Chapter 21: Mom

Dez was awake before I'd finished watching it the second time.

He looked over my shoulder at the screen.

"Where is that?"

"I don't know."

I called Dad.

He picked up on the first ring, and his voice was thick with sleep.

"Annabelle? Is everything all right?"

"Where's Mom?"

"Shopping with Verity. They left at six to beat the crowds." A pause. "Why?"

"Can you see her phone? Where it is?"

He could.

Every man who'd lost a child once had his family's phones on a map.

"State Street," he said. "The big store on the corner. Annabelle, what's going on?"

"I'll call you back."

Dez drove with the lights on and no siren.

Nobody said a word the whole way.

At eight in the morning, nine days before Christmas, the store was already full of women with shopping bags and men holding coats.

The windows had moving mechanical elves.

Dez stayed by the escalators where he could see both ways.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "Then I come find you."

The formal floor was the fourth.

I found them in the fitting rooms.

A long carpeted hallway, mirrors at the end, little white doors on both sides.

Mom was sitting on a velvet bench outside one of the doors with her coat folded on her lap.

She had a shopping bag at her feet and a blue folder in her hands.

She saw me and her whole face lit up.

Then it did something else.

"Sweetheart," she said. "What are you doing here?"

The white door opened.

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