Part Three: The Call
The rain had been steady all day — a November rain, without drama, the kind that simply commits to its purpose and continues. Emily’s office was on the fourth floor of a building she now partly owned, and the window beside her desk ran with water in irregular vertical lines, which she watched in the unfocused way she watched things when she was thinking.
Her private phone rang at seven forty-two in the evening.
Unknown number.
She answered because she always answered unknown numbers after six — she had learned, in the difficult years, that important things often came from numbers she didn’t recognize.
Silence on the line, for just a moment. Then breathing. Then a voice so small and so familiar and so completely itself that Emily’s hand clenched around the phone with a force she didn’t feel, because she had gone entirely still in the way the body goes still when it is receiving something it has been waiting for for four years.
“Mom.”
One word. One syllable. A world.
“Lily.” She managed to keep her voice from breaking by sheer will, because she understood, instantly, with the animal intelligence of a parent who has been afraid for her child for a long time, that she needed to be calm. That Lily needed her to be the steady thing in this call. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
“Mom, don’t hang up.” The voice was older than she had been prepared for — eleven now, the voice at eleven having a different weight than the voice at seven, a new complexity to it, self-awareness where there had only been pure feeling. But underneath the age was the same voice. The same precise cadence of a specific person. Her specific person.
“I would never,” Emily said. “Never. Tell me where you are. Are you safe?”
A shuddering breath. “I’m okay. I’m at a house — a big house with gates. I found a phone, it’s—” A pause — listening to something, checking something. “Daddy says I can’t call you. He said you left. He said—” The voice wobbled. “Mom, he said you didn’t want me.”
Something moved through Emily’s chest that did not have a name in any language she knew. She breathed through it, steadily, and said: “He lied, Lily. I have been trying to get to you for four years. I have not stopped for a single day. What he told you was not true.”
A sound on the line — something in the background. A voice, higher-pitched, sharp.
“I have to go,” Lily said quickly. “Please come. Please—”
“I’m coming,” Emily said. “I am coming right now. I promise—”
The line went dead.
She held the phone against her chest for forty-three seconds — she counted, because her mind needed something to do with those seconds — and then she called Marcus Hale.
