Wherever She Goes(7)

“What?” I’ve misheard her. I must have.

“How would you feel, if you took your kid to the playground, and you kept seeing this woman there, hanging around, with no child in tow.”

My cheeks blaze. “It’s not like that. I stretch near the playground sometimes. That’s all.”

“And you watch the kids.”

“I . . . I guess I do. While I stretch. I just . . . I enjoy seeing kids play.”

“Do you know how often we hear that, Ms. Finch? Every time we question a pedophile for hanging around a playground.”

My heart slams into my throat. “Wh-what? No. I have never—”

“No one’s accusing you of that.” Cooper glares at his young partner. “We’re just pointing out how it could look.”

“And that if you were a man, this would be a very different conversation,” Jackson says. “Personally, I don’t think gender should play a role in how we handle these complaints.”

“There was a complaint?” My voice squeaks.

“No,” Cooper says. “A couple of people mentioned it, but we all know parents can be overly cautious. You might want to run somewhere else, though, in future.”

Humiliation swallows my voice, and it takes a moment for me to say, “Yes, of course.”

Cooper continues, but I don’t hear it over the blood pounding in my ears. I always figured I was invisible, just a jogger stretching at a bench. It never occurred to me that anyone would notice, let alone remember me from one day to the next.

I made other parents nervous.

They saw me as a threat.

Did they talk about me? Whisper warnings to each other?

Have you seen that woman with the dark ponytail? She comes by every lunch and pretends to be stretching, but she’s watching us. Eavesdropping on our conversations. Staring at our children.

I’ll never be able to set foot in that park again.

“Ms. Finch?”

I struggle to refocus. This is about the boy, not me. Remember that.

“I know what I saw,” I say. “And it wasn’t an angry dad hauling his kid into a car.”

Jackson gives Cooper a look, as if waiting for him to respond. When he doesn’t, she opens her mouth, but he cuts in with, “Either way, we are taking it seriously, Ms. Finch. We put an alert out for the SUV.”

“An AMBER Alert?”

“Without a parent reporting a child missing, we cannot do that. We need to know who we would be looking for.”

“It’s been five hours,” Jackson says. “It’s not as if Mom left the park by herself, forgetting she brought a kid.”

“We are investigating, Ms. Finch,” Cooper says. “We wouldn’t ignore something like this.” He pushes to his feet. “If a child is reported missing, we’ll let you know.”





Chapter Five





After they leave, I sink into the sofa, ignoring the broken spring that pokes back. Did I make a mistake? My gut insists that I know what I saw. And what I saw was a child being dragged, screaming, into an SUV. A young child who’d been wandering alone in the park. That isn’t normal.

Not normal, yes. But maybe like Officer Cooper said, it was just bad parenting. Charlotte has had tantrums. She’s three—it happens. Once, when she got overtired, she threw a fit in a restaurant, deciding the world was a cruel and unfair place if they didn’t have sprinkles for her ice cream. I carried her to the car while Paul quickly paid the bill. I remember hurrying through the restaurant, dodging glares. Then I got outside and heard her gasp and discovered that in trying to quiet her, I’d been pressing her face into my shoulder. Forcibly silencing her.

When I realized what I’d done, I nearly threw up in the parking lot. It took everything I had to wait for Paul to reach the car before I blurted my confession.

He laughs softly and hugs me. “Charlie’s fine. Everyone’s just tired. And hey, it did make her stop crying, right?”

On top of the guilt came the shame. What if someone saw me and thought I was intentionally smothering my child to keep her quiet?

I remember another time, when Charlotte smacked a kid in the playroom at McDonald’s. Horrified, I’d hauled her out while apologizing to the boy’s grandfather. After we got home, I found a red circle around her wrist. Not only had I been hurting her as I marched her along, but she hadn’t complained. Had it seemed as if I was dragging Charlotte from the playroom? Had that grandfather watched me, and shaken his head, thinking, Well, I know where that poor child gets it from?

What if that was all I saw this morning? A frustrated dad forcibly putting his protesting son into their vehicle.

That could be what I saw.

But it doesn’t feel like it.

It just doesn’t.



An hour later, I get a call from Paul. He has a client emergency.

“Is there any way you can take Charlotte for the evening?”

“You don’t ever have to ask,” I say. “Even if I was working, I’d find a way to swing it.”

“Thank you.”

I tense hearing that. It’s genuine gratitude, which is the problem. He knows I’m eager to take Charlotte any chance I get, but he still acts as if each extremely rare circumstance is some great favor. I want a casual “Thanks, Bree,” perfunctory and offhand. I don’t want to keep score.