Page 30 of Unbroken

Her eyes went distant. To my right, Amanda opened the front door, and a gust of cold air blew past us, breaking us both from our thoughts.

With one final look, she started toward the door. And before I could think about it, I took a half-step forward.

But it was Amanda’s knowing, wide eyes that stopped me. If it wasn’t for that look, I would’ve been out the door. I wouldn’t have let her go. I would have—I shook my head, dislodging the ideas I had no right to think.

Amanda’s blond eyebrows shot to her hairline, and the silent question in that one look wasn’t quiet at all. It was screaming at me,“What are you going to do? Should you really do anything? Is that the best idea?”

Although my brain and body were at war—the first telling me to leave her be, and the latter wound tight with the opposite desire—I stepped backward. Amanda gave me a short, approving nod before quickly following Blakely outside.

Rather than stand in the hallway and watch the closed door, I willed my feet to move and walked into the kitchen.

I approached the island, and without missing a beat, James slid a beer across the counter. I caught it and immediately took a sip, peering around the room above the bottle.

James turned around and said something quietly to Ivy, who was sipping her own drink. Hazel and Luke joined the rest of us a second later, while Reed and Josh finished preparing the food we’d all abandoned when the doorbell rang.

No one spoke. The only noise was Reed and Josh cooking and moving around the kitchen, along with Zach’s random laughter from the backyard or Sadie’s occasional excited bark. I peered out the back windows and caught Piper’s eyes. She looked at me for a moment, and when I didn’t motion her back inside, she turned back to Zach and my mom.

In the near silence, we all heard the front door open and quickly close, followed by the click of Amanda’s boots on the wood floor. She appeared around the corner a moment later, and our heads swiveled in her direction.

I know she said she was leaving, but I half expected to see Blakely fall in behind her.

I took another generous swig of my beer and tried not to crush the glass bottle in my hand.

“She left?” Hazel asked quietly. The water glass she sipped from shook as she sat it back down on the counter.

“Yeah,” Amanda answered almost as quietly. Reed kissed her forehead while he stirred something on the stove. Her responding smile was sweet, although surface-level.

From the other side of the kitchen, James cleared his throat. “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?” Josh asked, putting a dish in the oven before closing it and standing to face the rest of the room.

“I—uh—I believe her. I didn’t thirty minutes ago, but there’s no missing the sincerity in her voice. And, well, Ivy found articles that describe exactly what she told us. They never say her name, but it’s pretty easy to tell it’s her case.”

Ivy slid her phone across the counter, and the rest of us gathered around it, staring down at the screen like it was going to fill in all the missing pieces and answer every question we couldn’t yet vocalize.

I skimmed the details on the screen as Amanda scrolled through the article.

A woman in her early thirties was found by a group of teenagers. She’d been held hostage in the basement of an abandoned home. One of the teens called the cops and helped free the woman. It took one sentence, “Her injuries were consistent with a person who had been held without much food or water for several months,”for me to decide to skip the entire paragraph.

Amanda decided the same and kept scrolling.

The woman’s name wasn’t being released pending the investigation and for her own protection. At the bottom of the article, there was an update from two months ago.

“An arrest has been made in this case; however, the detectives refused to comment on the overall status of the investigation and the suspect’s motives.”

“They still haven’t released her name,” Reed muttered under his breath.

Without looking up from the screen, Amanda said, “Yeah, probably because her parents wouldn’t let that happen. I would bet my left tit that her parents paid a hefty amount to keep her name out of the paper.”

We all chuckled and shook our heads at Amanda’s comment but understood what it meant to her: that she was completely sure she was right.

Blakely didn’t share many details about her family. It was common knowledge that her parents weren’t her favorite people, but anything beyond that she hated to share.

Amanda shook her head and pushed the phone back across the counter to Ivy.

“I talked to her mom a lot right after she went missing. She promised she would call me if they ever heard anything, but she obviously didn’t do that.” With a deep breath, she continued staring into the living room and at the chair where Blakely had sat minutes before. “I searched her name so many times, and nothing ever came up. I was half terrified and half hopeful that one day something would come back. That I’d see her name or recognizesomethingthat would make all of it make sense. If I’d only known what to search for, maybe we would’ve figured it all out sooner.”

Amanda’s words hung in the air while the silence filtered back in. I didn’t mention the similar lengths I’d gone to to try to come up with the same answers.

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