The butler answered as always, and when I asked him if Emma was there, he said no. She hadn't come home all day.
That sentence made my heart constrict. Normally, I would chalk it up to her out shopping or something, but now I was worried. She told me she'd be ready in two hours. What if she was just pretending she was all right and what I had said hurt her more than she let me know? She knew I was coming over…What if she was trying to avoid me?
I took out my phone and dialed her number. She texted me back just a couple hours ago saying she'd be here. The phone rang and rang with no answer. I texted her instead.
Baby, where are you?
When I got no answer, I texted again.
I'm so sorry for what I said. Please Em.
I stood in the doorway with Hanson for ten minutes waiting for Emma to answer me. I decided I'd wait for her in her room. Maybe I could help pack some things up while she was gone. Maybe my packing up would be a nudge for her to know that I wanted nothing more than for her to be with me, in my home, with all the family I had left. Though the storm had taken the idea to move right out of our hands. There would be no moving anything until this storm was over.
I told Hanson so and he nodded his approval, though I didn't need it. Isabella saw me heading for the stairs and cocked her head a little. "Mason. Is Emma back?"
"No…she said she was coming here to get a head start on packing some of her things, but that was a couple of hours ago and she's still not here."
"Why do you look so uneasy?" Her manicured hands went to her hips.
"We had a little…fight. But I thought things were OK."
She waved me off. "She'll be fine. Emma…the way she is, she doesn't hold on to grudges. I'm sure there's a explanation for why she's not here yet." She nodded up the stairs. "You can wait in her room if you like."
"If that's OK," I said, though I had been planning to do that anyway. Always the gentleman.
"Of course." She smiled and it was more genuine, the façade fading just enough to see it. "You'll be married in a week anyway."
I nodded and hoped that was still the case. I gritted my teeth at myself, wishing I hadn't said what I'd said. She squinted at me. "What happened with the fight? If I may ask."
"Just me saying something stupid." She continued to look at me, expecting me to go on. "I was telling my mom that I felt…guilty because Emma made me so happy. That I shouldn't be so happy about something that only came to be because of what happened with my mom's accident."
She raised her brow, not understanding why my mom had anything to do with it. I sat down on the bottom stair. She sat beside me. I looked at her face, to make sure the woman that I came to know when Emma was asleep was with me, not the one who showed up afterwards and caused Emma so much heartache fighting her own grief. When I saw it was indeed the woman I'd brought coffee to almost every day for six months, my guts spilled wide open.
I told her everything. She listened and put her hand on my knee in sympathy. I explained to her that I was over it, for the most part. I mean, you're never really over something like that, but when my mom asked me about the accident, my guts spilled to her, too.
She didn't seem surprised by what I'd said except that Emma would have gotten so angry that she wouldn't come home because of it. The clock said it was almost seven. It had gotten dark an hour ago.
And then the lights went out.
Her breath caught as I heard the fans of the appliances whir to a stop, the house quieter than I'd ever heard it. "Oh, my. The snowstorm must have knocked the power out."
I pulled my phone from my pocket and pointed it around. Hanson came through with a flashlight, asking if we were OK. I rolled my eyes in the dark where no one could see me, as if the power going out could hurt us somehow. He gave a flashlight to Isabella and she went, spouting something about getting candles out. I looked at my phone with very little battery left and dialed Emma's number slowly to calm myself. I was trying not to freak about it. I normally wouldn't, Emma could do anything she wanted, but if the storm had gotten so bad the power went out, then I was now worried about her safety.
Mad at me or not, she needed to come home.
The call wouldn't send. The line told me that my call couldn't be completed and my heart sank into my stomach with dread. I went to the window and watched the wind whip the white flakes by in the minimal light the moon provided. I took my phone out once more and tried her number. Still no cell service or busy circuits or whatever was going on. I gripped the keys in my pocket and started to move toward the door when Rhett called my name from the den.
"Mason." His voice seemed surprised that I was there. "Oh, good. I was hoping you and Emma hadn't gotten caught in the storm somewhere."
"It's just me." I gulped and moved to the door once more. "Emma never came home after she left my place. I can't reach her by phone, and she should be here. I'm going after her." I opened the door. The wind and snow pulled the door from my grasp and slammed it against the foyer wall.
He called my name louder and ran to the door, just as I stepped onto the porch. "Mason, no. You can't go out in this."
"If Emma is out there, I need to find her. What if she's stuck somewhere?"
He looked at the snow with wide eyes. It wasn't the quiet kind that fell and seemed to bring a peaceful silence with it, it wasn't the kind that fell fast like rain and whipped in the wind. No, this was a storm in the truest sense. And with the look of horror on Rhett's face…Emma's father's face…I knew he realized I was right. "I'll come with you."
"I think you should stay. I'm going to check on Mom and the nurse, and then drive around and see if Emma broke down somewhere or got stuck. If she comes home and the phones still don't work, put a flare out or something so I know when I drive by that I don't need to keep looking."
He nodded slowly. "I have some flares in my tackle box in the garage."
