Chapter 1 - THE BUS STOP IN THE RAIN
I almost drove past Emma.
The rain was coming down hard enough to blur the road, and December darkness had settled over the little shopping strip outside Columbus even though it was barely five in the afternoon. The pharmacy was closed for the holiday weekend, the parking lot nearly empty, and water reflected every streetlight in long yellow streaks across the pavement.
Then I saw the pink backpack.
Emma stood beside the bus shelter in a soaked navy coat, both arms wrapped around herself. Her light-brown hair was plastered to her face. She looked so small against the gray sky that for one second my brain refused to accept what I was seeing.
I slammed on the brakes.
Before I had fully parked, I was out of the car.
“Emma!”
Her head snapped toward me.
“Aunt Claire!”
I ran across the wet pavement and pulled off my coat before I reached her. Her hands were trembling so badly she could barely hold onto the backpack straps.
I wrapped her in my coat and knelt.
“Oh my God. What happened?”
Her lips trembled.
“They left me here.”
“Who?”
She looked toward the road.
“Mom.”
My stomach dropped.
“Your mother left you here?”
Emma nodded.
A green SUV had been pulling away when she first called me. At the time I had been too focused on getting to her to think about it.
Now I realized it had been Lauren’s.
My sister.
Emma’s mother.
“What happened?”
Emma struggled to speak through chattering teeth.
“She said I always spoil Christmas.”
I felt something inside me turn cold in a way the rain never could.
“How long have you been out here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she tell you I was coming?”
Emma shook her head.
That answer frightened me more than anything else.
I guided her toward my car and turned the heat on full blast. Then I called 911.
“My nine-year-old niece was abandoned outside a closed pharmacy in freezing rain.”
Emma sat curled under my coat in the passenger seat.
The dispatcher asked questions.
Location.
Age.
Condition.
Whether she was conscious.
Whether I knew where her mother had gone.
I answered as calmly as I could.
Then Emma suddenly grabbed my sleeve.
“Aunt Claire.”
“What?”
“Mom said to tell you one more thing.”
I crouched beside the open passenger door.
“What did she say?”
Emma swallowed.
“She said you’d understand when the letter came.”
Every sound around me seemed to disappear.
“What letter?”
Emma shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
Distant emergency lights appeared down the road.
I looked at my niece.
Then at the direction Lauren’s SUV had disappeared.
The abandonment had already horrified me.
But a letter meant something worse.
May you like
A letter meant this might not have been an angry decision made in one terrible moment.
It meant my sister may have planned it.
