Chapter Three
After parking in the underground garage of my apartment building, I took the elevator to the sixth floor, snacks in hand. I could smell the pizza as soon as I stepped into the hallway. We had a Friday night tradition in my house.
One that apparently started without me if I was late.
Before I could fully unlock the door, it swung open, revealing my smiling best friend and a giggling four-year-old girl with a mop of dark ringlets. “Popcorn!” the little girl squealed as she smashed into my thighs and threw her arms around me.
Francesca grabbed the door before it could hit Juliet in the back of the head.
“My name is Caroline,” I told the top of the little girl’s head. “Not popcorn.”
She kept her arms around me, but looked up at me with another one of her contagious laughs bubbling out of her. “I like Popcorn better,” she told me.
I cupped one side of her angelic face. “Me too.”
Francesca waved her arm frantically. “All right, Princess Unicorn, let Popcorn in the door so we can eat.”
Juliet stepped on my toes so I could walk her all the way into our apartment. “Princess Unicorn?” I asked with one eyebrow raised.
“Aunt Francesca wanted me to be Princess Poop!” she exclaimed with equal parts outrage and amusement.
That didn’t surprise me at all.
I turned to my best—and to be honest, the argument could be made she was my only—friend in the entire world and glared at her. “Really, Francesca? Princess Poop?”
Leaning on the kitchen island, she grinned at me. “What?”
“I don’t even know where to start with you.”
Her smile stretched wider. “Hey now. If anyone knows anything about being a princess it’s me.”
“Why Aunt Francesca?” Juliet asked all innocent eyes and sheltered childhood.
Francesca held Juliet’s earnest gaze and with all the gravity and truth in the world said, “Because I used to be a princess.”
“No way!” Juliet squealed. She swiveled back to me. “Mommy, is that true? Did Aunt Francesca really used to be a princess?”
I hugged Juliet closer to me, hating that Francesca had brought up our past, hated that she’d invoked the ghosts that still haunted both of us. “She was a princess a very, very long time ago.”
Juliet’s energy was contagious though and it was hard not to smile when my daughter’s head swiveled back and forth between us so quickly. “For real? The crown and the dress and the whole big castle?”
I shared a look with Francesca and mouthed for real. I was a single mom and the only help I had with raising Juliet was Francesca. We all lived together in our three-bedroom apartment that we’d had since before Juliet was born. The only outside influence Juliet had was from her daycare and preschool. And while she occasionally came home saying funny things she’d picked up at those places, the majority of her dialogue was copied from Francesca and me.
This sometimes made for interesting emails from teachers. They didn’t encourage their kids to jump to their feet during naptime and shout, “Would the real Slim Shady please stand up?”
I blamed Francesca for that one.
The bad influence in question flicked open the pizza boxes, revealing our usual order of Thai Pie for us and another with cheese and olives for Juliet—which Francesca and I would inevitably finish later tonight around midnight. We’d tell Juliet that the pizza trolls ate it while she was sleeping.
I was a good mom like eighty-five percent of the time. Then there was that fifteen percent that was all lies so I could eat her snacks and not feel bad about the calories.
Everybody knew kid calories didn’t count.
Said the woman that just talked herself off the Cherry Coke ledge.
“You got me there, kid. I didn’t have a crown or dress,” Francesca admitted.
Juliet left me to take a seat at the kitchen island, across from her aunt. “Those are the best part!”
Francesca tilted her head back and forth, not convinced. She refused to wear dresses when we were kids. Hell, she still refused to wear dresses. “I had something better.”
Juliet’s eyes widened. “What did you have?”
Some of the light dimmed in Francesca’s eyes and her mouth twitched with the effort to keep smiling. “I had power.”
“And?” Juliet pushed, not at all impressed with that word.
Francesca felt that too, so she upped the ante. “And I had servants.”
Juliet threw her head back and giggled again. It was impossible to tell if she believed Francesca or not, but at least she was entertained. For my part, I half expected the Frisco Police Department to bang on our door any second and demand to know exactly what Francesca was princess of.
That would be an interesting conversation.
“What are we watching tonight?” I asked in an effort to change the subject.
Juliet didn’t hesitate. She threw her hands up and shouted too loudly for our paper-thin apartment walls. "Princess Bride!”
I shot Francesca a helpless look. “Again?”
“It’s the theme for tonight. Also, it’s her favorite,” Francesca defended. “Look at that face? How am I supposed to tell her no?”
I hadn’t even set my purse and bag of goodies down or made it past the entryway. But when Juliet looked up at me, blinking her brilliant blue eyes, I knew she was going to get whatever she wanted no matter what. That was power. She might not have understood the meaning of the word, but she had it.
All joking aside, I did think of myself as a good mom that eighty-five percent of the time. I disciplined when necessary. I didn’t spoil her. She had an unwavering bedtime and age-appropriate chores. But whenever she gave me that puppy dog look with those big, dewy eyes I just couldn’t resist, she got her way.
So maybe I spoiled her more than I liked to admit.
She was still a good kid.
I dropped my purse next to my shoes and prepared myself to be dominated by the four-year-old I was supposed to be in charge of.
Folding her hands in front of her, she blinked rapidly and whispered, “Please, Mommy?”
Done. Dead. She slayed me.
