Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
Wren hadn’t gotten much sleep.
As she lay on the couch, she kept replaying the previous day.
She was definitely on edge, and it wasn’t going to get better any time soon.
For a moment, as she lay there, Wren let herself remember a different version of Sunday mornings.
Her family used to go to church every Sunday.
All six of them would cram into the same pew their grandparents had claimed decades before.
Her mother would make a big deal about what the sisters wore—she liked for them to coordinate.
Her father would talk to everyone and shake their hands as if he were running for office.
Her brother would chatter on and on about some new insect he was obsessed with.
On some Sundays, Wren, Nora, and Marlowe sang special music, three careful harmonies stacked one on top of another. While they did that, Christian sat in the front pew and watched his sisters sing as if they’d hung the moon.
That version of her family didn’t exist anymore. It hadn’t, really, for ten years.
Wren had stopped mourning the loss a few years ago when she realized she could only look to the future, not to the past.
But she wasn’t sure if her future included church or not. She and God hadn’t exactly been on speaking terms for a long time, and sometimes she regretted that. Sometimes she missed lifting prayers to Him. Sometimes she still did lift prayers, but they were more of instinct than sincerity.
Finally, Wren forced herself to get up.
She checked the exterior doors out of habit. They were both locked, with deadbolts thrown in place. Relief filled her, though it didn’t fully unclench the tautness in her chest.
She was reaching for the coffee pot when her eyes caught the hook beside the door frame. It was . . . empty.
She stood there a second, her coffee forgotten.
She always kept her spare key there.
But it was gone.
The key wasn’t on the counter. It hadn’t fallen off onto the floor beneath the hook. She checked the junk drawer. The bowl by the door where loose change and receipts collected.
It wasn’t there.
She forced herself to breathe, her mind running through the possibilities.
Maybe she’d moved the key herself at some point and forgotten. Maybe Mason had taken it down to play with and had lost it somewhere in his room.
She didn’t believe either one. Not really. But she made herself consider the possibilities anyway.
Because the alternative was standing in her kitchen with proof that someone had been in her house and now had a key that would let them back in anytime they wanted.
A shiver raced through her.
Nash lay in bed and watched the gray morning light creep across the ceiling.
He’d made a promise to himself back in the hospital, in the blur of weeks after his surgery: When I finally have some breathing room, I’ll go back to church.
He’d meant the words as a bargain at the time. He’d thought maybe when he moved to Fog Lake, this place would make his promise feel like less of a chore.
Most Sundays since, the promise still felt like a chore.
He got up anyway. He showered, dressed, and stood in front of the mirror.
He thought about his father while he knotted his tie. Thinking of him on Sunday mornings was an old habit. His father had never missed one Sunday at church in sixty-some years of living, sick or well, grieving or joyous.
Faith isn’t a feeling, son. Feelings come and go with the weather. Faith is what you do when the feeling’s nowhere in sight.
His father had said some version of that more times than Nash could count, usually right when Nash needed to hear it most.
It had never been harder than it was now.
Nash still prayed some nights, though it felt less like conversation these days and more like leaving messages he wasn’t sure were being received.
He begged God for the ache to lift—not the physical one, though that hadn’t fully gone either.
The ache he was referring to was the low, constant hum of guilt.
God hadn’t answered yet. But some mornings, Nash caught himself thinking that the fact he was still asking God to help counted for something. Maybe faith wasn’t the sturdy, unshakable thing his father made it sound like—at least not for everyone all the time.
Maybe some people just kept showing up, kept going through the motions of belief on the days it felt like nothing, and called that faith too. Maybe that was the only version they had left to offer.
After getting ready, he drove into town with the windows down, Tank remaining at the house.
Twenty minutes later, he slid into a pew near the back of Fog Lake Community Church exactly the way he had every Sunday since coming into town. He was close enough to the door to leave without a scene and far enough back that no one would feel obligated to make conversation with the new guy.
Before the service started, the screen at the front lit up with the usual run of announcements—a potluck sign-up sheet, a youth group car wash, a reminder about Wednesday night Bible study.
Then a new slide appeared, one Nash hadn’t seen before: HOMECOMING REUNION—SAVE THE DATE, over a faded photo of a crowd gathered on a lawn somewhere, string lights glowing overhead.
The next slide was another old photo, and Nash’s coffee-deprived attention nearly slid right past it before it caught.
Three girls stood on a portable wooden stage with picnic tables behind them, their mouths open in harmony.
Nash sat up straighter.
He didn’t need anyone to tell him who they were. He’d seen Wren enough to recognize the shape of her face even ten years younger.
“That’s the Loveless girls,” someone said at his elbow.
Nash turned to find an older woman two feet away, hymnal already open in her lap. She’d introduced herself to him his second Sunday here—Loretta something. She made a point of welcoming new faces each week.
“They had the sweetest voices this town’s ever heard, before everything happened to that family,” the woman continued.
Before everything happened to that family . . .
Nash kept his eyes on the photo until the slide changed. Some kind of slow, unplaceable pressure built behind his sternum. It wasn’t quite grief, not quite recognition, but something adjacent to both.
He thought of Wren and everything she’d told him.
The timing of Christian’s return mattered. He was certain of it.
If he had to guess, half of Fog Lake still remembered the date. A missing boy in a small community wasn’t something that was forgotten.
Which meant whoever had planned Christian’s return for that exact day hadn’t needed inside information to get the timing right.
They’d only needed to be paying attention.
Nash sat through the rest of the service, half listening and the other half of his mind turning that thought over from every angle it would allow.
By the time the closing hymn started, he’d already decided on his next plan of action.