Page 156 of Sing with Me

“Let me get Ethan,” Diehl said. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“May I take your bag?” Malik asked.

“Yes. Thank you.” Diehl quietly opened Ethan’s door as Malik and Mom headed for the elevator. Even though they were only one floor down, Mom preferred not to climb the stairs.

Diehl opened Ethan’s bedroom door slowly. His son was still sleeping—like a comfortable baby—under a blanket in the bed. Diehl hated to wake him up, but he wasn’t going to leave Ethan behind.

“Elisa?” Ethan rubbed his eyes. “About time.”

Diehl tried not read too much into it. If this was a hoax, he’d get to the bottom of it and everyone would pay—

No. I’ll be glad to have my daughter back.

That thought remained in his mind all the way to the Brunswick Golden Isles Airport and through breakfast on board the family Gulfstream, when Malik told them that Private Investigator Earl Young would be meeting them at the airport.

Malik suggested that he and Diehl would go with Earl to the station to meet Detective Jeong, while Mom and Ethan would wait at Diehl’s house with Dad.

Diehl was impressed that while he had been sleeping, the GBI and local area police department were hard at work hunting down the tracks that led to his daughter.

Speaking of sleeping, he turned to the seat where Ethan was buckled in, and the kid had fallen asleep again. Across from Ethan in a similar reclining seat, Malik was talking on the phone with Earl.

One row in front of them, Diehl and Mom sat across from each other.

Instead of texting Dad, Mom called him, not caring that it was four in the morning Atlanta time, and Dad was probably still sleeping.

“Checking on him,” Mom whispered loud enough for Diehl to hear. “Trying to see who picks up the phone.”

Diehl’s jaw dropped. “We have PIs for that sort of thing.”

“He’s not going to cheat on me.” Mom waved her hands. “He’s not an Urquhart.”

Diehl didn’t reply. It wasn’t polite for Mom to gossip on her own friends, although everyone felt sorry for Marguerite Urquhart when her husband of fifty-nine years got a facelift and ran off with his chief financial officer’s daughter—only to die of a heart attack on an expedition trip in the Amazon rainforest.

While Mom talked with Dad, Diehl texted Skye.

She wasn’t awake yet, he supposed.

She surprised him by calling him. “Good morning and good news there.”

“You’re up early.” Diehl was happy to hear her voice. He put on earbuds so that only he could hear what Skye had to say.

He kept his voice low so that Ethan didn’t wake up, but the boy had slept through the other conversations in the cabin.

She was wearing a T-shirt, and her hair was all tied up in a bun. Her face looked fresh. She wore no makeup.

Diehl wondered what it would be like to see that face every morning. When she smiled, he could hear a sparrow sing.

“For some reason I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep,” Skye said. “I’ve been praying for the last fifteen minutes before you texted me.”

“Well, maybe God woke you up.” One week before, Diehl wouldn’t have believed that.

“I prayed for Elisa, Ethan, and you.”

“Thank you. As I mentioned in my text, we’re on our way to Atlanta.”

“Thank God they found her alive,” Skye said. “Anything could have happened in the last three days.”

“Right. God answered our prayers.” Diehl went on to say that Detective Jeong hadn’t told them everything. “So we don’t know what to expect.”

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