I nodded and left without another word. I didn't want to sit there all day and debate about it. I climbed into the truck and backed out into the dark road. The headlights seemed to come out of nowhere. I slammed on the brake, sliding a little in the salted, snowed driveway. The driver went by at a snail's speed, so I decided to go the other way around the neighborhood, hoping to beat them to the main road. I understood the cautiousness. It was pitch black, the headlights just illuminated the snowfall piling on my windshield making it glow and blind me, the worst thing I'd ever driven in.
But I wasn't stopping.
I knew right then where I was going first after I checked on Mom. To pull into the police station after only a few hours of her being "missing" may be going overboard in normal circumstances, but not today. Not right now.
All I could think, breathe, and feel was protectiveness for my Emma. Something inside me was pushing me to her.
It was dark and I could barely see in front of me as it was, let alone look for a car on the side of the road, or parked somewhere. She didn't really have any girlfriends in this town. She was still working on things, friends being one of them. She had cut the cord with the school friends she had because they would not get past her past, which she had to do, so she didn't need them around her. Still, I hadn't heard her say much about any one person, so I couldn't imagine she'd be at someone's house. Unless she hadn't told me about them.
My brow lowered. Surely she would tell me if she had a friend that she hung out with sometimes, right? She would at least talk about them.
I searched out the window on the shoulder of the road and the ditches, and then sidewalks and parking lots as I got into town. I did drive by the shop first, just to make sure she hadn't gone there either.
No cars were parked out front. My heart sank and I hadn't realized how much hope I had put into that thought. So, I started to pull out toward the police station. I didn't see anything, and then all of a sudden, a car was right there. They honked and crawled by slowly. It was dangerous to be driving right now and I gripped the steering wheel tighter at the thought of Emma getting hu
rt somewhere and having no one to help her.
The short ride to the police station took longer than I wanted. It was dark, but I hoped someone was still there.
A couple of emergency lights were on in the back of the outdated and musky building, and I told the only man there behind the desk what was going on. What he had to say didn't make me a happy man. He said he was sorry, but he was sure lots of folks hadn't made it home in the storm and had family worried about them.
"Sir, I understand that, but I'm telling you that it's not like her. She said she was going straight home. It's only a few minutes from my house and she wasn't there. Never made it home."
"It's dark now. There's nothing we can do. Plus, it hasn't been twenty-four hours. We don't consider them missing until—"
My blood boiled. "She's not missing, she's in trouble!" I bellowed. We were wasting precious time.
I leveled him with a look and let it all hang out. I wanted him to see my anguish, my fear, my tortured guts. "Please, sir."
He sighed. "It's Christmas Eve. There's not anybody else even working tonight and they definitely won't be working tomorrow."
"You can go home to your wife tonight, knowing that you did nothing to help a girl that was in trouble, no matter what day of the year it was?"
He sighed again, in resignation this time. "Look, I'll take a Jeep with the spotlight out and look for her."
"Thank you," I said, not hiding my gratitude.
"Go on home and I'll stop by—"
"No," I said hard. "I'll look, too. I'm not going home just to let you look by yourself. I think that would be pointless."
"It's not safe out there," he told me, slipping on his coat and hat. "You'll be safer at home—"
"No. I know it's not safe. It's not safe for Emma if she's caught out there somewhere in the storm." He gave me a look. "I'm not going home."
He sighed as he opened the door. "My cell's not working. I'm sure yours isn't either. Meet me back here in two hours, whether you've found the girl or not. That's the only way I'll do it. If you don't find her, you're going home to start again in the morning with some light. I mean it."
I nodded, though I wasn't sure I could do that.
The first place I went was the hospital. I…hated to do it. I didn't even want to think about it, let alone actually go there and see if she'd shown up, but I asked the nurse at the desk. They were writing down names of people who had come in since the computers weren't on the emergency power system. She assured me no one by that name had been brought in. So I started searching again. After an hour of circling highways in the heavy snow, I started to let my mind wander to other possibilities. Maybe she had gone out of town. I had no idea why she would, but what if she had? There were several ways out of town and it would take hours to search the roads if that was the new plan.
I beat my fist on the steering wheel and cursed loudly. I yelled some more because I just needed to. I pulled over into an abandoned lot and laid my head on the steering wheel.
I had an awful feeling that I was right and she wasn't on the main roads.
And then my cell phone rang. I gasped and picked it up. "Emma!"
"Mason," a familiar voice crawled through the line, sounding upset.
"What do you want, Adeline?"
"I called Emma." I could hear her fast breaths. "Something happened."
"Why the hell did you call Emma?"
"To…mess with her. Piss her off. Tell her about us."
Ice raced through my veins. "You what?" I said, dangerously low."Us? There is no us!"
"I got fired today."
"I don't care."
"I got fired because they found pictures of us in my office."
"Pictures…of us?"
