Chapter Three: Talia Always Knows First

I didn't sleep.

Not after the fourth call. Not after I turned the phone off completely and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling of the bedroom I had painted myself three years ago on a Saturday while Eli sat on the floor eating crackers and naming every dinosaur he owned.

I turned it back on at six fifteen.

Eleven missed calls. All the same unknown number. No voicemail.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I got up, washed my face and started making Eli's breakfast like it was any other morning. Because for him, it had to be.

"Mama, can the ankylosaurus come to school today?"

"In your bag. Not on your desk."

"What if he gets lonely in the bag?"

"He'll survive."

Eli considered this seriously while eating his toast. He was wearing his red jumper with the hood he refused to take off indoors and his grey eyes were still half asleep, hair everywhere, completely unaware that his mother had been awake since nine thirty holding a phone and waiting for something she couldn't name to arrive.

I dropped him at school at eight forty. Kissed his forehead. Watched him run through the gate without looking back the way he always did — confident, unhurried, completely certain the world was safe.

I stood at the gate for a moment after he disappeared.

Then I walked home.

Talia was already on my doorstep.

She had two coffees and the face she got when she knew something bad and was deciding how to arrange it before she said it out loud. Talia Rossi was my best friend, the loudest person in Maplewood Hollow and the only human being I trusted completely. She had short natural coils she never bothered to tame, a bakery that smelled like vanilla and burnt sugar and strong opinions about everything. She hadn't even opened the shop yet.

That told me everything.

"You look awful," she said.

"Thank you. Come in."

She followed me to the kitchen. Set both cups on the table. Turned around and looked at me with that look — the one that meant she wasn't moving until I sat down.

I sat.

"Someone came into the bakery last night," she said. "Just before I closed."

I wrapped my hands around the coffee cup. Said nothing.

"Big man. Expensive watch. Quiet in a way that wasn't actually quiet." She paused. "He had a photograph on his phone. You. Coming out of your front door."

My hands didn't move.

"He asked how long you'd lived here. Asked if you lived alone." She lifted her chin. "I told him I'd never seen that woman in my life. He left."

"Did he believe you?"

"No."

I stood up. Went to the window.

The street outside was ordinary and unhelpful — Mrs Alderton's flower boxes, the empty road, a delivery van moving slowly past. Nothing wrong. Everything wrong.

"Ivy."

"I heard you."

"Who sent him?"

I knew who sent him. I had known since the fourth call last night, somewhere between turning the phone off and turning it back on. I had known the way you know things you've spent five years trying not to know.

I turned around.

I looked at Talia — the woman who sat on a hospital floor with me through fourteen hours of labour, who held Eli before his cord was even cut, who had been every version of family I hadn't had since I was twelve years old — and I said the name I had not said out loud in five years.

Talia went completely still.

She knew the name. I had given her the bare bones of it in her bakery kitchen two months after I arrived, late at night, two cups of tea, Eli asleep in the back room. Enough to understand. Not everything.

"He found you," she said.

"Yes."

"How fast?"

"Forty eight hours. Maybe less."

She sat down slowly. Put both hands flat on the table the way she did when she was steadying herself. "Your uncle."

It wasn't a question either. She had strong feelings about Bain Croft based only on the bare version and I had always known the full version would destroy her.

"Yes," I said.

"Okay." She breathed out. "Okay. Does he know about Eli?"

I sat back down across from her.

"The man who came to the bakery," I said. "Did he ask if you lived alone or did he already know you didn't?"

Talia's face gave me the answer before her mouth did.

"He asked if you lived alone," she said quietly. "Like he already knew you didn't."

Which meant Bain had given him everything. Address. Routine. The boy. The grey eyes I had spent five years keeping two hundred miles from the man they belonged to.

Talia leaned forward.

"Ivy." Her voice dropped low. "Does he know about Eli?"

I looked at my best friend across the cold coffee and the ordinary kitchen of the life I had built from nothing and I told her the only true thing I had.

"He will," I said. "Very soon."

Talia opened her mouth.

Her phone buzzed on the table between us before she could speak. She looked down. Her expression shifted.

She turned the screen to face me.

A message from Fenne Halee. Eli's teacher. Sent twenty minutes ago.

Ivy. A man was parked outside the school gates at pickup yesterday. He didn't come in. He just sat in his car and watched.