Page 97 of At the Edge of Surrender

Reshapen.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised to find a book full of a lifetime of pictures that we’d shared with our best friend, Jana. I had a million of them, too.

But it was the jumble of news articles that she had clipped that had left me unsettled. Some printed from online, others cut from actual newspapers and magazines. Every mention of her disappearance from when she’d been stolen away from us. All the speculations and hypotheses.

Maybe the hardest part was knowing we’d been intended on being stolen away, too.

We’d made it out.

We were safe.

But Jana…she was gone.

The thing I hadn’t known was that Emmalee had clearly become obsessed. The unintelligible notes she had scrawled in a frantic hand. As if she’d thought she could sift through the debris and bring her back to us.

My chest squeezed in a fit of pain.

Except that was impossible.

We’d all known it.

I kept flipping through the disorder, the pictures of predators that she’d printed and glued into the book, the notes she’d written around them.

I flipped the book shut, then hesitated as I glanced down at my bag, not sure if I even wanted to delve into whatever Emmalee had been involved in. But I pulled out her tablet, anyway, sliding my thumb across the screen and bringing it to life.

I inputted the passcode that we had always used for everything and easily gained access.

Her files mostly contained things for her boutique, Ivy Threads. Vendor receipts and financial information.

But it was the one file that was buried and locked that had left me itching. What had given me that strange sense that Emmalee might have been hiding something. That she might have been in trouble.

It was only labeled with a date.

The date we’d been saved. The same date as we’d lost Jana.

And no matter how many hundreds of different passwords I’d tried, I couldn’t get inside.

“What were you doing, Emmalee?” I whispered into the nothingness.

Pain gripped me when I had to accept that she would never answer back.

Blowing out the strain, I slammed the lid shut and stuffed it back into the bag. When I did, my fingertips brushed over the velvet bag that I’d also stuffed at the bottom. The velvet bag that I’d found in her things. The velvet bag that had been stolen from my drawer in my bedroom.

Why had she taken it? Maybe in her obsession she’d needed the single, tangible thing that remained of that night. I just wished she would have told me rather than me thinking I’d been going crazy when I found it missing. I would have happily given it to her, but I guessed she thought she needed to sneak it since I’d never admitted to her that I had it.

Fighting off the anxiety, I stood from the chair.

There was no chance I’d be able to go back to sleep any time soon, so I crept across the room and slipped through the door I’d left open a crack in case Maci needed me, then I tiptoed to hers that rested halfway open.

I stopped at the threshold and peered inside.

A nightlight that cast a million stars onto the ceiling and walls gently lit it, and my sweet niece was tucked beneath the covers, her face turned toward me where she was lost to the abyss of sleep.

Her facial features lax, her lips parted with her soft, steady breaths.

Completely at peace.

Love sped through my being. A tidal wave that nearly knocked me from my feet.

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