Chapter 9
Cleaning is the only thing that quiets the voices in her head. Not forever, but while she’s sweeping and dusting and moving various objects around, Addison’s not bogged down by emotional turmoil. All those little what-ifs hush to whispers. She welcomes the reprieve.
It’s not hard to find projects. This place needs work and lots of it. She’s also talented at finding tasks where there are none. She washes laundry in the tub and folds it into neat piles of towels that create an illusion of control over her life.
She even considers going out to the shed to rearrange junk before remembering it’s dangerous out there alone. Not worth the risk to move one lump of stuff to another corner, so she forgoes that idea.
The last few days have been a whirlwind cleaning spree while Wyatt recovered from his ordeal.
In between scrubbing, she’s taken care of him the best she can, learning that he’s a terrible patient when he’s not hallucinating.
He refused to stay in bed. Kept trying to help around the house when he could hardly stand.
Wyatt behaves much the same way she does when she’s sick. He hides it.
His insistence that they go out to look for Emma, even when he’s too weak, is difficult to refuse, but it’s not practical.
At least, that’s what she told him every single time he asked, which was frequently.
He’s chomping at the bit to get moving again, though his exhaustion works in her favor. It’s not a lie that he needs to rest. She’s only relieved to have a valid excuse to redirect him. She’s gotten away with it so far because of the circumstances, but he won’t continue to let it slide.
Addison can already see him gearing up for a battle while he watches her clean the coffee table.
“You don’t have to do all this, you know?” he tells her.
“I don’t mind. I want to.”
“Weather’s good. We should get out there and search again.” It’s a tentative suggestion as if he expects her to finally blow up at him.
“You’re still not one hundred percent. It’s not safe.” Something tells her that this tried-and-true argument is about to fail today.
Wyatt chews on his bottom lip and blurts something out that surprises her. “You worried about me, or using me to avoid going out?”
She rubs the cloth against the wood hard enough to squeak the table. “That’s not fair. Of course I want to go.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
“We’ll go when you’re better. Every trip has to count when gas is this low.”
“I can walk. The fever’s gone. I’m good.”
She hasn’t gone out alone again for fear of getting lost and wasting what little gas they have. Two sets of eyes are better than one. He knows the area, so she told herself it was only smart to wait rather than end up stranded.
Logic says this is the right moment to try again, but she can’t bring herself to agree.
“You said the weather’s fine, but it looks like rain to me. I can feel it. We don’t need to get caught in a storm,” she argues.
“There ain’t a cloud in the sky and the sun’s trying to blind me. Can you…can you stop cleaning for a minute so we can talk?”
She huffs, ringing out the rag even though it’s not wet. “What is this? Why are you coming at me? You think I don’t want to find my daughter? It’s all I want, Wyatt. It’s all I can think about. I can hardly function anymore.”
Her words come out biting and angry, so much harsher than she intended.
It surprises her, considering she’s bitten her tongue for years around Vincent.
Never been brave enough to snap at him. Wives are to be eagerly submissive.
That’s how she was raised. To do otherwise would have earned her any number of punishments sanctioned by the group.
She has no fear of Wyatt lashing out, and that loosens her tongue. Funny how bold she is given the smallest bit of safety.
“I’m not trying to come after you, just don’t understand what’s happening here. I can walk to the car, and if push comes to shove, I can get away from one of them.”
“Unless it’s a runner. A slow one, sure, but your leg wound is barely closed. You’re fresh off a fever, and—”
“She’s not dead.”
“Don’t say that when you can’t promise it,” Addison gasps, dropping the dust rag to the ground.
He landed on the exact reason she can’t go.
Now her lower lip won’t stop wobbling. “It’s been so long.
Too long. If we find her, I’m afraid she’ll already be one of them.
I can’t handle that. I can’t. I won’t survive seeing her like that. I don’t think that I could…you know…”
“It would be worse to let her wander the earth in that state. I would do it for you if you couldn’t.”
His practical yet gentle words feel like acid on her heart.
Especially when she knows that he’s right.
It’s hard to look at him when she’s not as good at hiding her feelings as she thought.
So, she slumps onto the sofa with her head in her hands.
