Free The Off Season by Colleen Thompson Page A

try—”
    When the call disconnected, Christina rolled her eyes at her sister’s hopeless technical skills. Figuring Annie would call back, Christina walked to the front window and opened the blinds, then squinted until her eyes adjusted.
    The remaining snow had melted, leaving behind puddles and muddy patches that reflected the winter sun. Across the empty street, the gently sloping beach—a wide ribbon now, at low tide—had attracted a host of long-legged shorebirds, all busy pecking the mirrored strip bordering the relatively calm Atlantic.
    There was something hypnotic in the feathered hunters’ rhythm, the way they trotted farther out when the blue-gray water ebbed, and then ran for drier sand as it washed their way again. Christina stood taking it in for several minutes, struggling to focus on nothing but the rush and retreat of her own breathing. She realized that during the entire six weeks she’d lived here, this was the first and only time she’d allowed herself to enjoy this privileged view.
    I should show Doug.
    The thought had bubbled to the surface, a lost artifact of her marriage. But instead of making her sad, she felt the sharp bite of her own anger that he would never be around to share anything with again. Even when he’d been alive, he’d rarely been available, instead spending long hours at work and gripped by his increasingly obsessive interest in running, bicycling, and swimming. In the triathlon training that had killed him . . .  because he had to get away from you.
    Grateful when the phone interrupted her thoughts, she snatched it up again, only to see that it wasn’t Annie calling, but Renee’s photo flashing on the screen.
    “Hi, Renee, is everything all—”
    “I called the ambulance! It’s—” Renee cried, the words so garbled they were almost impossible to understand. “Where are they? I can’t—”
    Christina’s heart leaped through her chest. Was Lilly hurt? How badly? How would she survive if her daughter, too, was—
    “Where are you, Renee?” she asked, speaking with a calm that belied her racing pulse. “What’s going on?”
    Her grip tightened as Renee sobbed into the phone. Christina struggled to comprehend what she was saying, but she could only pick out a few words . . .
    Her daughter’s name among them.

CHAPTER SIX
    “Christina, this is Harris,” he told her after pulling the phone from his incoherent ex-wife’s grip. He wished he’d been able to stop her before she’d made the call. But what he’d seen on entering the Kid Zone, after racing there following a frantic call from the manager, had slammed him like a two-by-four across the shoulders. “I’m sending an officer to your house, lights and siren.”
    “Is it Lilly? Is she—has something happened to my—”
    “Lilly’s fine,” he assured her. “It’s Jacob.” My son. My best buddy. He glanced toward the spot where a registered nurse who’d happened to be there with her own kids was kneeling at his three-year-old’s side while Renee sobbed and clutched his hand. The shock of seeing Jacob, pale and unmoving, snaked across Harris’s nerve endings, all of them sparking like downed wires.
    “What’s going on?” Christina demanded. “Harris, talk to me. Was there a car wreck? Or are you at the—”
    “The Kid Zone, yeah.” He shook his head, distracted by the flashing lights and the beeping backup warning of an ambulance approaching the glassed-in front entrance. “Sorry. EMTs just pulled up. It was a fall, Christina, off one of those padded tube things—I can’t even imagine how he got up on top of it, much less slipped off and hit his head, but there’s a huge lump on the side. Blood, not a lot, but—”
    “Is he conscious? Moving?”
    Her seriousness, her focus, reminded him that he was talking to an experienced emergency physician.
    “He hasn’t said a word,” Harris told her, “but he—he moaned and pushed me away when I tried to blot the bump with a