The Taking Read Online Free PDF

innocent. Austin’s dad was a cop, and I felt better knowing that the police, even if he was the only one, hadn’t suspected my dad of anything shady.
    Then Tyler’s eyes met mine, and he asked me the question I’d been asking myself over and over again. “So where were you then? This whole time you’ve been gone, where were you?”
    If I had an answer I would have given it to him. Surely I wasn’t asleep behind the Dumpster for the entire five years—the Rip van Winkle of the Gas ’n’ Sip. The same went for wandering along Chuckanut Drive after my fight with my dad. I had no memory of anything past getting out of his car that night.
    Just the flash of light. And then nothing.
    Five years gone in a blink.
    I glanced again at the clock, but its hands hadn’t moved since the first time I’d looked, perpetually frozen at 3:34. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t remember anything at all. For me it’s like it was yesterday.” I shook my head, as baffled as everyone else by the question. “They looked for me?”
    “Of course,” he offered, his green eyes earnest as they sought mine. “Everyone. Not just your parents or mine, but the entire school. The whole city, maybe the entire state. There were flyers and alerts, and private investigators. You were like one of those milk carton kids.”
    “And Austin?”
    His head bobbed. “Austin too. And Cat. They searched with everyone else.”
    Cat. I hadn’t even thought of her, and my eyes stung all over again. My face crumpled as I clutched Tyler’s phone even tighter in my fist. I’d have to call her tonight. She’d want to know I was back. Of course she’d want to know.
    He studied me, silent for a long, tense moment. “Can I tell you something strange?”
    I half choked on a sob. “Stranger than me reappearing after all this time with no memory at all of the last five years?”
    The corners of his mouth slid up the tiniest bit, and he cocked his head. “Yeah, sort of. It’s just that . . .” His eyes slid over every part of my face. “You don’t look any different.” His brow fell as he tried to explain. “What I mean is, Austin looks older. He looks twenty-two. But you . . . you still look . . . sixteen.”
    My dad had always been dorky. And by dorky I guess I mean cheesy but sweet.
    He was the hands-on kind of dad. When I was little, he was the dad who volunteered to go on class field trips, and coach my softball and basketball teams when all the other dads were too busy working. He worked, too, but his job as a computer programmer gave him the flexibility to telecommute, which meant he’d collected coach’s trophies until I went into middle school and his role was usurped by coaches who collected real paychecks for what they did.
    But he’d never missed a single game or recital or parent-teacher conference.
    He was that dad.
    So seeing him now, five years—and one missing daughter—later was like a punch to the gut.
    It wasn’t just me he’d been missing all these years later . . . it was him.
    He was no longer the same man I remembered from our fight over which college scholarship I should pursue. This man, this dad, was a bedraggled version of that one.
    His eyes were what I noticed first. Where my mom’s had been tense and drawn, his were red rimmed and vacant. Hopeless.
    Unlike with my mom, however, there was no awkward hesitation. He was running toward the house the moment he stumbled from the beat-up van he’d parked haphazardly at the curb, the door still dangling wide open. I met him on the lawn, barely registering the fact that I was pushing my way past my mother and her new son and husband, past Tyler and his mom and his father, who was planning to meet us at the hospital—something my mother was insisting on, that I be checked out.
    Gary Wahl—Austin and Tyler’s dad—would take my official statement there. I was pretty sure that because I was twenty-one, and no longer a minor, I could make some of these decisions