8. Mattias

Connor Darling was back in Cider Landing.

Word almost reached me before I saw him, Cider Landing was so small and gossipy.

My friend Mandy from the beauty parlor texted me as I was putting the last of the dirty linens in the washing machine, and I glanced down enough to see the beginning of her message, "You'll never believe who I just saw driving into town..."

The bell rang as I was starting the machine, though, and I shoved my phone in my pocket and headed out toward the counter. Grandma was still doing all the checking in, but I carried most of the bags these days. Not that she was sick or frail or... She was over seventy, for fuck's sake. The fact that she was still working at all was impressive.

She was fine. Absolutely fine.

I walked into the lobby to find Connor Darling standing at the counter. He was paler than last time I'd seen him, like he no longer spent time outdoors, and he had dark circles under his eyes. Little wonder. Cider Landing had fucking eaten his kid.

The wonder was that he was back at all. That he'd ever even considered coming back to the place that had fucked up his whole life.

I didn't like to go to the hospital since Grandpa had died. It just reminded me of the strongest man I'd ever known, lying frail and broken in a hospital bed, machines beeping all around him. And then worse, when they'd stopped beeping, turned off and useless. I couldn't imagine why Connor had come back here, to the place where something so horrible had happened to him.

"Show Mr. Darling up to the heron room, would you dear?" Grandma seemed strained, clearly concerned for Connor, but she wasn't going to tell him to get lost, obviously. No, she was probably going to smother him in brownies later on. Or whatever else she could make in the kitchen while he was... while he was probably out scouring the woods for his kid.

"Of course," I agreed, turning to him and finding only two bags. It was a bit of a change from last time, and all the heavy suitcases.

That was when I realized two things.

One was that Trev was conspicuously missing. The other was... well, the bags. One I vaguely remembered from the year before, just a plain black suitcase with nothing special about it. The other, the one that stood out, smaller and green with a big picture of that cartoon character Jessie had been so attached to. Froggo, the they frog.

Connor had brought Jessie's bag with him.

He wasn't here to remind himself of his horror, or relive it, or try to move on. He'd come back for Jessie. To keep looking for his missing kid.

My heart broke into a thousand pieces.

I dove down and snatched up the black suitcase, not leaving room or time for Connor to assure me he could handle it, but not willing to try to take away his kid's stuff, even just to carry it. "Right up here," I said, pretending to be a thousand times more chipper than I felt.

Why the hell hadn't I read Mandy's message before coming out? She was a terrible gossip, but not usually about pointless things. Only about important ones, like, oh, the dad of a missing kid come back to town a year after his kid first disappeared.

Should I ask about Trev? About how Connor was? About the Darling shipping conglomerate? Fuck, was there anything I could say to this man that wasn't a fucking land mine waiting to blow up in both our faces?

I started to open my mouth, not even sure what I was going to say, when Connor first clutched the Froggo bag to his chest, then set it down on the bed. "Yeah," he said, as though I'd asked the question it was obvious I wanted to. "I thought maybe... I thought I should have their stuff, if they wanted it. If, you know. Just in case."

I swallowed hard and forced myself to nod. "That makes sense."

I didn't point out that it had been a year, and if he managed to find Jessie, they'd have grown quite a lot. That didn't matter. No one thought he was going to find Jessie out there, including Connor. He just couldn't let go.

Who was I to question that?

Jessie was a kid. How could anyone just let go of that? How could the whole rest of his life not be about losing them? There was a reason that people who lost a child divorced so often. It wasn't really about the kid, and I doubted Connor and Trev had less in common now than they had before. But every day for the rest of their lives would be a reminder of what they'd once had and didn't anymore. How did a couple get over that?

Trev wasn't there either.

Not that they were divorcing. Connor was still wearing his wedding ring, Trev just wasn't with him. Which honestly, was also understandable. If I were one of them, I might have been with Trev. I didn't know how Connor could come to Cider Landing and not just want to raze the place to the ground, screaming out his rage at the unjust world taking his kid away.

Just thinking about Jessie's golden locks and enormous blue eyes made me want to cry. I loved Cider Landing more than anything, and in that moment, I also hated it a little. If Connor asked me to, I might have helped him burn it to the ground for taking away his baby.

But he didn't. He just gave me a strained smile, nodding and running his fingers over the frog on Jessie's bag.

I couldn't make myself say anything to him about it. Nothing comforting, nothing about staying strong or letting himself break apart and then healing or... what the hell did I know about his situation? Nothing. I had no right.

I cleared my throat after a moment. "If there's anything I can do for you, just let me know. Any time. I'm always around. Just yell. Or—or call." I grabbed the inn's card off the entry table—we always left one there for new guests—wrote my personal cell number on it with the pen next to the phone notepad, and held it out to him. "There. That's my number. You can text if you don't like calling."

He smiled and took the card, nodding to me.

Neither of us said another word as I rushed out. Had I been weird and needy? Did he think I was flirting even though he was married? I'd never do that. I didn't think he would either. He'd been nice to me last year, but not weirdly so for a married guy.

No. It was fine. Everything was fine.

Except a five-year-old kid was gone, and no one knew why.

I drifted back downstairs to find Grandma sitting at the counter going over the inn ledger. She looked up, concerned. "Is Mr. Darling all right?"

"Honestly, Grandma? I have no idea. I'm not sure if he knows either."

"Don't be silly dear, of course he doesn't. He's lucky he remembers which way is up or down right now. Poor dear. I can't imagine what we'd have done if we hadn't found you—that day."

I blinked rapidly. Almost twenty years, and she still remembered the day I'd run away with something that looked like fear on her face. Meanwhile Jessie Darling had been missing for a year.

A shiver ran through me, and I shook my head. Even if Jessie Darling came out of the woods tomorrow, hale and whole and somehow untraumatized, nothing would ever be the same again.