Chapter 6
Jenna was sitting on the edge of the bed drinking a cup of coffee from the Keurig in her room when her phone rang.
She looked at the screen. An unfamiliar number with a Blue Ridge Hollow area code appeared.
Luke. This had to be Luke. No one else had this number.
Her heart rate doubled as she answered. “Hello.”
“Hi, Jenna.”
She pressed her eyes closed at the cool sound of his voice. “Good morning, Luke.”
Despite his tone, relief filled her. He’d called. This was a good first step.
It was something.
He paused—possibly second-guessing this phone call. “I’d like to talk . . . if the offer still stands.”
“It does.” She kept her voice steady. “When?”
“An hour. I’ll meet you at Hollow House.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“See you then.”
The call ended, and she sat with the phone in her hand another moment. This was it—what she’d been praying for.
She stood and turned the shower on as hot as she could stand it. Then she lingered under the water and let the heat work through the knots in her shoulders. She’d been carrying tension in her neck and jaw for so long now that the tautness almost felt normal.
After getting out, she dried her hair as best she could and went to her bag.
She didn’t have much. A few changes of clothes, practical and dark, chosen for the same reasons she chose everything these days. She picked whatever was easy to move in, easy to replace, and that wouldn’t make her memorable.
She pulled out the nicest outfit she had—a soft gray top and a pair of dark jeans that fit better than the rest.
After changing, she went to the small bathroom mirror and looked at herself honestly for the first time in longer than she could remember.
Her dark hair was longer than she used to keep it, still damp at the ends, with a touch of wave to it. Her hazel-green eyes looked tired no matter how much she slept. A scatter of freckles were sprinkled across her nose.
At one time, she used to think she was pretty, back when she’d had the luxury of thinking about it at all.
Her mind traveled back to the woman who’d first married Luke She’d had a whole life back then. A whole self.
Back then, she’d believed the future was full of hope.
She’d been wrong.
Sometimes she wondered about the roads she hadn’t taken. The moments where things could have gone differently.
How had her life turned out like this?
She didn’t have an answer. She wasn’t sure she ever would.
With a frown, she checked the time. Fifteen minutes until he arrived.
She picked up her key, slid on her jacket, and went downstairs to wait.
With every step, she prayed this conversation would go well.
Luke had called his mother right after he called Jenna.
She answered on the second ring. He kept their conversation brief—he needed to go into town, could she come stay with the kids? Without asking a single question, she said she’d be there in twenty minutes.
That was his mother. She showed up, and she didn’t push. This morning Luke was more grateful for both those things than he could say.
As he stepped from his house, he paused.
A gray sedan drove by a little more slowly than usual.
Interesting. This wasn’t a road where many people got lost. His property was too out of the way.
The driver must have seen him because he sped up, zooming away before Luke could make out any of his features.
Was that just a coincidence? A driver who was honestly lost?
Or was this connected with the tension around Refuge Cove?
He had no idea. Most likely, he was reading too much into things.
At least, he hoped that was the case.
Because his life was already complicated enough without throwing any other problems into it.
Luke was on the road by seven-fifteen.
The drive from his place outside Charlottesville into Blue Ridge Hollow took just under an hour on a good morning, winding down out of the foothills and through the kind of Virginia countryside that looked like a painting in early spring.
The mountains were still purple-gray in the distance, the fields along the road had gone soft and green, and dogwoods were beginning to bloom in the tree lines.
He’d been rehearsing this conversation ever since he’d called Jenna. He’d tried out questions, discarded them, tried others.
Why did you leave? Where have you been? Do you have any idea what you put us through?
None of them felt right. Yet all of them felt necessary. This time, he wouldn’t take “it’s a long story” for an answer. He wanted the truth.
He’d imagined this day more times than he could count. In the early days after Jenna had disappeared, he imagined it as a reunion. He imagined Jenna walking back through the door with an explanation that made sense, something he could understand and eventually forgive.
She must have been taken. That’s what he’d told himself. That she was hurt somewhere and unable to reach them. He’d called friends. Colleagues. Hospitals.
He’d driven the route she took to the grocery store looking for her car. He’d sat across from a police detective who was kind but not optimistic as he’d filed a missing person’s report.
In the end, he’d walked away feeling disoriented, like he’d been dropped into a land where he didn’t belong.
He’d done everything a man did when the woman he loved vanished without a trace. But all of it had gotten him nowhere.
Then the days turned to weeks, and there was no activity on her accounts, no sightings, no trail of any kind.
And then the text came.
It had been from an unknown number six weeks after she disappeared. He’d been putting the kids to bed when his phone buzzed. He’d read the message while standing in the hallway outside Liam’s room.
Then he’d read it again.
Then he’d sat down on the floor with his back against the wall because his legs wouldn’t hold him.
I’m sorry. Take care of them.
That was all it said.
He’d immediately called the number back. It was already disconnected.
The message had let him know that Jenna was alive. That she’d chosen to go. And that she wasn’t coming back.
He’d been stunned. More than stunned. He’d been unable to make things compute.
Jenna had truly been a good mother. She’d let Cora “help” make pancakes every single Saturday, batter on the ceiling, twenty extra minutes added to a ten-minute job, never once taking the spatula back just to get it done faster.
She’d knelt on bathroom tile in the middle of the night, sponging a fever down with a washcloth and singing the same four lines of a lullaby until Liam’s fever finally broke.
She’d loved their children with everything she had. He’d watched her love them and knew what that looked like.
For a while, he’d wondered if she might have postpartum depression. Jonah had only been two, and it wasn’t unheard of for PPD to surface late.
He’d called Jenna’s doctor, who couldn’t tell him anything.
He’d looked up the symptoms at two in the morning on his phone while Jonah slept on his chest. He’d told himself this wasn’t her fault, that she’d been struggling and he’d missed the signs.
He’d been convinced that if he’d paid closer attention he might have been able to stop it all before it came to this.
He’d beaten himself up about it for the better part of a year, though he had no proof that the narrative he’d developed was true.
Then the guilt had curdled into something harder.
Jenna had left her children. Whatever the reason, whatever the explanation she’d been carrying, the fact remained that she’d walked out of their house and driven away from three kids who needed their mother.
The mountains rose blue and distant ahead of him as he came around the last long curve before town.
He tightened his hands on the wheel and prayed for strength to get through this conversation, to act like a man of integrity and not an injured animal lashing out.