"What is it saying?" Clement asked his daughter who had been trying Esme's number for the past five minutes, his voice tainted with restrained impatience and rising worry.
"Still the same," Sabrina answered, her voice barely over a murmur, her suspicious eyes lifting from the glowing phone screen to her overly curious parents, who leaned forward from their seated positions on the sofa, anxiously.
"Her phone is switched off."
Josephine exhaled through her mouth, her legs restless, her feet tapping the floor in a jittery, uneven rhythm that betrayed her nerves.
"Maybe she didn't charge her phone…" but the anxiousness on her face didn't follow through with her statement, and the hollow reassurance fell flat in the heavy room.
And she was right to be anxious because when they had returned from the Becketts company, she had dozed off and had been woken up about an hour later by a bad dream that clung to her mind like a dark omen.
