5. Mattias

The Darlings didn't come back for lunch, which wasn't a surprise. But then they didn't come back for dinner either, and that was a surprise.

Grandma and I ate the chicken piccata I'd made for them, and then I'd worried they would just arrive at like seven and be annoyed I didn't have dinner ready and waiting.

But then, seven came and went.

And eight.

Grandma and I sat at the front counter, worried that maybe they'd gotten lost, even though the local trails were heavily traveled and hard to stray from—some of them were even freaking paved for joggers. But they weren't back.

"Child that age should probably be in bed by now," Grandma said, leaning on the counter, watching the door. She was worried about them too, and not just because she was jealous of one and wanted to be part of their picture-perfect family.

I was sure if I asked, she'd tell me she'd had her own picture perfect family, and wanted everyone to have that chance. Not necessarily with my mom, who'd been a troubled kid and left home, pregnant, to move in with her nearly thirty-year-old boyfriend at age sixteen, but with me. Because when the boyfriend had abandoned my mother just after I was born because it turned out babies were loud and annoying, my mother had basically dropped me in a box on her own parents' doorstep before taking off for parts unknown.

She'd been married three times since—that I knew about—but thankfully, had no more children after me. I doubted my grandparents could have raised a dozen more after me. They'd had to be frugal as it was, raising an extra child unexpectedly.

The door opened and we both perked up, expecting a tired and maybe not incredibly happy Darling family, ready for bed. Instead, it was Sheriff Miller and the elder Darlings.

Jessie was nowhere to be seen. My stomach felt like someone had dropped a boulder down my throat.

"I'm serious," the sheriff was telling Connor. "The best thing you can do right now is sleep. You're not going to do Jessie any good by staying up all night looking. We have people on all the trails, and you're not going to help them if you keep going till you drop of exhaustion and my people have to help you instead of doing their job."

"But Jessie won't recognize strangers," Connor said, sounding utterly broken. "What if they hide from them because they don't know them?"

"We have their name," the sheriff promised. "We know what we're looking for, and the second anyone sees them, we'll get you down there."

She didn't sound terribly hopeful, and I knew why. Everyone in Cider Landing knew why. Sometimes—not often, but often enough for us to have noticed—kids just disappeared. It wasn't especially more than in other places, but unlike in other places, no one ever found them, alive or otherwise. No one ever found out that the next-door neighbor was secretly a monster who killed children—no one like that had ever been found in Cider Landing, almost like the town repelled people like that. It was just like there was a magical child-stealing black hole in the woods.

I had a hazy memory from my early childhood that I sometimes wondered about. I'd been seven, and my mother had appeared out of nowhere with husband number two, a guy with money who wanted a ready-made family, because he couldn't have kids of his own. She'd basically offered me to him. She'd informed me we'd be leaving together, but my grandparents had calmed everyone down and sat them in the living room to "talk" about things.

Me? I'd run the hell away. Into the woods behind the inn, as far from my mother and her husband as I could get. And I'd cried, alone in the woods, till a bunch of kids had seemed to melt out of the forest. We'd spent the day playing pirates, and it had been some of the most fun I'd ever had in my life.

But then, at the end of the day, when I'd said I had to go home so Grandma and Grandpa wouldn't worry about me, they'd seemed confused. One of them, annoyed. Said I didn't need to go home. That I could just... stay.

And fuck me, but I'd been tempted. I'd had nightmares dancing in my head of my mother and her husband and a strange city and never seeing my family again. But that was what staying in the woods had been, too, wasn't it? If I didn't go home, I'd never have seen Grandma and Grandpa again, either, and even if I could do it to me, I couldn't do that to them.

By the time I'd gotten home, there had been search parties, very much like the ones out looking for Jessie right then.

Ironically, that had been the thing to convince my mother once again that kids were simply too much trouble, and she'd ended up abandoning both the idea of me, and her second husband. I always figured the poor guy had dodged a bullet and should look for someone who wasn't going to run off at the first sign of trouble.

Sometimes, I wondered how I was related to her or my father, since running away at the first problem was the only thing I knew of him, and she'd always done the same. But my grandparents had never done anything like that. They'd never backed down from challenges, always been strong and steady and present. And I liked to think I'd grown up to be the same.

Fashion dad came over and slumped against the front counter, Grandma leaning over to lay a hand on his shoulder. "My fault," he mumbled. "I should have just corrected her."

"Her?" Grandma asked, confused.

Connor wasn't having it, though. "No, Trev. This isn't about that. We both got distracted. This isn't all on you."

He came over and wrapped his arms around his husband and... and... fuck, I was sick. I was the worst person ever, because even then, in that moment, I was jealous of fashion—of Trev. I longed to have someone wrap his strong arms around me and tell me things weren't my fault.

But right then, that didn't matter. What I wanted was completely fucking irrelevant. "Is there anything we can do?" I asked Sheriff Miller. "We can make coffee for the searchers. And... I don't know. What else?"

"Coffee'd be great, Mattias, thank you," she answered with a grave nod. "We're centering the search down at the head of the old Eden Trail if you want to drop by with coffee. I'd better get back there and see how everyone's doing."

By the time I turned back to check on Connor and Trev Darling, Grandma was leading them upstairs, offering them some over the counter sleep aid if they wanted it. She'd been taking it the last few weeks, she promised, and it really did help, especially when you couldn't sleep without it.

I went to the kitchen and started boiling water for coffee. It was going to be a long night.