You Don't Want To Know - By Lisa Jackson Page 0,61

she heard him sobbing. “Oh, honey,” she said brokenly. Her heart leaped at the thought of seeing him again. It had been so long, so damned long . . . She yanked on the doorknob.

Nothing.

Again, she grabbed hold of the glass knob and twisted hard.

It didn’t budge.

“Noah?” Oh, God, had he stopped calling for her? “Mommy’s here, just on the other side of the door. You didn’t lock it, did you, sweetie?”

She pulled with all her might, her muscles straining, her shoulders aching. Through the door, she could hear his sobbing, his soft little cries.

Her heart shattered into a million pieces. “I’m coming!” Closing her eyes, she grabbed the door handle with both hands, twisting and throwing herself backward.

The glass knob came off in her hands, cutting her palms and fingers. “Noah?” she called, and heard him whimper.

Looking through the hole left by the broken knob, she saw into her son’s room where all had gone quiet except for the tinkling notes from the mobile as it spun slowly over his crib. The tiny seahorse and crab seemed to be laughing at her, and she knew in her heart that her son was gone again.

Falling onto the floor, she lay in a shivering puddle of despair and terror. “Noah,” she whispered brokenly, her tears mingling with the blood dripping from her clenched fists, “where are you? Where? ”

“Ava!” Wyatt’s sharp voice cut into her sobs. “Ava! Wake up!”

Strong fingers wrapped around her shoulders, and she blinked hard against the sunlight streaming through the windows. Wyatt was leaning over the bed, shaking her gently.

“What?” she whispered, then sat up and scooted into the pillows toward the headboard, away from him. The dream, so real, clawed at her brain; she actually looked at her hands for any trace of blood, but they were unmarked, not so much as a scratch upon them. A dream. Only another dream.

She pushed her hair from her face, trying to get her equilibrium, to come to terms with the fear and disappointment. As frantic as she’d been to get into her son’s room, at least in the dream she’d known him to be alive.

“Are you okay?” her husband asked.

She looked up sharply at him. There was that damned question again.

“You were having a nightmare. Crying out. I thought you’d want to wake up.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. It had been so damned real. If she tried, she could still hear Noah’s plaintive, frightened voice.

Hearing the whir of Jewel-Anne’s wheelchair, her eyes flew open again. She saw that the door to her room was open. Wyatt was the only one inside, but through the doorway, she could see both Jewel-Anne and Demetria, hovering. Ava sent an angry glare at the nurse, who herded Jewel-Anne and her contraption out of sight. “I could use some privacy,” Ava said.

Wyatt was already walking around the foot of the bed. “I heard you screaming and I ran in here. I wasn’t thinking about anything but seeing that you were all right.” He closed the door gently, then leaned against it. Worried eyes assessed her, and she pulled the covers up to her chin.

“I’ve had bad dreams before. A lot,” she said, her voice less sure than her words. She felt a quivering inside, and she swallowed back the panic that rose within. Maybe they were right. Maybe she really was cracking up.

“You were in the guest room?” she asked, striving for normalcy.

“No, I came in this morning. Caught a ride with Ian. I left you a text. Didn’t you get it?”

“No . . . I . . .” She found her phone on the bedside table. She must’ve turned it off. Suddenly she remembered working on the computer until falling asleep. She hadn’t bothered turning off or charging either the phone or the computer. She’d even let the computer go into sleep mode, had left it on the bed next to her. Glancing at it now, she noticed that the screen was still dark, but that didn’t mean that someone hadn’t seen that she’d been reconstructing the night Noah disappeared. Hit one button and the computer would come to life. Wyatt could have waited until the screen went dark again before waking her. But he would have had to have timed it just right or gotten incredibly lucky because he couldn’t have predicted her nightmare.

No, it was unlikely he’d seen the screen.

So her secret was safe from him. He couldn’t know how desperately she was still trying to force together the jagged