Wide Spaces (A Wide Awake Novella, Book 2) (5 page)

I raised my hand to stop her, but she was already going. I sighed and rubbed my forehead. God, help me, I was stupid sometimes. I'd give her a little bit and then I was going after her. And she better be ready to swoon, because I wasn't letting her out of my arms until she understood that she was home in them.

In the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders.

Emma

As soon as I pulled into the driveway, I got a call. I thought it was Mason and I wasn't really ready to talk about it again, but I looked anyway. It wasn't him.

"Hey, Mrs. Betty."

"Hey there." She sounded tired.

"You OK?"

"Oh, I'm fine. I've been working all day. I'm just getting off, but I thought there was something you should know."

"OK…"

"Adeline got fired. Remember your therapist?"

"How could I forget? What happened
?" And why does it involve me?

"It
's all very hush, hush," she said in a loud whisper. "But it turns out that she's been making all these weird phone calls from the office phone. Then the janitor found a huge stack of pictures and papers, letters, and…stuff in her office. They confronted her about it, and the next thing I know,
bam
. She packed up her office and left."

"OK. Well…that sucks, but what does that have to do with me?"

"Emma, the pictures…were of Mason. And her. And you. The letters were notes she wrote, letters to him that she never gave him, a journal type thing, things he said to her while they worked here, things he did to her-"

"What?" I breathed in agony. He told
me there wasn't anything going on with—

"No, not like that. It said things like
Mason brushed me off today again. One day he'll go out with me
. Or
Mason is so naïve for falling for that little cheerleader
. Or…
Mason and Emma should run their car off Bigg's Cliff
."

I scoffed. "OK," I said. I still wasn't sure what to make of it. "She's jealous. I'll keep an eye open."

"Good. I'm not saying you should get a restraining order or anything. I mean, she never did anything or contacted you, right?"

"No, never."

"OK. Well, be careful. I'm sure there's a good reason. With Mason, there always is. See you in a week." I could hear her grin as she hummed, "Dun, dun, duh, dunnnn."

I laughed
sadly. "Thanks, Mrs. B."

We hung up and I started
to get out, glancing in my rearview mirror on the way, but stopped. At the end of my driveway sat a red car. I got out and turned to look at it. Mrs. Betty had me paranoid now, of course, but I realized I wasn't paranoid at all when Adeline pressed the gas and drove by. She stared me down the entire time until she was out of view.

My heart beat faster. Oh, no. Was she about to be trouble for us?
And how did she have pictures of her and Mason? Had Mason not told me something?

I reached inside the car to call Mason and tell him, but stopped.
My calendar reminded me of my appointment in the next town over. I had completely forgotten with all the excitement of Mason's mom that I had to pick up his gift today.

My parents had set up colle
ge funds for me forever ago, so school was taken care of. However, they must have expected me to go to like Yale or something, because the community college's tuition for the year barely put a dent in that account. I told them I wanted them to take back the money I wasn't using, but they refused. They said working while going to school was stressful and they set the money aside for me for college. That included living money. When Mason proposed, I thought they might change their minds and take the money back, but no. Dad had written the check out to the college and given me bank cards for it before I could even ask.

And the first time I tried to pay them a payment for the Mini Cooper, they said it was paid off already. So, I had money for Christmas and they swore a million times it was perfectly fine. They were my parents after all.
I was their daughter.

I stuck the phone back in my pocket and climbed back in the car. My phone dinged with a text just as I was pulling out.

I love you. So much. You know that right?

What timing.
I smiled in spite of the situation. I looked both ways before backing out. I tried to tell myself I wasn't looking for Adeline's car, but I kind of was. I pulled up the text on my phone and spoke into the speaker for the talk-to-text, "I know. Why don't you come over in two hours. I'll be ready to go. We can talk. Love you."

I could get
his gift real quick and then get back to the house, throw some things in a box, and he'd never be the wiser. I sighed and drove the distance to the shop in the next town.

As far as Mason's guilt…
I honestly understood what Mason was saying, and I understood how he felt. But actually hearing with my own ears that loving me made him feel guilty? That didn't feel good. But I just had to make him see that he didn't need to feel that way about it. About
us
. And his mom today—what was that miracle about?

