LITMIR.BIZ

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he’s right. Maybe that is the way it’s supposed to be. It’s definitely the way Cam wishes it had been for her, growing up…and the way it’s going to be for her own child, if she and Mike can make it happen.

      Don’t worry, Dad, she silently tells her father-in-law now, flipping the legal envelope forward to rest against her bulging belly as she checks the rest of the mail. I don’t love my job. Lately, I don’t even like it all that much.

      With luck, Mike’s promising new position in computer technology will pan out while she’s on maternity leave. Then she won’t have to go back to her job as associate editor at a women’s magazine. She can give their child the traditional family life she never had herself, with a father who works a steady nine-to-five job, a mother who’s there to dry tears and make meals and keep house…Hell, a mother who’s just there, period, would be a vast improvement over her own childhood.

      Maybe, as a stay-at-home mom, she’ll even finally be able to get back to her writing.

      That’s what she always wanted to be in the first place: a writer.

      But you can’t support yourself in the big city chasing artistic dreams. It’s hard enough, she learned early on, to make it on an editorial salary. Most of Cam’s coworkers have had their rich fathers’ money to fall back on.

      Not her. Pop is an aging rocker, living off little more than his fading glory days as a bar band drummer in the Jersey Shore towns.

      That’s fine with Cam, though. She wouldn’t trade him for a blue-blooded businessman with the biggest trust fund in the world.

      Nor would she trade Mike for a well-heeled Wall Street wiz with an uptown co-op: her colleagues’ perception of essential ingredients in happily ever after.

      No, Cam will take Mike Hastings any day—and this rented one-bedroom apartment. It’s not upscale by any means, but it’s cozy, and lived in, and, most important, it’s home.

      She looks around, drinking in the reassuring sight of the television, the stereo, the cordless phone. There’s the official wedding portrait of her and Mike, snapped more than two years ago but finally framed and hung just last month.

      Ha. The world’s worst procrastinators strike again.

      Beneath the portrait is a full bookcase with rows of vertical well-worn bindings and haphazardly, horizontally stacked newer ones as well: What to Expect When You’re Expecting, The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy, The Expectant Father.

      The spine on the last one isn’t even cracked. Mike might be thrilled about impending paternity, but unlike Cam, he isn’t much of a reader.

      In the far corner of the living room, closest to their bedroom doorway: the white-draped wicker bassinet awaiting the arrival next month of its newborn occupant.

      Cam feels better just looking at that.

      Yes, this eight-hundred-square-foot haven she shares with Mike—and, soon, with their firstborn child—is Cam’s whole world.

      Too bad that world also consists of so many past-due bills; there are quite a few in today’s mail. Con Ed, Verizon, Baby Gap, student loans…

      Relieved when she reaches the bottom of the stack at last, Cam separates the envelopes from the junk mail. She idly flips through the supermarket circulars, perusing this week’s bargains.

      She and Pop always got by on fast food, sandwiches, and free pub fare provided to the band and the drummer’s daughter, affectionately referred to as a pint-sized roadie. It wasn’t until college that Cam learned to like “real food,” and she craved it once she left the dorms behind.

      So she determinedly taught herself how to cook, thanks to the red-and-white-checked Betty Crocker Cookbook someone gave her at her bridal shower. These days, she finds puttering in the kitchen therapeutic. She even welcomes the challenge of planning ahead, creating menus based on sale items…

      As she turns a page of this week’s D’Agostino’s flier, something flutters to her lap.

      Scooping it up, she sees that it’s one of those small blue and white fliers that arrive with the weekly circulars.

      A young boy with dark hair and eyes smiles up at her beneath the headline HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

      The answer, to Cam’s utter shock, is yes.

      Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

      Yes, she’s seen him. Absolutely.

      According to the flier, his name is Paul Delgado, and he disappeared on a Boy Scout hike out in the Sierra Nevadas, just six weeks earlier.

      Six weeks?

      But…

      This is the same boy who had cowered, bound and gagged, in an abductor’s car trunk in one of Cam’s visions almost a year ago.

      He’s real.

      The comprehension is so stunning, so devastating, that Cam finds herself gasping for air. Panic wells within her, propelling her upward, and she sways to her feet.

      She staggers to the kitchen, instinctively seeking to tamp back the frantic barrage of emotions erupting within.

      Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

      She frantically looks around, for who knows what—and spots…something.

      A bottle of vodka.

      It’s stashed on top of the fridge, covered in a layer of dust, leftover from a Halloween party.

      Cam finds herself blindly reaching for it on pure whim.

      It will numb her—that’s all she knows.

      With a violently shaking hand, she dumps some into a glass and raises it to her lips, already looking around for her pack of cigarettes.

      Where did I put—

      Glimpsing a prescription bottle of prenatal vitamins, she suddenly remembers.

      The baby.

      For God’s sake…

      She lowers the glass in disgust. Or is it dismay?

      You’re pregnant.

      Of course there are no more cigarettes in the apartment; she quit smoking eight months ago.

      Liquor is out of the question as well.

      Still trembling, Cam dumps the vodka into the sink.

      “Help me,” she whispers into thin air, clinging to the counter.

      What is she supposed to do now? Now that she knows she doesn’t have hallucinations after all. Nor daydreams.

      She has premonitions.

      Because that boy…Paul…he’s real.

      He actually exists somewhere in this world.

      And if he does…

      Then all the others—the anonymous children who have populated the bizarre visions in her head all these years—must exist as well.

PART I: MAY

      Chapter One

      Fourteen years later

      Hearing a door slam somewhere downstairs, Cam is startled from her prenap stupor.

      “Mom?” a voice calls up from the foot of the stairs in the foyer. “Are you here?”

      She opens her eyes. Tess is home. Can it possibly be three fifteen already?

      She turns her head to look at the bedside clock, and sees that it is, indeed, three-fifteen.

      “Be right down,” she calls to her daughter, and sits up groggily.

      So much for catching a much-needed afternoon nap. Somehow, the better part of a Tuesday morning and afternoon seems to have escaped her.

      Then again,

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