like that.” His defensiveness sounded practiced, worn smooth from repetition. He had clearly needed that sentence before tonight.
“No? Because from where I’m standing, it sounds exactly like that.”
Mason’s shoulders tightened. “I was angry, alright? I needed somewhere to say things I couldn’t say out loud. I didn’t use names. I didn’t give details. I just...” He looked down. “I wrote about a woman I couldn’t let go of. A woman who said one thing with her body and another with her mouth.”
My face went still. “You were writing about me.” His silence answered. “Online,” I said quietly. “You were venting about me online.”
“I didn’t use your name.” He offered it like that made the violation smaller, as though anonymity could turn betrayal into harmless venting.
“Wow,” I said. “How noble.” My skin felt too tight.
Now that he had started confessing, the rest came easier.
“Jude reached out after one of the posts. Said he understood. Said he’d known women like that, women who made you think you mattered and then cut you loose like it was nothing.
” His jaw tightened. “We kept talking. Met in person. I told him more after that. About you. About us. Not your name.”
“And you believed him.” I thought of Jude in the grocery store, the coffee shop, always with another reason to be near me.