Chapter 1 - OUT OF THE WOODS
The second I got home from work, I saw my seven-year-old daughter stumbling out of the woods behind our house with her baby brother in her arms.
She was barefoot.
Scratched raw.
Shaking under the weight of a toddler nearly half her size.
For one terrible second, my brain refused to understand what my eyes were seeing.
Maisy’s pink shirt was torn at the shoulder.
One shoe was gone.
Dirt streaked her cheeks.
There was blood smeared across the bottoms of her feet where the woods had chewed her up.
Theo was slumped against her chest, hot-faced and whimpering, his little hand tangled in her collar.
I had left both of my children with my parents that morning.
Because I thought there was no safer place in the world.
My mother, Linda Whitaker, had called at 6:15 a.m. after Maisy’s day camp canceled for a water-line repair.
“Bring them here,” she said. “I’m their grandmother. Stop acting like you have to do everything alone.”
I was tired enough to believe kindness.
So I packed snacks, diapers, Theo’s fever medicine just in case, Maisy’s favorite unicorn hoodie, and drove them to my parents’ old farmhouse two miles beyond our street, on the other side of the state woods.
I kissed both children goodbye.
Theo cried when I left.
Maisy waved from the porch.
My father, Raymond, stood behind her holding coffee in one hand and my mother’s grocery list in the other.
Normal.
Safe.
Family.
Nine hours later, my daughter came out of the trees like something the world had tried to bury.
“Maisy!”
I dropped my work bag in the driveway and ran.
She tried to keep walking when she saw me, as if her body had forgotten it was allowed to stop.
I reached her halfway across the yard.
The moment my arms closed around her, she collapsed against me but still would not let go of Theo.
“Baby, give him to me.”
She shook her head so hard her tangled hair hit her cheeks.
“No. No, Mommy. I have him.”
“I know. You did so good. Let me help.”
Her lips were cracked white at the edges.
Her small arms trembled.
Theo’s skin burned against my wrist when I touched his forehead.
Too hot.
Dangerously hot.
I pulled both of them down into the grass and took Theo carefully, but Maisy kept one hand clamped around his blanket.
As if someone might snatch him back into the trees.
“What happened?” I asked.
Maisy looked over my shoulder toward the woods.
Her eyes were too old for seven.
“Grandma left us in the car.”
My stomach went cold.
“What?”
“She said we had to wait. She locked it. Theo cried. It got hot. I told her. She said to be quiet.”
Theo whimpered against my chest.
I fumbled for my phone with shaking hands and dialed 911.
Maisy began sobbing without sound.
Then she said the thing that made the hair rise on the back of my neck.
“Grandpa came outside wrong.”
I pressed the phone harder to my ear.
“What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“He was scary. He said we had to get back in. He said Grandma needed it to look real.”
My breath stopped.
The dispatcher answered.
I gave my address.
My children’s condition.
The words hot car.
Woods.
Baby fever.
Possible crime.
My own voice sounded calm.
I do not know how.
Maybe mothers become machines when terror is too large for the body.
Maisy clung to my sleeve.
“Mommy,” she whispered, “he had my shoe.”
The dispatcher asked me to repeat that.
I could not.
Because from somewhere deep in the woods behind our house, a man shouted once.
Not a child.
Not a neighbor.
A grown man.
Then branches cracked.
Maisy screamed.
I pulled both children behind me and backed toward the porch.
The dispatcher said deputies were on the way.
May you like
I looked at the tree line.
And for the first time in my life, I was afraid of my own father.
