I take a deep breath, steel myself for whatever waits inside, and I walk up to the door. I grab the handle and pull.
VANESSA
Vanessa tramps through the cedar-branch-lined floor of the little bit of forest. She can’t help but let her mind wander back to what Jeff had once said about them catching on fire. All it would take is a sturdy lightning bolt and a stiff wind. They’d be done for.
At the edge of the tree line, she can see the group of FBI agents preparing themselves. They aren’t going to wait much longer. One of them holds a bull horn. He brings it to his mouth.
“Tom,” he says. “This is Wyatt. We need you to come out right now.”
Time is limited, Vanessa realizes. She has to find Birdie. There has to be a way. She’s thought about this for so long—wanted a child for so long—and now it’s her time. She was meant to be a mother, as some women are. She was never meant to be the wife of a professor, entertaining grad students and graciously looking the other way when he cupped their asses with more tenderness than he’d ever shown her. She was meant to be with someone like Mark. Someone that cared about the idea of a family together under a roof, loving each other, and never ever lying.
Except she knows that wasn’t entirely true. She and Mark had done their fair share of lying. But she also wonders if they had met in some other manner, if any of that lying would have been necessary. Could they have been faithful to each other? Could she have been true?
She thinks so.
The thought alone is enough to keep her feet moving forward. What if she could get back to the city? What if she could get back to Mark with this baby? A peace offering for what happened in the end.
The idea is nebulous, the ways in which it connects itself to reality are frail, but Vanessa clings to it like a lover in the darkness.
“Tom,” the FBI man’s voice booms over the loudspeaker. “I’m trying to help you out here. We just want to help the girl who’s pregnant and the journalist. Just let the two of them come out.”
Ione could die in a firestorm of bullets for all that Vanessa cares. Hell, she might even like to watch. But Birdie is another story. Birdie carries something precious to her, and to Tom. And it’s that thought which spurs Vanessa to strain her eyes. She has to find the girl before Tom does.
She turns her back on the flood lights that are unable to penetrate through the cedar trees. She steps carefully, though twigs and branches snap beneath her weight. She hears something to her right. Someone else. She stills herself.
In the darkness, she can only make out a shadow. Male or female, she can’t tell.
Crouching, her muscles begin to cramp, and she quickly loses her footing, falling to the ground in the copse of trees.
“Shit,” she mutters.
The shadow figure is gone before she can get another look, leaving her seemingly alone. The little imitation of a forest is anything but quiet. Things—animals—rustle on the ground and birds call to each other in the trees. She wonders if they’re warning each other. What would they have to be afraid of so high above everything?
She listens for a moment. The sound of someone else is gone. She’s alone once more.
Vanessa steps through the cedars, each branch tickling her arm in an unwanted caress. She continues to move forward. Finally, she sees a break in the coverage. The little white studio stands not too far away. She can see it again.
The clearing seems large, vulnerable. She has to chance it.
With a quick step, she jogs across the red dirt to the building.
Vanessa grasps the splintered wooden rod that serves as a handle on the rickety screen door. Behind it, she fights with the rusty brass doorknob, surely installed more than half a century ago. For a moment she realizes that the doorknobs in the house they have built will look like these someday. The thought is funny to her in a strange way. She smiles to herself and turns the knob. It creaks, screaming with the pain of years of abandonment. She lets the door squeal open on its aching hinges, arthritic from so many winters exposed to the elements.
“Birdie?” she calls the girl’s name softly.
She hears a stack of paintings clatter to the ground and begins to walk to the easternmost side of the building.
The scurry of feet pricks her ears like a dog’s. She’s alert, ready to hunt the girl down. Ready to take what’s rightfully hers.
VANESSA
7 YEARS AGO
Tom and Vanessa had tried for a child before. They’d never successfully gotten pregnant and it was something that made Vanessa’s heart ache with a hollowness she couldn’t describe. But two weeks after the explosive fight with Mark at the party, Vanessa threw up at approximately 5:45 in the morning one Saturday.
It was when the sickness repeated itself the next day that she was thrilled. She didn’t dare let herself go down that primrose path without proof. She went to the drugstore and bought a three pack of pregnancy tests. She waited until the appropriate time and took them all, just to be sure.
And she was.
They all came back positive.
Things were rocky between her and Tom. She doubted his faithfulness still, even after the fight with Mark. She had stopped seeing his former friend, but less out of loyalty to Tom and more out of guilt for what Mark might have to sacrifice for her.
Before she told Tom, she wanted to be absolutely certain. She wanted a blood test. So, she got one. It, too, came back positive.
Her heartbeat quickened when she got the call, and then a calmness descended over
