Author's Note: Sorry this has taken so long. This isn't a particularly long chapter, but hopefully another should be coming soon. Thanks to Ivory Novelist, Greta Darken, and drivelikebandits for their reviews! I really appreciate them. Hope you enjoy this part!

Recently, dinners at the Perry house contained onions. Generally Mrs. Perry wasn't a fan of the vegetable—they smelled up the kitchen and she preferred other flavors. But lately Mrs. Perry had found herself drawn to the neat stack of onions at the market. At home, she would peel back the skin and slice more than necessary, throwing the extra into the garbage when she realized that she had too many for a soup or salad. She was not a wasteful person by nature; having lived through the Depression, she knew what a sin it was to throw out perfectly good food. Even now, her family wasn't the richest in the area. They had had to make several sacrifices to make sure their son had the best advantages they could give him. Yet Mrs. Perry could not stop herself from purchasing these unnecessary vegetables. They gave her an excuse to cry in the kitchen, tears welling up in her eyes and filling her throat as she chopped and diced.

She was used to not having Neil at home. He had been at boarding school since he was twelve, and since then she had gotten used to not seeing her son on a daily basis. The quiet shouldn't have upset her so. Somehow this was different. Now he was like a ghost, whispers of their argument floating through the air and distracting her from her chores. She would find herself stopping over a load of laundry and clutch a button-down shirt for several minutes, imagining what he might be wearing at that moment, if he was cold. The night after they discovered Neil had gone, she went through his clothes to see what he had taken. He had been a neat and conservative packer, only taking what was necessary—a couple of shirts, sweaters, pants, his warm coat. At the time she was oddly relieved. He has to be somewhere nearby, he can't have gone somewhere warm with that coat. Then she considered that he might sell the coat during his journey and buy clothes more suited for balmy weather. She had cried above his open sock drawer as she imagined her son shedding his winter coat, moving further and further away from her.

Mr. Perry did not say much on the subject. He had contacted the authorities, met with Dr. Nolan, and called the parents of Neil's friends for any information, but at home he found himself unable to bring up the topic of their son. For the most part, he would eat silently, pretend to read the newspaper, and wordlessly fall into bed. That evening, Mrs. Perry noticed something different about his manner when he came through the front door. He fumbled with his coat and briefcase, as though not knowing how to approach his wife.

She couldn't contain herself. "He's dead, isn't he?" The words tore out of her and her hand unconsciously went to her throat.

"No, no, nothing like that," he assured her. "I did talk with the police today and…they haven't been able to find anything. He's just…out there."

There was a dangerous world out there. They had spent Neil's live trying to protect him from all of that. They had chosen Welton Academy (even though it meant they would never own expensive cars or take impressive vacations) because it was a school that would get Neil a good job as a doctor. They never wanted him to know the hardships they had faced at his age. And now he had willingly put himself out there, with almost nothing to his name. At least he wasn't dead—or at least, they hadn't found that he was dead. He could be dead. He could be lying dead in a ditch somewhere, and no one would know it.

As Mrs. Perry thought of this, she began to cry silently over her dinner. Mr. Perry, glancing up from his pot roast, noticed and sighed.

"Marianne," he said. "Marianne, please."

Mrs. Perry sniffled and tried to choke back her tears, but this only made her cry harder.

"It's going to be all right. He can't have gotten far—he hasn't saved up that much money and he's never lived on his own."

"He doesn't know how to live out there," Mrs. Perry said through tears.

"Exactly. He doesn't know what he's up against and he'll come home soon. He's just angry—it's a way to get back at us. Once he realizes he can't handle the real world, he'll come home."

"But what if he doesn't?" Mrs. Perry was not accustomed to arguing with her husband, but she couldn't get over the image of her only child dead and alone. "What if he never comes back?"

"He will—"

"What if he gets killed? Maybe we were too hard on him."

"Marianne—"

"It was only a play, George."
"He disobeyed us, Marianne."

"He's a good boy," she insisted. "He wouldn't just disobey us, or just run away. We should have asked him what was wrong—"

"Nothing was wrong! That teacher put this ridiculous acting business into his head, and he needed to be set back on the path. You're not seriously thinking that we should have let him be in that play?"

Mrs. Perry picked up her plate and walked to the sink. "I don't know. I don't know. I just want my son back."

She walked out of the kitchen without looking at her husband. Mr. Perry could not look up from his plate as he listened to the sound of his wife's footsteps retreating.

To be continued…please review!