“I can stay here the rest of the week, right?” Henry asks.
“Of course. Daddy will bring your bag over tomorrow. And why don’t we have you wear one of his T-shirts to bed? Your PJ top is a little sweaty.”
I grab one from Gabe’s drawer, and as I’m slipping it onto Henry’s small frame, I realize that it was probably a mistake to ever let him stay in the main house. He seemed so excited initially—especially about the chance to sleep with the dogs—and of course, I’d been all for the idea of Gabe and me having the cottage as our private love nest, but Henry’s a bit young to be on his own that way.
This switch is for the best, then, though there probably won’t be dreamy afternoon sex from this point forward.
“You feeling any better?” I ask, pulling the cotton blanket over him. I take a seat on the edge of the bed.
“Yeah, I guess. Is Daddy going to be okay?”
“For sure, and he won’t be long . . . . Is there anything more you can remember about what you heard?”
“No, just what I told you . . . . Oh, wait. Gee said if the person didn’t do the right thing, she would.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I tell Henry, even though the hair on the back of my neck is standing up now. “Maybe she only sounded mad because she was tired.” I kiss his forehead and rise. “Night, night. I’ll leave your door open and ours, too.”
From the glow of the night-light, I can see the outline of his hand giving me a thumbs-up.
Descending again to the sitting room, I pace, fretting. Was it Hannah whom Claire had been speaking to? Or could it have been Ash she was addressing? No, that seems unlikely. That’s not the way their relationship operates—at least as far as I’ve witnessed.
Another thought flickers in my head, one I probably should have considered initially: Could Henry have simply dreamed the exchange?
After ten minutes have passed and Gabe hasn’t materialized, my stomach feels like a big hard ball of rubber bands. Five minutes more go by, and I wish I’d told him to take his phone.
Finally, as I’m nearly out of my mind, I spot the beam of a flashlight bouncing between the branches of the shrub in front of the sitting room window. Gabe pushes the door open before I have the time to cross the room, and his expression reads perplexed rather than alarmed.
“So?” I ask quietly.
“The house is dark, and no one’s up—or seems to be. I looked all around and climbed to the top of the stairs, and I could hear my dad snoring. And the dogs are now sitting outside my parents’ room.”
“No sign of anything unusual?”
“None. The door at this side of the house was partly open—that’s obviously how Henry got out—but I closed and locked it as I left.”
I nod. “What are you going to do next?”
“I’ll have to talk to my mom in the morning, explain why Henry’s not there anymore. But I feel a little weird bringing it up—it sounds like it was a sensitive conversation.”
“Marcus and Keira are staying in the main house. Maybe they overheard it, too, and can fill you in so you don’t have to ask your mom.”
“But they’re in the big guest room, all the way at the other end of the house, so I doubt they heard anything. I’ll just have to suck it up and be frank with my mother, I guess. Did Henry go to bed okay?”
“Yeah, he seemed pretty relieved to be here. Do you think it’s possible he dreamed the whole thing?”
Gabe scrunches his mouth in thought. “Or . . .” he says, lowering his voice, “what if it’s all the product of a nine-year-old’s overactive imagination—and he made it up as a way to get out of staying in the house without having to ask directly?”
“Possible. And he might not have fabricated everything. Maybe he heard something, and it got twisted in his mind.”
Gabe shrugs. “Right. Hopefully we’ll know more in the morning.”
We trudge up to our room and crawl back under the sheet. The room feels slightly more humid than earlier, but I don’t have the psychic energy to activate the air conditioning. From sheer fatigue, I drift off into a restless sleep.
I wake the next day to the sound of laughter coming from below. Gabe and Henry. I roll over on my side. It’s 7:04. Sleepily, I pull on shorts and a T-shirt.
Downstairs I find the two of them drinking orange juice at the kitchen table. Henry’s playing a game on Gabe’s phone and grinning so widely that I almost wonder if last night was something I must have dreamed.
“Hi, guys,” I say, my voice froggy still from sleep. “Everything good?”
“Yup, all good,” Gabe announces.
“Dad said I could play Subway Surfers for fifteen minutes,” Henry tells me without looking up. “Then I have to stop.”
Sitting in front of Henry, I notice, is a plate scattered with toast crumbs, and there are strawberries and plums in a bowl, neither of which were in our kitchen here yesterday. I shoot Gabe a questioning look.
“Hey, Hen,” he says, “why don’t you take the phone upstairs while you get dressed? I left your duffel bag on the luggage rack in your room. And then when you’re ready, we’ll take the dogs for a long walk.”
“Gee says the dogs can’t go in the woods this week because of hunters,” Henry says.
“We’ll walk them on the road with their leashes, then,” Gabe assures him.
As soon as Henry’s scampered upstairs, Gabe eases the kitchen door shut with his foot.
“So you’ve been over to the house already?” I say.
“Yeah, I realized I’d better be there when my mom woke up so she wouldn’t go into Henry’s room and find him missing.”
“Did you learn anything?”
Using his foot again, Gabe shoves a chair away from the table for me to sit on.
“Turns out Henry was right,” he says. “He did hear my mom reading the riot act to someone outside his window.”
“Who was it?”
“You know the girl who’s been working with Bonnie? The one with the pink hair? My mother caught her helping herself to a couple of bottles of wine on the way out last night and confronted her out on the patio.”
It takes a second for the answer to register since it’s not what I was expecting.
“You mean after we took Henry up to bed?”
“Yeah, though there were still people around in the house. My mom didn’t want to spoil the mood, so she kept it to herself. Henry obviously did fall asleep after hearing the conversation and only came over here after he woke up in the middle of the night.”
I feel a weird, diluted kind of relief. On one hand I’m glad there’s no major family conflict, but part of me was hoping that Claire had put Hannah on notice.
“Does your mom know Henry’s staying here now?”
Gabe takes a couple of moments to chug his coffee. “Yeah, and she gets it—that he’s not quite ready to bunk down at the main house on his own. Though she was upset to hear he was out in the dark like that.”
I pour a mugful of coffee for myself and feel a frown form on my face, as if the muscles around my mouth have a mind of their own.
“What is it?” Gabe asks, his eyes curious.