Shaking his head, he moved his hand to her hip and nudged her away. “I’m not ... this isn’t ....” He pushed her away and stood up. “Not yet, Naomi. That’s all. That ship sailed on your birthday, remember? You’re not ready.”
She glared at him. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. Let’s find Hemingway.” He turned around and headed for the bookshelf with all the classics. He had told her it was Evelyn’s favorite shelf. Most of them were hers passed down to her from her mother. Some of them were in Italian.
Jesse stood in front of the shelf longer than needed. “Did you know Hemingway didn’t write it in Italy?” he asked as he bent down to look at the lower shelves. “He was there just prior. He was your age when he was wounded and fell in love with his nurse. I think he was in Milan.”
“He was eighteen?”
“I think so.” He pulled a book from the bottom shelf and stood. He looked more relaxed now. “You’ll probably be older before Eric and the others take you there.”
He stopped and looked away and started to say something else, but she interrupted him.
“To where? Italy?”
“Never mind.”
“Tell me.” She shifted across the cushions. “Jesse?”
He narrowed his eyes. “I said
never mind.
Drop it.”
She clamped her lips shut. She didn’t like the anger in his face, and moved her attention to the book in his hands. The entire story took place in Italy.
XV
August
NAOMI OPENED HER JOURNAL ALMOST every night and read through specific passages. She wanted to remind herself where she had been in her weird kidnapping journey. She wanted to see how her emotions were changing. So far it was a growing attachment to Jesse and the others. She saw the attachment; she suspected it was deliberate on their part to get her to want to stay, but there was nothing she could do about it. She could never go anywhere, never talk to anybody except them. She was completely, one-hundred percent stuck.
The dragons kept visiting her dreams. She wrote about them and described their thick, leathery wings and long, vase-like necks. She tried so hard to imagine a bouquet of flowers coming out of their mouths instead of fire, but her imagination wasn’t strong enough in her dreams. It was always fire, and it always burned the knight who came to rescue her.
After she read a few passages, she wrote a new one. She pushed the pen so hard into the paper it indented the next page. She wrote the words as small as she could so the journal would last because she didn’t know if they would give her another one—if she would even have the courage to ask. For some reason, writing in the journal felt like a big secret, especially since Jesse had slipped up and told her they were taking her to Italy and now she kept writing about it.
Italy.
It was so far away. It seemed like a fresh start, because as she looked back on her life, there wasn’t anything spectacular about it. Her nannies had cared about her, but they had never been particularly close. In fact, the more she wrote about her life the more she realized being kidnapped was the most exciting and real thing that had ever happened to her—and not necessarily in a bad way. That thought made her close the journal and cry into her pillow for the first time in weeks.
XVI
September
WHEN KAREN ARRIVED HOME FROM WORK, Mindy told her Brad was waiting on the deck. Confused, she made her way through the house as she shed her jewelry and suit coat and left them on various pieces of furniture. Mindy would collect them later.
Brad’s voice was dark and smooth. She heard him talking on the phone as she stepped outside and spotted him shuffling along the sandy paths from the beach. The rain clouds were heavy and black. They looked ready to split at the seams. The tall beach grass swayed in the breeze.
“Yeah, I gotta go. Later.” Brad closed his phone and smiled at her as she sat down in one of the patio chairs. He had never smiled at her before. That was odd. He reached the top of the steps, stammering, “Hello, Mrs. Jensen. I hope it’s okay I came by. Your housekeeper said you’d be home soon, so I—”
She stood to greet him. “I was at my office wrapping things up with a client. Things took longer than I expected.”
His eyes widened. “You’re back at work?”
“I never stopped.” She swiped a hand across her forehead. “It’s been seven months, Brad. You’ll be starting your classes soon, moving on with your life. Won’t you?” Why was she explaining herself to him?
He cleared his throat and stared down at the phone in his hand. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“How is it going for you?”
Still staring at his phone, he muttered, “Alright, I guess. I’ve decided on medicine, but not sure exactly what yet.”
“That sounds like a fine ambition.”
He looked up and tried to smile. “Nothing like Harvard, though, huh?”
“Harvard?”
“Yeah, Naomi said she wouldn’t go, but I always thought she might since she was accepted. I applied after she did. I didn’t get in, of course.”
Karen sat down. The warm breeze tinged with the smell of rain was suffocating. She looked up at Brad. “Naomi applied to Harvard?”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“She was accepted?” Her voice was shaky now. She grabbed the arms of the chair, remembering her own acceptance letter from Harvard. Her mother was in the hospital then, dying of cancer, and her father couldn’t have cared less about what school she attended as long as he didn’t have to pay for it. It was a good thing she had won scholarships.
“Even if she didn’t tell you, I thought you or Mr. Jensen would find out from going through her mail or something.”
She put a hand to her forehead. This was only the third time she had seen Brad since Naomi’s disappearance. The first time was when he had come by to tell her and Jason that Naomi was missing. The second time was during the investigation. She looked up at him, confused. “Why didn’t she want to go to Harvard?”
“I don’t know.” He pushed his hands into his pockets and looked away.
He didn’t have to say anything else. She could see he was implying that it was her own fault. She tried not to glare at him. “So you’re in town to visit your family?”
“Uh, yeah, and I wanted to see if you’d be willing to let me do something for Naomi.”
“Oh?”
He looked up at the clouds. He was dressed in khakis and a stiff dress shirt that looked brand new. He had probably dressed up just to come speak to her.
“My roommate’s a photographer,” he finally said, still staring up at the clouds. “He gave me the idea to get some of Naomi’s work and enter it into a contest.” He looked back down at her. “You know about her photography, right?”
