“What do you think of naming him Grant?” I asked. “If we get him.” I’m afraid to jinx it by assuming all will go well. Grant was my maiden name. I didn’t have a lot of family names to draw on. My father walked away when I was young, and it was just me and my mom. As a lyricist, I didn’t necessarily love that both Grant and Pollitt end with a t sound, but it is what it is, and I thought: a family name matters for this child. We named Julia for Kyle’s much-loved grandmother. It would be a first step to knit him into our family.

Kyle smiled and nodded. “That’s a great idea, babe. Grant. What about a middle name?”

“You pick,” I said, not really meaning it, believing that he’d pass and defer to me.

Kyle gave me his thinking frown. “You might not like this. But we could keep his Russian name as a middle name. Alexander. One syllable, four syllables, two syllables.” That was all for my benefit, as a songwriter who chooses words for variety and length. “Grant Alexander Pollitt.”

He said it grandly.

A rush of joy passed through me. I thought it a very fine name, and I cried again like the mess I was, and then I dried my tears, because now that we’ve named you, nothing, neither hell nor high water, was going to keep you from me.

14

Julia

Julia slips out the back door, closes it silently. She stops on the back step, takes a deep breath, listens for the sound of a parent’s chasing-her-down footsteps. Silence. Grant’s room is directly above and she glances up at the window; a light is on. She knows Grant is probably in bed, headphones on, watching Critterscape videos on YouTube or bingeing a TV show on his tablet. But she doesn’t move, because if one of them finds her, she wants to say she just is getting fresh air.

The silence stretches out, and she hurries across the yard. She stares into the darkness of the greenbelt, the thick growth of the oaks and mesquites and…then she feels the weight of a stare.

Someone watching her.

You’re imagining it, she tells herself, but the feeling persists like a rising fever. She shoves the fear away. It’s just the horror of the day, creeping around her mind and her vision and jangling her nerves. She activates the flashlight on her phone and steps into the greenbelt. Stops. Listens.

Maybe Danielle was walking in the greenbelt. Maybe. And someone out there took her.

She shines the light forward, and there are only branches and trunks and the well-traveled path, worn by her neighbors and their dogs and kids’ bicycles over the past twenty years, and she walks down it.