Rose Garden [book two]

Chapter Five

this is the longest chapter yet...

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It was so early that I knew I'd only gotten less than a few hours of sleep. Niall and I were up so late last night, but I don't seem to feel tired. I get a weird feeling in my stomach as though I hadn't eaten in days and had only survived on liquid because my insides swish from side to side when I walk.

During the middle of the night, we had left the girls downstairs on the floor. But we're not completely bad parents/babysitters. At least we had the decency to turn the baby monitor on in hopes of Niall hearing them in his sleep if anything should ever had gone wrong.

I shower before going downstairs to check on the girls only to find that Sophia has taken care of them both. I could tell that it was somehow Sophia who had picked Rosemarie up off the floor and put her in the couch then snuggled up behind her. She'd even draped a blanket over their bodies that I could have sworn was tucked away in the hallway closet upstairs. Had she gone through all of that trouble just to accommodate the both of them? It didn't surprise me.

Rosemarie whistled through her teeth in her sleep, so I readjusted her head on the couch cushion to keep her tongue from blocking her windpipe. It scared me, although snoring was normal.

I didn't know what to do with myself so early in the morning, but then again, it was like this everyday of my life.

A gasp got half stuck in my throat that it sounded more like a hiccup than anything else when I came into the kitchen. I knew Rosemarie loved to open doors, especially the front door, which is why I had to remember to lock it, but it never really appeared to me that she knew how to open the patio door, which was a sliding door.

It wasn't open wide, it was ajar, just enough for a child to slip through.

Maybe Sophia had done it.

Then suddenly, something tells me that both Sophia and Rosemarie had gotten up sometime after Niall and I had gone to sleep, or at least sometime after I had put my hearing aids on the charger. Now I know not to leave the two completely unattended downstairs... In the middle of the night especially.

It's hardly light out when I peer outside to see if they had played with toys outside, so I turn the patio light on, but the light only reaches to the end of the pavement and not where the grass starts.

I grab my phone off the counter from where I had left it some odd days ago, going to sit outside on the deck's swing.

As I wait for my phone to restart itself, I squint out onto the rest of the yard expecting to see something, but the luminating light behind me makes it hard to see anything in the distance.

I hear the wind blowing in the opposite direction, but the house behind shields me so that I don't feel it. Simultaneously, I see movement in the darkness, only to realize that it's a ball rolling towards the fence.

By the time it seems that my phone starts to have a seizure with its vibration of notifications, the sky has gotten quarter of a shade lighter.

My phone tells me that there are dozens upon dozens of missed calls and text messages, and it never occurs to me that anyone even knew me. Of course, I don't wonder how many of the people even got my number, because obviously I've had the same phone number since I was about 12 when I'd gotten my first phone. Over the years I had given many people my phone number even though several times I have lost all my contacts. It just never occurred to me that most of these people remembered me to have even called or text me several years later. And it was all because of leaked news that they'd probably heard about.