Chapter 4 - Behind the Locked Door
Grace ran.
Owen stood in the hallway outside the sitting room, barefoot on the marble.
A broken vase lay near the wall.
Adrian had hold of his wrist.
Celia stood beside them, pale and shaking.
“He said he needed to talk to him alone,” she told Ortiz.
“I asked him to wait.”
“Release the child,” Ortiz said.
Adrian let go immediately.
“He knocked over the vase.”
Owen’s eyes found Grace.
“He said I had to go upstairs.”
Grace crouched several feet away.
“Stay still, sweetheart. There’s glass.”
One of the deputies lifted Owen over the broken pieces and carried him back into the sitting room.
Adrian watched with his mouth pressed flat.
Ortiz spoke to him quietly.
Grace couldn’t hear every word.
She heard “separate contact.”
She heard “threat.”
She heard Adrian say, “You’re making a serious mistake.”
Then Owen was coming down the front steps in Ruth’s arms.
He was too big to be carried comfortably.
Ruth carried him anyway.
Grace sat beside him in the back of Ruth’s car.
As the house slipped behind them, he pressed his forehead against her sleeve.
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“I broke the party.”
She turned toward him.
“You didn’t break anything.”
“The vase.”
“We can talk about the vase another day.”
That almost made him smile.
At Ruth’s house, they found a spare toothbrush, an old college sweatshirt, and a night-light shaped like a lighthouse.
Owen refused the bed.
He wanted the couch where he could see both women.
Grace sat on the floor beside him until his breathing slowed.
Then his eyes opened.
“Don’t let him take my bear.”
“Your brown bear?”
He nodded.
It was still at the estate.
Nora had given it to him after he got stitches in his chin.
“Why do you need it tonight?”
Owen curled tighter beneath the blanket.
“Mommy said the zipper pocket was for things I couldn’t lose.”
Grace kept her face still.
“What did you put in there?”
His eyes filled again.
“The shiny thing.”
Ruth had stopped moving in the kitchen.
Grace wanted to ask ten questions.
Instead, she remembered Ortiz’s instructions.
Don’t press.
Don’t supply details.
Let the trained interviewer do that.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell Detective Ortiz.”
Owen caught her hand.
“Daddy knows I hid something.”
Across town, inside the estate, Adrian walked into his son’s bedroom.
And Grace’s phone lit up with a message.
May you like
COME GET YOUR THINGS.
BEFORE I THROW THEM OUT.
