Free Since She Went Away by David Bell Page B

Ursula, or maybe Ian. I called Ian finally, and he reported her missing. He thought she was with me. I thought she was with him. And then later I found out she thought someone might have been following her. She never told me that, so it hit home that we weren’t as close. I could have picked her up. We could have done it all differently.”
    “Wow. I’m sorry, honey. But you can’t beat yourself up over that. It’s just . . . a coincidence. A horrible coincidence, but that’s all it is.”
    “I try to tell myself that.”
    “Are you sure she didn’t run away?” Sally asked. “You know people say things. They speculate. Would she leave her life that way?”
    “Leave her child?” Jenna asked. “Like I said, she wasn’t a perfect mom. And Ursula, her daughter . . . she’s shown it a little bit.”
    “Wild?”
    “Not that so much,” Jenna said. “Just . . . unhappy, I guess. Kind of an angry kid once she hit her teenage years. A couple of weeks after Celia disappeared, she got into a fight with a girl at school. No big deal, really. No one was hurt. They pulled Ursula off the other girl before it got too bad.”
    “And if her mother just disappeared, you could understand her anger.”
    “Sure. Look, Celia could be impulsive. She could be emotional. Every once in a while, she’d get mad at me and shut me out. She did it about four years ago.”
    “Why?”
    “We were out with friends, and I mentioned this guy she hooked up with in college. She and Ian were on a break back then, and I thought all our friends knew she had this thing with this guy on the swim team. Apparently not everyone did. She froze me out for two weeks. I didn’t even know what my crime was.”
    “So she had some places she wouldn’t let people go.”
    “Doesn’t everybody?”
    But Sally looked as though she had something else on her mind, something else she wanted to say.
    “What?” Jenna asked.
    “It’s nothing. It’s—I’m sure you’ve thought of it. It’s kind of a morbid thought.”
    Jenna didn’t push her, but she knew exactly what Sally was thinking. She knew the same question lurked in the minds of everybody in town. Yes, if Jenna had been on time, Celia might not have been taken.
    But what if she’d been on time and suffered the same fate?
    That scenario ran through Jenna’s mind at least one hundred times a day. She couldn’t count the number of nights she lay in bed, the room and the house dark, the red glow from the bedside clock in her peripheral vision. She felt the guilt—and she felt a painful, almost sickeningly sweet sense of relief.
    What if she’d been there? And what if she’d been the one taken away?
    And every time Jenna considered her life—all the things she had and all the things she would have left behind. Like Jared. Her mother.
    Everything.
    And she always reached the same conclusion: When push comes to shove, she wouldn’t have traded her life for Celia’s. No way. No way.

CHAPTER TWELVE
 
    T he rain let up, but Jared didn’t notice. He walked through Caldwell Park, his feet splashing through small puddles, which would soon be turning to ice, the sweat from his exertion drying and cooling against his skin. His heart still thudded but was slowing down, and the frantic energy that had been running through his body since he first approached Tabitha’s house wound down like a clock with a dying battery.
    He couldn’t believe he’d thrown a rock through Tabitha’s window.
    They couldn’t have seen him, could they? He felt sick to his stomach, like a child in trouble with his parents. Which made him think of home. He pulled out his phone.
    His mom would be freaked. He wandered around in the cold and the wet while she sat at home stewing. And they hadn’t even talked about Tabitha, about her being in the house. In his room, on top of him after school.
    Hell, that was unlikely to ever happen again. If she knew or suspected he’d been spying on her and then busted her kitchen