Adeline and I had one date. One. It was before Mom's accident, back when I was that stupid teenager who haunted me in more ways than one. We had gone to one of my friend's parties. Adeline went to school in the town over. I couldn't remember any pictures taken of us there, but who knew. That was the only way she could have pictures of "us". I was drunk that night and all I really remembered was that Adeline kept trying to drag me up to the rooms and I kept refusing. I told her that I wasn't looking for a girlfriend and she said she didn't care; she just wanted to have a good time that night. A really good time. And then my stupid teenage hormones caved, like an idiot. We had sex in the laundry room of my friend's house, of all places, and I regretted it about as quickly as it had begun.
She acted like it was no big deal. I never called her again because in my mind, we didn't have a great time and we barely said two words to each other the whole night. All she wanted to do was grind against me and beg me to dance with her. When I tried to ask her about what she was going to do that summer, she said she didn't want to ruin the moment with talking, just dance. I knew then my mistake had been grave and figured she wasn't that interested in me either. I thought would never hear from her again.
But I did.
When the texts came too frequently for me to ignore anymore, I told her as nicely as I could that I wasn't interested and for her to move on to someone else. That we just hadn't meshed.
She tried calling a few times a day after that, so I started leaving my phone at home… I sucked in a quick breath as I remembered. I had completely forgotten about that. I left my phone at home the night of Mom's accident because of Adeline…
"Mason? Can you hear me?"
"I hear you," I growled. "And I still haven't heard a good reason for why you called Emma." I closed my eyes tightly, my guts twisting. "If she got angry because of what you said, didn't come home because of it and got hurt in the storm, I'll—"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you." Her voice was small."I didn't say anything to her about us. I just called and as soon as she picked up and said hello, there was a lot of screeching and noise. I think she may have wrecked her car or something."
My breath caught painfully. "Where was she?"
"I don't know."
"Why are you calling me?"
"I wanted to tell you. I just wanted you, Mason. I wasn't trying to hurt her and wasn't going to. I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I just wanted to make your life hell."
I hung up. I was not going to argue about what happened back then. If Adeline could call me, then I could call Emma.
I dialed, but she didn't pick up. I jerked the truck into drive and barely looked before jamming the gas and heading back down the road. I had no idea where Emma would have gone if she was angry with me about Adeline, but Adeline told me Emma had gotten in an accident. I couldn't think of anything Adeline would have gained from confessing that.
I had to find Emma now.
I shook my head violently. Could I realistically blame Adeline for Mom's accident and now Emma's, if that was the case? No, but she sure as hell had a hand in it.
I rounded the corner to Emma's neighborhood and passed her house. There were no flares lit and I felt my eyes sting. Oh, God, please. Don’t let this happen…
All the breath left me at once when I looked at the clock and saw how late it was. It was almost time to meet the deputy, but there was no way I was going back there without finding Emma. I just…couldn't.
And then I remembered that he had a family waiting for him, too. They were probably worried about him. I'd make one more sweep and then meet him, but I wasn't going home. He could forget that.
I came to the end of the subdivision and started to turn right toward town, but stopped. I looked left, toward the road near the bridge. Emma had almost lost her life there once and Andy had taken his own life there. I didn't think Emma would go there, even if she was angry with me, but I felt my hands turning the wheel left and my foot pressing the gas anyway.
When I came to it, it was as I expected. No cars were there, no tracks, but that didn't matter since the snow covered it right back up. I drove over it and started looking for a place to turn around. I stopped and backed into a driveway. As I looked to the right to check for someone coming, I
saw headlights. I waited, rubbing my face in anguish. I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and closed my eyes so tight they hurt.
I couldn't bear the thought of not finding her tonight. My guts twisted painfully. At first, I thought I'd throw up from it. My eyes stung behind my eyelids and I realized my body was preparing me for the worst. I ripped off my seatbelt and got out, almost slipping with my leap from the cab. I kicked at the back tire and beat my gloved fist on the side of the truck. It didn't matter, the fabric ripped and it stung, but I kept hitting it until it hurt so bad that I knew the skin was ripped to the bone.
I stood there in the snow that had seemed to die down a little and listened to the quiet. The eerie quiet that snow provides settled around me, pushed in me and through me. I knelt down and let my aching fist rest on the snow to ice it. The quiet was practically yelling it was so silent. I slowed my angry breathing and tried to think, tried to find the answer that I knew I would regret later for not getting right.
I looked around at the snow-covered trees and land. I had been wrong. My body hadn't been preparing me for letdown. It felt not like I should give up, but that I should listen. I should pay attention, let my fear ebb away, and focus. Just like I used to tell Emma.
Never give up. Never let your fear and frustration cloud your focus.
I sighed, pulling my now numb hand from the snow. I stood and looked out at the road. The headlights were still sitting there and hadn't come past me. I hadn't been paying attention. I watched carefully. They weren't moving, but were muted behind all the haze the snow created.
And the snow and wind was picking back up again. It was stupid, I knew, but I let the hope creep back in that this was a sign of some sort, that the calm that had taken me over was letting me find the girl I was in love with.
I squinted at it before climbing back into the truck and making my way to it a little faster than I should have. The hope glowed in my chest. The car was facing my way so whoever was in there was coming towards town. The front end was wrapped around a tree, but the lights still shown on both sides. The car was completely covered in snow.