No one answered.
Riley paused, half crouched, her hand on the doorknob. She breathed hard before rolling up on her toes and squinting through the peephole.
There could have been someone there, but Riley couldn’t tell through the blackness. She couldn’t remember if the porch light had a bulb yet.
Had someone taken it? Had it ever been there to begin with?
Her heart started to pound, her mind throbbing, clogging with images: a police officer, come to take her away; Seamus and Abigail O’Leary, wringing their hands while looking for their daughter Jane; a lackey for her parents, certain they knew what Riley had found.
Stop being a paranoid freak, she commanded herself.
She was breathing hard now, her runaway mind pretzeling her body into a panic attack. She felt the telltale beads of sweat on her upper lip and at her hairline. Her chest felt as if it had been wrapped tight, every breath she tried to take an exhausting effort.
“I’m OK, I’m OK.” She spat out the mantra Dr. Morley had told her to say, and concentrating on the words did calm her, slowly, each syllable carefully chipping away at the block that held down Riley’s lungs. She paced the front room, peeking out the long window there to see that there was no one on the porch, no one parked on the streets.
A glitch, Riley decided. The bell had rung due to a mechanical glitch.
When she was breathing normally again, deep breaths in, long breaths out, she double-checked the lock on the door. It was locked. Riley had initially liked the thick, heavy bolt on the door, but that little niggling voice in the back of her head was suddenly wondering whether it was there to keep the bad people out—or in.
Back upstairs, Riley shoved the birth certificate aside and yanked her biology book closer. She was done being Nancy Drew—an errant doorbell had nearly made her pee her pants—but it was what was on her computer screen that caused the blood in her veins to run ice-water cold.
The headline letters were thick, an almost throbbing red. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? The picture underneath was a grainy black and white of a chubby, round-cheeked baby girl. There was no name, no contact number, no additional information.
“Oh my God,” Riley breathed. “My God.”
Riley didn’t recognize the baby—nothing about her seemed familiar—but her black eyes were round and wide.
Trusting.
My sister?
She found herself leaning in and pulling the laptop closer as she scrutinized the screen. Did this baby have her eyes, a lopsided smile like her own?
Her stomach started to churn, bile burning at the back of her throat.
Or is that me? The phrase zipped through Riley’s head, was gone before she had a chance to catch it.
She shoved the computer from her as though it were a snake, coiled and ready to bite. But it wasn’t the child or the missing poster that scared her the most—it was how the webpage ended up on her screen.
With trembling fingers, she pulled down her web browser history, alternately praying for some easy explanation or for the photo to disappear—or to never have existed at all. The history popped up as quickly as it faded out when the screen went black.
The lights zapped out.
Riley went to the window. Her heart was beating in her throat, pounding in her ears, the sound like thundering footsteps. Her whole body was humming with adrenaline electricity, but all of that stopped when she saw the figure in the front seat of the dark car parked in front of her driveway. Her breath was choked, strangling. She wanted to pound the window, she wanted to scream, but her voice was lost in the gunning engine of the car. Her cry was muffled by the pinching squeal of tires speeding off into the darkness.
? ? ?
Riley didn’t remember falling asleep.