see that as the failure of our scheme, but they all assured me that the opposite was true. There would be doubters, of course, but if no one believed the text so many people were getting, there would definitely have been a response.
After that, while all phones remained conspicuously silent, we went out back to Kris’s homemade gun range again, but this time the entire household came with us. We drew faces on our black silhouetted targets with neon markers and Wite-Out pens, then tacked them to trees on the edge of the woods behind the house.
Since there were so many of us shooting at once, Kori brought out a plastic tub full of mismatched sets of headphones she’d evidently taken one at a time from every gun range she’d ever visited. I didn’t want to know how she’d gotten out the door without turning them in.
Then I realized she probably hadn’t gone out through the door at all.
On the third try, I shot the button nose off the demented teddy bear Kris had drawn on my new target—he was pretty damn good with a marker—and I was feeling pretty good about my new skill, until Kris and Kori pulled down everyone’s first target and handed them out.
Neither Daniels sibling had missed a single mark. In fact, Kori had hit the center of her target’s forehead so many times that there was only one big hole where his poor paper brains had once been.
Kris went for the heart. And he hit it every single time.
For our second round, I drew shaggy white facial hair on Kris’s target man, and when I turned to hand it to him, I found him bent over the card table with a sparkly sliver pen—I have no idea where he got it—drawing on my target as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.
I took one look and wanted to hide the one I’d done before he saw it. His soon-to-be-destroyed art was incredible. “Holy shit,” I breathed, and Kris chuckled. I recognized Julia’s sparkly scowl staring out at me from the face of my target guy with a single glance.
He held the paper up. “I thought you might like the inspiration.”
“That’s incredible. I’d say it’s beautiful, but...it’s Julia.” My biological aunt was not unattractive in real life, but I would never think of her as pretty, because I would always know what lay behind the blessings genetics had given her. But Kris had drawn her so well I almost hated to shoot her.
“Show off.” Kori had already demonstrated the fact that she’d rather decorate her target with 9 mm piercings, and I wasn’t sure whether that was because she was obviously violent in nature or because she had no other talents that I could tell.
Ian glanced at the drawing, then at me, then at Kris. Then he gave us both a quiet smile that made me blush.
While Kris nailed up our targets, I headed to the cooler next to the back steps to grab several bottles of water. When I stood with as many as I could carry, I was struck by the sight of them all together, doing what they did best, like any family might. Sure, my family’s together-time had been spent singing along with my dad’s acoustic guitar rather than shredding paper targets with high-velocity personal projectiles, but the gist was the same. They were together, and beneath the bickering over who’d hit the target’s left eye more times in a row and Gran’s nagging Kris to quit shooting Kori’s target on the sly, you could see that they loved each other. And that more than anything, they wanted Kenley back, to complete their family.
Seeing the pain they shared and how it drew them together made me ache with memories of my own, a pain so deep that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. That ache grew sharper and gained focus, not in my chest, but in my abdomen. Beneath my scar.
My eyes closed and tears rolled down my cheeks before I’d even known they were there. The water bottles fell from my arms to bounce in the dirt and I clutched at my stomach, hating how flat it felt. How empty.
He would have been seven months along now, my baby that never was. He would have been mature enough to live, even if he’d chosen to come into the world at that very moment. But he would never be born. And he would never have a brother or