He tried not to laugh, but then he rolled onto his back on his bed, trying to fight me and cracking up at the same time. “Stop it, Mom. You’re crazy. I’m . . . I’m going to move away and change my name and my number, and you can never ask me if I brushed my teeth again.”
I tickled him harder. “And I will find you. You can’t get away from me!”
Sophie and Mallory jumped up and down.
“Get him, Mommy!” Mallory shouted.
“Get him, get him!” Sophie parroted, clapping her little hands and laughing more.
“You’ll never catch me,” Thomas shouted, wiggling and laughing.
“You’re the crazy one, Thomas! We got the magic and we will find you.” Mallory climbed onto his bed, shouting it at his face where she was on her knees looking down at him from over his head.
It was almost too much.
The way love and adoration and devotion poured free.
Taking everything over.
My voice softened to wistfulness, and I stopped tickling my son so I could run a hand over his damp hair. “I will always find you. No matter where you go. All of you.”
It was a promise.
A promise that we would all be together. No matter what that took.
Thomas sobered, and Mallory climbed off his bed and opened our picture book, wanting to continue our story the way we did each night.
“What’s this?” Mallory asked, waving a piece of paper in the air that she’d found pressed between the pages.
The smile I was wearing slid off my face, horror taking its place.
Heart crumbling.
Spirit failing.
Oh God.
My trembling fingers ran over it.
It was a crude image of the maze near the castle.
But that was where the similarities of our story ended.
Because the prince and princesses and the handmaiden had been slain, the king standing over them holding a knife that dripped with blood.
A lump locked in my throat. I looked at my son who was now hunched over on the side of his bed, hanging his head in shame.
“Thomas,” I whispered, touching his knee and urging him to look at me. “What is this?”
Tears filled his eyes. “What if there isn’t really magic? What if this is the way our story ends?”
“I won’t ever let anyone hurt you. Do you think—”
He shook his head, and frustration bled out in his voice. “What if we don’t get to leave? What if we have to stay there forever?”
And I realized this drawing was his own metaphor. The idea that Reed held the ultimate power.
“Nuh-uh, no way, we got a hero now and we don’t have nothing to worry about because he’s going to save us and we’re going to get free and fly away on our unicorns. Ian-Zian the Great to the rescue!”
Mallory was pointing at the picture she’d had me help her draw last night after Ian had left. When he’d walked out of our house and left it brimming with hope.
I should have known it would be my worrying little man who would have all the questions. The one who’d toss in his sleep and contemplate the way everything could go bad.
I took his hand and pulled him off his bed. I didn’t care that he was nine, and he thought he needed to be a man. I tucked him close to my chest, held him even harder. Sophie hopped over and climbed into my other arm, and Mallory threw herself onto my back, wrapping her thin arms around all of us.
I drew them all as close as I could get them, the words emphatic as I let the promises permeate the room. “I won’t let you go. I won’t let any of you go. You are my babies. You are my life. You are the reason I live. The reason I breathe. And I will live every breath that I have for you.”
It didn’t matter what the circumstances were or how powerful Reed might be.
I had to have faith that everything would turn out right.
We belonged together, and there was no power in this world that could change that.
Especially when we had our hero fighting for us.
Twenty-Three
Ian
“What the fuck is this?” Lawrence tossed the newspaper onto his desk.
I wanted to tell him that no one still unwrapped a newspaper and read that shit, but the fact this was splashed all over the online news media and was getting special broadcast time on about every news channel in the state made the point moot.
Flippantly, I flicked it back toward him. “Don’t tell me you had me come all the way over here because you wanted to ask me about my new client.”
He pitched forward. “Drop it.”
Incredulous laughter rocked out of me. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Drop the case. Give it to someone else. I don’t care. I don’t want you anywhere near it.”
My head shook. “I’m not sure how you think you have any say in the clients I take.”