“So you’re warning me?” she asked, trying to sound amused. “Otherwise he’ll take me off to his lair and have his way with me?”
“No, just, be careful.” Silas’s tone was edged in frustration. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
Her heart softened. At least she could understand where Silas was coming from. She patted him on the shoulder, “I will be. I have to go, though. Talk to you later?”
She didn’t care if Silas approved of her relationship with Gavin or not. She wanted to help Gavin and Emma, and if there was a way to do it, she’d figure out the way to accomplish just that.
Chapter Four
After the closet incident, as Gavin had dubbed it, Emma seemed to bounce back to her mostly normal self. She’d admitted to Gavin that she’d been afraid that “the people were coming to get her.” When he’d pressed her to explain, she’d clammed up and refused to say any more. She hadn’t said anything more about what had happened, and although part of him wanted to understand his daughter, another part was hopeful she could get past this and they could somehow make a normal life for themselves in Heron’s Landing.
Now, a few weeks after the closet incident, Gavin sat in Emma’s second-grade classroom for the semester’s parent-teacher conference. Emma’s teacher, Mrs. Gentry, was a woman in her late thirties who looked more like she was fifty, mostly because she wore her hair in the tightest bun Gavin had ever seen and wore clothes that were probably older than Gavin himself. Mrs. Gentry had recently divorced, and sometimes Gavin wondered if she hated him on sight for being male.
Really, he couldn’t blame her. Apparently her husband had cheated on her with his much-younger secretary and subsequently run off to Hawaii, secretary and divorce papers in tow. Mrs. Gentry hadn’t changed her name back, though, and it created an odd contrast with the woman sitting in front of him: uptight and stiff and prickly, yet with the salutation of a woman who wanted everyone to acknowledge that she was, in fact, connected to a man.
“Mr. Danvers,” she said, shuffling through her papers. “Thank you for coming in. I know a lot of parents don’t love these conferences, but I find them hugely beneficial to make certain we are all on the same page as educators and parents. First off, do you have any questions or concerns for me?”
He wanted to ask if this woman understood that Emma was a child to be treated with both delicacy and care, and he wanted to know if she could be that person for his daughter. He wanted to ask how the school had managed to lose his daughter, only for her to be discovered in a closet by a teacher who was only passing by. He wanted to know if he’d ever get his daughter back from wherever she’d disappeared to.
“How is Emma doing?” he asked instead.
Mrs. Gentry pursed her thin lips. “Let me assure you that Emma is a bright child, and she’s at the level she should be in all subjects, although she seems to excel most at reading and the language arts. I will say, I’ve had to tell her to put a book away during class. I applaud her interest in reading, but she needs to understand there’s a time and a place for reading, as well.”
He almost smiled at this. Emma reminded him of himself in that regard: always cracking open a book instead of listening to a teacher drone on and on. He’d gotten so many demerits and detentions when he’d been caught with a book during class hours; he’d always wanted to say that if teachers didn’t want students reading, they shouldn’t make class so painfully boring.
“I’ll let Emma know that reading shouldn’t be done when the teacher is talking. That being said,” he couldn’t help but add, “I don’t want to discourage her from reading in general.”
Mrs. Gentry scribbled a note on the paper in front of her. “Certainly not. I know how much of a struggle it can be to get kids to read these days, especially with phones and the Internet and TV distracting them. Books are boring, they tell me. It’s a pleasure to see Emma remaining interested in reading.”
Gavin sensed a but to that sentence. He glanced up to look at the banner above the whiteboard, which read Celebrate each other! in bold font. There were other art projects pinned to the walls, from self-portraits to various other kinds of drawings of animals, people, and—was that a tractor? Mrs. Gentry’s classroom was decorated in bright primary colors, at odds with the neutral-colored clothes she wore, her hair a similarly neutral ash brown.
But all that dissipated when she tapped her pen against the desk, like she was trying to figure out how to give him some kind of bad news. He almost sighed. Why was it always bad news? For once, he wanted to talk to someone and have them only say, “Everything’s great! Don’t worry about anything.”
“As I’ve mentioned, Emma is clearly an intelligent child. But her shyness means she has few, if any, friends. I rarely see her playing with other children; on the playground, she’s usually by herself reading a book. I hoped that as the school year continued, she would warm up to her classmates, but nothing much has changed. I conferred with Ms. McMurry, and she confirms that Emma acted similarly when she was in her class. And now the incident a few weeks ago, and her behavior lately…” Mrs. Gentry pushed her glasses up her long, thin nose. “I must admit that, overall, I find Emma to be a rather odd child.”
Gavin gritted his teeth so hard that his jaw ached. He knew Emma had issues, but Jesus Christ, did her own teacher have to single her out like this?
“She’s shy,” he replied, his voice surprisingly calm despite his desire to throttle the woman in front
