Until I Find You - Rea Frey Page 0,76
calls someone from the back to help. Jess makes Betty laugh, and Crystal marvels at how Jess puts most people at ease. She’s never been like that, instead wired so tight, she feels she might slice someone apart if she’s not careful.
“Okay, got the list.” Crystal thumbs through the names. “How do we even know who we’re looking for?”
Bec is listening, but appears despondent. Her delicate fingers snake around her cup of lemonade. With her dark glasses and erect posture, she could pass for a statue. Except for the wriggling baby on her chest.
“How many names?”
Crystal hurriedly counts them. “Twenty.”
“Any of them look familiar?”
She scans the last names. “Unfortunately, no. But I’m probably not the right person to ask.”
“Do you mind texting it to Jake?”
“Sure.” Bec recites Jake’s number from memory. Crystal sends him a text and pockets her phone. While they wait on Jess to check out, Crystal leans in. “What can I do to help?”
Rebecca sighs and her face, usually filled with such optimism, crumples. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“Well, that was easy,” Jess says as she lugs a small painting of a giraffe toward them. “Ready?”
They walk outside. “Thanks for distracting her.” Crystal pops the trunk.
“It’s what I do best,” Jess says.
Once she’s behind the wheel, she starts the car and glances once again at the shop. Inside, Betty fusses with the front window display. She moves a vintage baby stroller. Its large chrome wheels take up most of the space. Betty pulls back the fire engine–red canopy, adjusts something, and tugs it back into place. Crystal continues to stare. She’d had a stroller just like that when Savi was little.
The color of cherries.
The color of blood.
She ignores the eerie feeling and starts the car. “Anyone hungry? Want to grab something before we head back?”
“I could eat,” Jess says.
“Home.” Bec leans her head against the window. She seems just out of reach, her emotions caught in a complex web Crystal can’t possibly untangle. “I want to go home.”
“You sure?” Jess asks. “There are so many great places around here. Maybe a good meal would—”
“I’m not in the mood. I have a child to find.”
Crystal and Jess look at each other. She inputs Rebecca’s home address into the system and pushes start. “Home it is then.”
From the back seat, Rebecca’s hair shrouds her pretty face before she sweeps it all back and knots it at the nape of her neck. “I swear on everything I’ve ever believed in that this really happened. I am not imagining it.”
“I’m not questioning you,” Crystal affirms. “You know your baby best.”
“You would know if Baxter wasn’t yours, right?” Bec asks Jess.
“Yes,” Jess affirms.
“And you’d know if it wasn’t Savi?”
“Of course.” Now she would, anyway. Back then, no. But what if she were blind? In some ways, she’d probably be more aware of all her child’s little quirks. But in other ways, she could never be sure. It would be a constant fear that plagued her. Was this a common fear for all blind mothers?
She takes a left onto the highway, and the boutique shops and quaint streets give way to flat, rolling reams of concrete and crisped corn fields. All this time, she’d thought she and Bec were so bonded—the same, even—but now she realizes Bec is having a solitary experience, and no matter how much grief unites them, she can’t ever really understand what she’s going through. But she doesn’t want their differences to tear them apart either.
“No one spends as much time with him as I do,” Bec continues. “I’ve memorized every square inch. I could pick him out of one hundred babies.”
Crystal shifts in her seat and hits the horn as a car almost sideswipes them. “I believe you.”
“Do you, or are you just saying that?”
Crystal glimpses her reflection in the rearview: green eyes searching, pained.
“I’m not just saying that.” She sneaks a glance at Jess, who’s gone conveniently mute. “You know, after Paul died, I was convinced it was all my fault. If I’d just been in the car with him. If I’d woken up before he left. If I’d called him before he got into his car, then maybe it wouldn’t have happened. We’ve talked about that.” The scene flashes in her head. The phone call from the police. Her husband’s mangled car. His unrecognizable body at the morgue. Her love, eviscerated. “Everyone just kept telling me it would get better. That I needed to take time to grieve, but that life goes on. I swear,