Struggling to keep my stern expression I said, “As you wish, Princess Poop.”
The three of us erupted in silly laughter, relaxing into the evening and forgetting about the rest of the outside world, then got busy with our Friday night o’ fun. After pizza, we curled up together on the couch and shared popcorn and candy. Juliet fell asleep halfway through the movie, but Francesca and I kept watching. We always did.
This had been our routine for at least three years. Ever since Juliet had the attention span for TV. I didn’t let her watch very much of it during the week, but Friday night was all about the movie.
I had always loved our ritual, this night that we made our own. In the beginning, Francesca didn’t always stick around for the whole movie or eat pizza with us, preferring to be alone or with some random hookup. But now it was as much her night as it was ours.
We were a family. Not a conventional one or even one made by blood, but we looked out for each other, we supported each other and we protected each other. I knew from experience that blood could be bought and loyalty wasn’t an inherited trait. Francesca was my family because she picked me and I picked her and there was nothing in this world that could make us let go.
It had always felt safe with just the three of us, disconnected from the rest of the world as we made a life for ourselves in this valley. That was how we wanted it. When Francesca and I settled here, we made the conscious choice to keep our lives small, but normal.
Something neither Francesca nor I had ever had before.
Except tonight felt strange. I pulled my sleeping daughter closer to my side and pondered the note I’d found on my car at the gas station. Was it worth bringing up to Francesca?
Or was I being paranoid?
Fine, I knew I was being paranoid. I was always paranoid. Being paranoid had kept me alive for twenty-five years. I wasn’t going to quit on the one thing that was working for me.
But was this worth uprooting our lives and starting over for?
That was a conversation I wasn’t ready to have yet.
“Something’s on your mind,” Francesca accused quietly.
I turned to my friend. “Something’s always on my mind, Frankie.”
She flinched at her old nickname, the one that I hardly ever called her anymore. Frankie Volkova was dead as far as the two of us were concerned.
Also as far as her uncles were concerned.
Her tone turned cutting, sharp with the edge of fear. To speak our old nicknames was to invite trouble, to conjure the ghosts both of us were desperate to keep buried. “Well, why don’t you tell me what it is, Caro.”
I ignored her defensiveness and tried to articulate my whirlwind thoughts. “I have a funny feeling.”
She softened some, letting out her misplaced aggression in a long sigh. “Is it the pizza, Princess Poop?”
A laugh bubbled out of me. “Maybe.”
We were silent for a long time. Francesca changed the input on the TV and turned it to late night reruns of The Real Housewives. I thought the conversation was over. After living together for so long and knowing each other our entire lives, sometimes we didn’t need to hash everything out. I knew what she was thinking most of the time and she knew what was going on in my head.
And for some reason we still liked each other.
After a while, she voiced her thoughts. “We’d be dead already,” she said. “You know it as well as I do, Caroline. If they knew where we were, we’d already be dead.”
I had thought the same thing, but that didn’t erase the panic fluttering in my chest.
I turned to face her again, knowing she was right. My fingers curled around Juliet’s shoulder reflexively, protecting my daughter from those ominous ghosts hovering nearby. “So you feel safe here?”
A sad smile tilted the corners of her mouth. “There is not a place on this planet where I would feel safe. But I think we’re well hidden. And for me, that’s enough.”
The flyer was still tucked into my purse.
Where is he?
Where is who?
“What if we’re not hidden well enough, Frankie? What will we do?”
She turned back to the TV, her dark eyes clouded with memories of our past. “Run.” She tightened her grip on the remote, her knuckles turning white with the intensity of her grip. “And this time we won’t stop.”
My body remained still, calm, rested, but inside my chest my heart pounded with two fists and my blood rushed through my veins like it was being chased. The TV was alive with sound and noise and rich women screeching at each other, but my head felt like someone had thrust it under water. I heard nothing but the whooshing of my own frantic thoughts.
Frankie and I had escaped a world of nightmares by the skin of our teeth. We were lucky to be alive. And even luckier to have found a place to make our home. But not a day went by that I didn’t think back on what our lives used to be and feel the chill of it creep over my skin, like a specter reaching out from the grave to pull me inside.
I sat there for another hour, struggling to tuck all the escaped demons of my past back into the carefully locked box that I usually kept them in. It took a while for my heartbeat to slow and my panic to subside and for everything that I used to be to fit once more inside that internal prison. But I managed.
I picked up Juliet, softly grunting at how big she’d gotten. Her long hair tumbled over my arm as I carried her to her bedroom and she curled her body into mine lovingly.
Laying her on her princess-themed bed, I tucked her in beneath the fluffy pink duvet and kissed her forehead. “I love you, sweet Juliet,” I whispered to her like I did every night, repeating the lyrics of the Neil Diamond song she was named after.
She didn’t respond, she was too asleep to care. Instead, she flipped over and found a more comfortable position.
My insides ached as I watched her sweet, sleeping figure for long moments. I had a terrifying past, but she was my beautiful future. She was the reason I ran and the reason I would always run. She was worth all of the other trouble.
I pressed a hand to my stomach as it flipped again. Instinct warned that something was coming. This time I listened. And prepared myself. And girded my resolve against whatever it was.
The first time I ran was so Juliet could live. And nothing had changed. If I had to run every day for the rest of my life to keep my daughter alive, I would.