I skip
ped through town, my mind running a mile a minute. It took only about fifteen minutes to get to the next little town. I pulled into the shop I called weeks ago and really wanted to just sit and think, watch the snow for a minute while I thought of what to say to Mason later. I knew he was going to go overboard in trying to make me see that we were OK, everything was
OK
. He just still had a few things to work out in that amazing head of his.

And you know what? T
hat
was
OK.

I remembered what it felt like to find out all the things that I'd done. I
had felt like the guilt and blame was burying me. That doesn't change overnight. That doesn't just flit away to nothing just because you make the decision to forgive yourself and move on.

I took a deep breath and opened the door to the freezing Colorado air. I practically sprinted across the salt covered
parking lot and into the store, cursing myself for forgetting my scarf and hat. I told the guy my name and he went and got a box from the back. He opened it and showed me with a little smile that said he knew I was going to be impressed. I smiled back.

I wasn't a tattoo artist, but even I could tell this thing was awesome. It was a custom
Danny Fowler machine, and the man told me all about it, how he had one and it was his absolute favorite machine. I paid him and took the box with me, setting it in the passenger's seat like it was precious.

When I checked my phone
, I had no texts or missed calls, so I hurried from the lot to get back to my parent's to pack. The snow was falling hard. The salt and snow trucks were running nonstop. I passed one at the last red light out of town before the stretch of long highway. Snow flew up on the side of his tractor into the ditches in waves. That much snow had fallen since I'd come through. I focused on the road and couldn't see any cars in front of me. I trekked on slowly and it hit me that sneaking off probably wasn't a good idea. I should have at least let someone know where I was going.

As if
my phone had ears to hear me groaning about it, it rang. I opened it without looking to keep my eyes on the road, knowing it was Mason anyway.

"Hey."

"Emma."

I froze. It wasn't Mason. It was Adeline.
I just knew it. "Adeline?"

"
Now I have nothing," she whispered.

In my mind
, I imagined her looming somewhere like she had at my house earlier. I swung my gaze all around in search of her and then, it happened.

You know when you
get this gut feeling. When you just know that it's too late, and by the time you look, it's all happening in front of you in slow motion? You're amazed at how many things you can think of in just a few seconds. I was thinking that Mason would never know that I wasn't angry with him for what he said, but for the fact that there had apparently been something between Adeline and him and he didn't tell me. He was going to be eaten alive with guilt because we had a fight and he never got to make it all OK in his Mason way.

I watche
d the truck barely miss the snowplow, which was throwing huge waves of snow into the air, and swerve into my lane. I had nowhere to go but the trees. It was either plow into him and take him out with me, or let him go and take the trees alone instead, even though he hadn't given me the same courtesy. I held the wheel tight; my body knowing what my decision would be before I even gave it the command.

Mason.

That was all I could think. Please, God, don't let Mason's guilt be the end of him. Mason, I love you…

I didn't feel the trees as the car blew snow into the air in a big wave from the ditch before the trees sped toward me. I didn't feel a thing and I was grateful.

I closed my eyes and let the dark take me. I had spent six months of my life in the dark. I wasn't afraid of it.

And
I wasn't afraid to die, I was just angry that I never got to
live
.

Cherries will cause cancer cells to kill themselves.

Mason

When I pulled into her house a couple hours after she left mine, I was curious why her car wasn't in the driveway. The pavement was completely covered in snow, and the short drive over had been challenging, even for someone who had lived in Colorado all his life. My cell phone went off again with a text. I pulled it out quickly, but it wasn’t Emma. I sighed as I read the message. I'd been getting messages all day that made no sense.

b
astard.

That was it.
Bastard
. I even tried to call the number, but they didn't pick up. If it wasn't
bastard
it was
prick
or
jackass
. I'd been getting random texts for weeks now. No cause, no rhythm, only about once every couple of weeks, but they weren't violent until today. I showed Emma sometimes and we kind of laughed at some poor sap's misery. The ones before made me think that the person had the wrong number and was trying to text an old boyfriend or something.

I still think about you.
Or
You didn't give us a chance.
Or
We could have been something.

I shoved the phone into my pocket, giving the text no more of my thought or attention, and sprinted to the door, ringing the bell.

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 c
onstrict. 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 s
o 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 cause
d 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 flashli
ght 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 the
n 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 h
ad 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 hurt 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 sai
d 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 fi
rst 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.