She nodded. “We gave her a lot of money to buy her equipment, but all of those things disappeared when she did.”
He cleared his throat. “I was hoping you’d let me enter some of her work.”
“I guess that would be okay.” She held her breath as a stiff breeze blew across the deck. It was cold and smelled like salt and seaweed. It reminded her of Naomi’s constant treks down to the beach whenever a storm was approaching. She was usually dressed in a jacket with her camera bag slung across her shoulders. It surprised her that she had noticed those treks of Naomi’s so often. A lot of things she was remembering about Naomi surprised her. “Do the rules stipulate if the contestant has to be ...?” She wanted to say “alive” but the word wouldn’t slip off her tongue.
“No, my roommate said it’ll be alright if we have your permission.”
The rain broke free from the clouds, but neither of them made a move to get out of its way.
“I’m sorry about everything,” Brad said as the rain plastered his hair to his forehead. “This is what I can do to try to make a difference—even if it doesn’t make a difference, you know? At least for me it will.”
LATER THAT evening Karen sat in her home office with a glass of brandy. She stared at her computer and thought of Brad’s words. He was determined to do
something.
At least he had taken that step. She hadn’t done anything yet. So much time had passed, and yet it felt like only a moment.
She turned on her computer and pulled up Naomi’s Facebook page. So far she had avoided looking at it, but as time crept on with no hope of seeing her again, she couldn’t help herself. The police and her private detective had already searched through it top to bottom. They said they hadn’t found anything helpful.
She scrolled through the dozens of posts her classmates had left asking where she was, and then found the last status update Naomi had written.
Going to Dad’s banquet tonight with Brad. So much corporate talk. Maybe there will be fog later to shoot in the park.
Corporate talk? That was something Karen had never heard her say before.
Brad had written in response,
Love you, Baby. That dress I picked out will look smoking hot on you.
A boy named Damien had written,
Good luck with that fog! Make sure you post the pics later.
Karen scrolled down farther. It didn’t look like Naomi had a lot of friends she interacted with other than Brad and a few girls from a photography class. She scrolled past some of Naomi’s photos, surprised at how good they were. Why hadn’t Naomi shown them to her? Was she afraid she wouldn’t care?
A part of her died when she asked herself that question, and she took a sip of brandy and noticed the glass was almost empty. Good. She needed to cut her edginess with something. Ever since her two-month stay at Elizabeth’s, she wasn’t the same. Work wasn’t the same. Nothing felt right, and it wasn’t only because Naomi was missing.
The sound of a car rolling up the drive snapped her from her thoughts. Jason was home. Eight-thirty. He was later than usual. Mindy probably had dinner ready an hour ago. She stood and walked to the front door to greet him, but frowned when she saw that he wasn’t alone. Reporters had followed him, which was odd. They hadn’t come by for a long time.
Jason stopped in front of the garage and got out of the car. Of course he would talk to the reporters, because he knew they would follow him around the next day if he didn’t. She took a deep breath and opened the front door to go stand with him. Lately he seemed worn out, and a part of her ached to lift him up, even though she was a wreck herself. He gave her a shaky smile as she approached him. The reporters’ faces lit up like Christmas trees when they saw she was joining him.
There were only two of them, but that was enough to put her on edge. If it wasn’t for the brandy in her system she might have ordered them to leave.
Jason slipped an arm around her and pulled her close. He smelled like his office, like ballpoint ink and paper and the green-and-white striped mints he kept in a glass dish on his desk. He was tall and thin and always shaved so close that his face didn’t get scratchy until late at night. She loved that about him—loved that feel of his scratchy cheek on hers. Right now all she wanted to do was snuggle up with him in bed and fall asleep. If Naomi’s disappearance had done anything, it had made her realize how much Jason meant to her and how much he needed her too. He was almost clinging to her for dear life. His fingers rubbed over her lower spine in little circles, and it was enough movement that her undershirt came untucked from her pants. She shifted against him. He was nervous. It was unlike him to be nervous for something as small as two reporters.
“Are the police going to aggressively pursue the case again?” Reporter number one asked.
“I-I don’t know,” Jason said with a glance at Karen. He started to fidget.
“Are you two going to push to make this a federal case?”
“That’s undecided,” Jason said in a voice that seemed to be getting weaker by the second. He opened his mouth to say more, but the reporter on the left—the pushier of the two—inched forward.
“How is this affecting your career, Jason? Your stocks skyrocketed after the merger, but we’ve heard you might hand over your position to someone else. Is this just too much for you?”
Narrowing his eyes, Jason took a deep breath. “The company is doing phenomenal. Any rumor you’ve heard about me handing over my position simply isn’t true.”
The pushy reporter turned to Karen. She almost shrank away, but stood her ground as Jason squeezed her tighter. He had told her months ago to always answer their questions and never show weakness. If Naomi saw them on television or read about them in the papers, he wanted her to know they were not falling apart—that her parents were the rock she could rely on and they had nothing to hide. She had looked at him then like he was insane because they were anything but a stable platform in Naomi’s life. They had been nonexistent while she grew up, providing her with everything but their own time—the thing Karen finally realized mattered most.
The pushy reporter leaned forward.
“Some unidentified female remains have been found in Southern California. Have you thought about what you’ll do if they match Naomi’s DNA?”
Karen balled her hands into fists and gave Jason a look that clearly asked,
How did we not know about this?
But his expression told her that he
did
know about it and had kept it from her to protect her. That was why he was holding her so tightly. He hadn’t expected her to come out here.