The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Out the Kitchen Door

Nobody left the ballroom, and Dean stopped asking.

A man at the back held his phone to his ear and said, "Yes, police, the Sandstrom estate, now."

Dean heard it, and I watched him decide.

He did not run for the doors.

He turned and walked straight to my mother, who was still on the floor with two guests kneeling around her.

"Sylvia, let me take her," he said gently. "You're not well."

The guests looked up at him, a husband and father, and one of them lifted my daughter out of my mother's arms.

"No," my mother said. "No, Dean, no."

He had my daughter on his shoulder before I got off the stage.

I jumped the three steps and went into the crowd.

People turned their chairs toward me, toward the screens, toward Dean, all of them standing in my way.

"Move!" I said. "That's my child!"

A woman in green silk caught my arm and said, "Honey, wait for the police."

I pulled free of her.

"Audra," Dean said, not loud, and looked up at the landing. "Now."

My sister came down the curved stairs in her cream dress with the newborn in the white blanket.

She did not look at me.

She walked past the front row of guests with the baby against her chest, and the crowd parted for the hostess.

"Stop her!" I screamed. "She has my baby!"

Nobody stopped her.

They had spent five years at this house believing her, and their feet did not know yet that they should stop.

Shane came off the stage at a run.

He went through the tables and the people with his shoulder down, and a chair went over, and I heard a glass break.

Dean was already at the kitchen door with my daughter, and Audra beside him.

He looked back once.

Over the heads of two hundred people, he looked at me, and he lifted the hand with the pale hook-shaped scar and waved, once.

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