Page 74 of The Followers

Ella and Chloe are here at my apartment for the evening.

Liv braced herself for a tirade about getting too enmeshed in Ella’s life. Thank god she hadn’t mentioned anything to him about Molly’s discovery.

But Oliver replied:

FaceTime me? I want to see her.

She dialed Oliver. He immediately picked up, his face coming through on her phone’s screen, eyes wide, and hair disheveled.

“Ollie?” she said, trying to keep her voice casual. The girls didn’t need to know this was anything other than a simple brother-sister chat. “We’re making cookies, want to see?”

“Sure,” he said, and she recognized the forced casualness in his voice, too.

She held the phone up so he could see the room. “Chloe, this is my brother Ollie.”

“Hi Ollie-wollie-pollie-mollie,” Chloe sang, waving her sticky hands at the phone.

Oliver raised one hand. “Hello there.”

“And this is Ella.” Liv turned the phone to Ella, but kept her eyes on the screen, waiting for the moment when Oliver saw their niece.

“Hi,” Ella said, looking at the phone under her bangs.

Oliver’s eyebrows raised, just a fraction. He cleared his throat before speaking. “What are you making, Ella?”

“Chocolate chip cookies.”

Oliver’s expression remained serious. “Livi used to make those for me when we were little.”

“Livi?” Ella glanced over at Liv, grinning. “Is that your nickname?”

“Yep,” Liv said. “Ollie and Livi, that was us.”

She glanced at her brother on the phone screen, then felt the smile fade from her face as she saw his expression. Her brother’s eyes glistened with tears. “What other things do you like to do, G—Ella?” His voice caught on the last word.

Ella didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, read. Play with my dog. Draw. Stuff like that.” She brushed her hair out of her face with her forearm, then set another ball of dough on the cookie sheet. “Is this good?” she asked Liv.

Liv nodded, unable to respond. Her brother, her niece, talking; it was all so ordinary, so normal, that it made her chest ache. “Really good. Let me finish with Ollie, and I’ll be right back to help you get it in the oven.”

She walked to the opposite side of the room, near the beige sofa, and kept her voice low as she spoke to her brother again. “What do you think?”

“She’s like Kristina.” Oliver’s voice sounded thick, and he cleared his throat. “Not so much how she looks, but how she talks. Her mannerisms, her expressions.”

“Do you get it now? Why I can’t leave her?”

“Yes.” His voice carried far more weight than the simple word. “Yes, I do. And it’s why I think we need to turn Sam Howard in.”

“What?” she said. It felt like a punch to the gut. “We can’t, Oliver. You know that. It would ruin everything for Ella.”

“Gabriela,” Oliver corrected. “Her name is Gabriela. And she is our niece. You’ve been distracted, playing house with your new man and hanging with your new bestie, but none of this is going to last, Liv. You know that. We need a long-term solution to keep Gabriela in our lives.”

“What are you talking about? What long-term solution?” She looked past his face, saw the background, an unfamiliar space. “Where are you? That’s not your apartment.”

Oliver shrugged. “You asked me to go open Kristina’s safe deposit box. That’s what I’m doing.”

Liv studied him, the faint blush spreading up his neck to his ears. “Ollie... are you at Elton’s?”

He pressed his lips together, his eyes shifting to the side. That was answer enough for Liv, and she broke into a grin.

---