She’d been here the whole time. Dad and I had searched all over for her, for years, spending weekends visiting hospitals and soup kitchens and all this time she’s been here, frozen in L2. My brain was having trouble coming to grips with the idea. There had never been a third kidnapper. Mom hadn’t been sold into slavery. All of the abuse and mistreatment that I’d imagined her enduring had been just that; imaginings.

I don’t know how long I sat there on the road, cradling my mother in my arms and sobbing uncontrollably. Eventually, my breathing started to calm, the tears stopped running down my face and I loosened my death grip on my mother’s huddled form. She couldn’t feel the hug. She couldn’t feel anything. Locked in stasis, even her blood cells were motionless. More than anything I wanted to bring her back to reality and talk to her, get to know her again. Only I couldn’t do that. Not yet anyways.

Thirteen years had passed by in reality, but not for her. In her mind, I was still a four-year-old girl and we were in the middle of being kidnapped. She wouldn’t know who I was and she might even believe that I was part of the group that was kidnapping her. To make matters even more complicated, she hadn’t aged a day in the intervening thirteen years. One look in the mirror and she’d think I was lying about being Abby. How could I have aged while she hadn’t? That just wasn’t possible in her worldview.

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Wiping the tears from my eyes, I gently set her motionless body back down on the road. Laying her there on her side, still hunched over and protecting a little girl that wasn’t there, didn’t feel right to me. I picked her up and carried her over to the side of the road and placed her on the ground, leaning against a streetlamp. I didn’t want to leave her there, but she was too heavy to carry all the way back to the truck. I had to go back and get it, without her. It was an irrational feeling, worrying about leaving her in a place that she’s been safe in for over a decade, only I couldn’t shake it. I compromised by wrapping her in a field that would tell me if anything about her changed.

I’d barely taken a few steps away from mom when the information from the field I’d wrapped around her finally penetrated my thoughts and worries. I stumbled and nearly fell to the ground as my brain hiccuped in mid-step. The field was giving me information on two people. One was very tiny.

Holy shit! Mom’s pregnant.