The baby.
“Emily!” Blake fell to his knees beside her. “Are you okay?”
“Go away!” Emily pleaded, though she needed his help to stand up. Her purse had been crushed in the fall. The satin had ripped open. “Blake, please just go. You’re making things worse! Why do you always make things worse?”
Pain flashed in his eyes, but she couldn’t worry about him now. Her mind was buzzing with all of the ways that falling so hard could’ve hurt her child.
He said, “I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t mean it!” she yelled. He was the one who was still spreading rumors. He was the one pushing Ricky to be so cruel. “You never mean anything, do you? It’s never your fault, you never screw up, you’re never responsible. Well guess what? This is your fault. You got what you wanted. It’s all your damn fault.”
“Emily—”
She stumbled, catching herself against the corner of the candy shop. She heard Blake say something, but her ears were filled with a high-pitched screaming sound.
Was it her baby? Was it crying for help?
“Emmie?”
She shoved him away and stumbled down the alley. Hot liquid dribbled down the insides of her thighs. She pressed her palm against the rough brick as she tried to keep herself from falling to her knees. A sob choked her throat. She opened her mouth to gulp in a breath. Salt air burned her lungs. She was blinded by the sun bouncing off the boardwalk. She stepped back into the darkness, leaning against the wall at the base of the alleyway.
Emily looked back at the street. Blake had slunk off. No one could see her.
She bunched up her dress, using her injured arm to hold up the folds of satin. With her good hand, she reached between her legs. She had expected to find blood on her fingers, but there was nothing. She leaned down and smelled her hand.
“Oh,” she whispered.
She’d wet herself.
Emily laughed again, but this time through tears. Relief made her weak in the knees. The brick pulled at her dress as she sank to the ground. Her tailbone ached, but she didn’t care. She was shockingly overjoyed that she had peed herself. The dark places her brain had gone to when she’d assumed that blood was gushing between her legs were more enlightening than any ultrasound she could tape to her bathroom mirror.
In that moment, Emily had desperately wanted her baby to be all right. Not out of duty. A child wasn’t only a responsibility. It was an opportunity to love someone the way that she had never been loved.
And for the first time in this whole shameful, humiliating, helpless process, Emily Vaughn knew without a doubt that she loved this baby.
“It looks like a girl,” the doctor had told her during her most recent exam.
At the time, Emily had catalogued the news as another step in the process, but now, the realization broke open the dam that had for so long held back her emotions.
Her girl.
Her tiny, precious little girl.
Emily’s hand went to her mouth. She was so weak with relief that she would’ve fallen over if she hadn’t already been sitting on the cold ground. Her head bent toward her knees. Big, fat tears rolled down her cheeks. Her mouth gaped wordlessly, her chest so filled with love that she couldn’t form sound. She pressed her palm to her belly and imagined a small hand pressing back. Her heart lurched as she thought about one day being able to kiss the tips of those precious fingers. Gram had said that each baby had a special smell that only their mother knew. Emily wanted to know that smell. She wanted to wake up in the night and listen to the quick in and out of the beautiful girl that she had grown inside of her body.
She wanted to make plans.
In two weeks, Emily would be eighteen years old. In another two months, she would be a mother. She would get a job. She would move out of her parents’ house. Gram would understand, and what she didn’t understand she would forget. Dean Wexler was right about one thing: Emily had to grow up. She had more than herself to think of now. She had to get away from Longbill Beach. She had to start planning her future instead of letting other people plan it for her. More importantly, she would give her baby girl everything that Emily had never had.
Kindness. Understanding. Security.
Emily closed her eyes. She conjured the image of her baby girl joyfully floating around inside of her body. She took a deep breath and started to recite the mantra, this time from a place of love rather than duty.
“I will protect—”
The sound of a loud snap made her eyes open.
Emily saw black leather shoes, black socks, the hem of a pair of black pants. She looked up. The sun flickered as a bat swung through the air.
Her heart clenched into a fist. She was suddenly, inescapably, filled with fear.
Not for herself—for her baby.
Emily curled inward, arms wrapped around her belly, legs pulled up tight, as she fell to the side. She was desperate for another moment, another breath, so that her last words to her little girl would not be a lie.
Someone had always planned to hurt them.
They had never been safe.
PRESENT DAY
1
Andrea Oliver willed her stomach to stop churning as she ran along the dirt trail. The sun pushed down on her shoulders. Wet earth sucked at her shoes. Sweat had turned her shirt into Saran Wrap. Her hamstrings were steel banjo strings that jangled with every pounding strike of her heel. She heard grunts behind her as the stragglers pushed themselves to keep up. Ahead were the strivers, the Type As who would ford a stream full of piranhas if there was at least a one percent chance that they could come in first.
She contented herself with the middle of the pack, neither a dawdler nor a cliff diver, which was an achievement in and of itself. Two years ago, Andrea would’ve been firmly at the rear, or more likely still sleeping in her bed while her alarm blared for the fifth or sixth time. Her clothes would’ve been strewn around the tiny apartment above her mother’s garage. Every piece of unopened mail on her kitchen table would’ve been stamped PAST DUE. When she finally crawled out of bed, she would’ve seen three texts from her father asking her to check in, another six from her mother asking her if she had been abducted by a serial killer, and a missed call from work telling her this was her last warning before she was fired.
“Shit,” Paisley mumbled.
Andrea looked over her shoulder as Paisley Spenser peeled off from the pack. One of the stragglers had tripped. Thom Humphrey lay flat on his back looking up at the trees. A collective groan filled the forest. The rule was, if one of them didn’t finish, they all had to go again.
“Get up! Get up!” Paisley yelled, circling back to either encourage him or kick him until he stood. “You can do it! Come on, Thom!”
“Let’s go, Thom!” the rest of them shouted.
Andrea grunted the sounds, but she didn’t trust her mouth to open. Her stomach was pitching like deck chairs on the Titanic. For months, she’d been doing sprints, push-ups, jumping jacks, rope climbs, burpees, and run approximately eleven million miles a day, but she was still a lightweight. Her throat filled with bile. Her back teeth ratcheted down. She clenched her fists as she rounded the last curve in the trail. Home stretch. Another five minutes and she would never have to run this grueling hell-course ever again.
Paisley flew by, going balls to the walls toward the finish line. Thom was back in formation. The line tightened. Everyone was digging deep.