He may be ready with words of encouragement, but her sudden hiss of pain distracts him.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Only a cramp. It happened the first time, too. It’s the stress.”
When she was pregnant with Emma, living with Vincent was enough to have her cramping off and on for months. Now, she’s got it coming from all directions, and her body isn’t coping well.
“Need to lie down? Get off your feet? Can I bring you some food?” Wyatt asks softly, so obviously regretful that he’d been pushing her.
This is her chance. She should take it. Tell him she needs to rest and use that as an excuse to avoid breaking her own heart out in the woods, but she doesn’t. “No. I’ll be okay, you don’t have to worry.”
It strikes her as a silly thing to say. Who is she to him that he would worry at all? Then again, she spent the last week worrying about him, didn’t she?
Her cheeks heat up as she looks away. His concern for her well-being far surpasses anything her husband ever showed.
That’s not something she expected from such an unlikely source.
After years of wishing a man would treat her with kindness and basic decency, she’s finally gotten that and doesn’t know what to do with it.
He’s quiet for a long moment, and she wonders if he’s ready to admit that she isn’t strong enough for this. He’ll see how weak she is and agree it’s for the best that they stay here, where she won’t have to face reality.
Her stomach flips, and another cramp squeezes hard, bringing buried memories along with it.
“I almost lost Emma before,” she whispers.
“The first time, I stopped feeling her move for three days. I was six months pregnant. We weren’t allowed to visit the city for groceries, let alone the doctor.
I thought she was gone, and then one morning she started doing somersaults as if nothing had happened. ”
Addison wipes at her face with the back of her hand, not daring to look up for fear of finding judgment. She should have left the group so many times. So many times. It’s only in hindsight that she can fully see how trapped she was her whole life.
“The second time, she was fishing on a dock. I only went inside for a moment. Just a moment. When I came back out, she was gone, and Vincent was reaching over the edge to try to pull her back up. That’s how little he thought of her.
She wasn’t worth the hassle of jumping in the lake, even to save her life.
She was halfway to the bottom by the time I reached her.
And then she coughed up some water and told me she fell off because she caught a fish, and the tension on the line pulled her in.
She wanted to try again after she got a snack… like nothing had happened.”
“She’s a fighter. It sounds like she always has been.”
“I wanna believe she still is. That she’s out there waiting for us, and we’ll find her safe, but fate’s been trying to take her from me right from the start. Our luck’s running out.”
“This wasn’t fate, ain’t no such thing. We can’t give up,” he says. “Not knowing is worse.”
He’s right, much as she hates to admit it. Fear of finding an answer has kept her frozen, but fear of never knowing lurks in the background, too.
“Okay.”
A decision made lifts a small weight off her shoulders. The upward curve of his half-smile gives her a much-needed boost.
She can do this. She has to.
He grabs the shotgun by the door. “You even got the spiders in the corner. Did you stand on the chair while evicting them?”
She huffs. “Maybe. Couldn’t live with them moving around like that. It made me shiver. I either had to get rid of them or name them.”
“No more pets.” He smirks. “The cats and the goats are enough. Not unless it’s a dog…”
They talk about redecorating the house as they head out to search, and she teases him that she’ll let all the cats in soon.
Any conversation is better than thinking about the crushing fear swirling in her gut.
Hiding from this forever isn’t an option.
The only way forward is to walk out that door and face what waits.
* * *
They begin where they found the stuffed animal. Addison clutches it in her hands like a good luck charm, but the only thing it’s good for is giving her something to squeeze.
Wyatt walks a few steps ahead before veering into a ditch. “I didn’t notice this last time. Did you?”
She stares at the backpack he holds up from a long-dead rotter stuffed face-first into a bush. “No. Anything in it?”
He dumps a few papers and random items onto the ground. “Nothing useful. Thinking someone looted it already. We found the toy a few yards back…”
“Do you think she found this? That she could have gotten supplies from there?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
It’s wishful thinking that solving this puzzle can be as simple as reconstructing a crime scene on a TV show, but if this is the road he wants to go down, then she’s happy to follow.
“There’s a dairy farm not far from here. I passed it coming in. She would have seen the sign.”