738 Days: A Novel (44 page)

The adjoining hotel rooms. Elise hadn’t been a pissed-off ex lashing out; they were scheming and I played right into it. No wonder Chase was so willing to let me stay in the room next to his.

And was this why Chase loaned me his shirt on the first day? I warned him what it would look like and he … he said he didn’t care. Of course he didn’t. It was what he wanted in the first place.

I’m aware suddenly of how exposed I am, wrapped in Chase’s jacket and wearing his shirt. Again. Like an idiot.

I fold my arms over myself as best as I can. “How much of it was real?” I ask him, surprised by the calm deadness in my voice instead of the shrill hysteria I’m feeling. “Any of it?” I don’t care about the cameras or what happened in front of them; it’s everything that happened privately that I’m concerned with.

His eyes widen. “Amanda, all of it. I went along with Elise’s plan at first, but I stopped.” His accent is stronger now. “You know I did. All the social media stuff—”

“You said you fired her,” I say.

He tightens his grip on the towel around his waist. “I did!”

“When?”

His gaze darts away from me, and my heart falls. “Amanda, I never wanted to—”

“When did you fire her?” I repeat, enunciating each word carefully.

“I sent her a text on Monday night, late,” he says finally.

Monday night. A whole day after he came to my house with apologies and claims of firing the person responsible for the worst moment I’ve had since escaping Jonathon Jakes’s basement. And from the guilt in his expression, I know without even asking that it was also after I kissed him on Monday night. After he kissed me. He was still in contact with her. He only stopped it, theoretically, when he realized scheming was no longer necessary—I was willingly falling into their plan and his false assurances.

Trembling starts within me until I feel like my teeth are chattering from it. “The box with the flowers and the chain, was that you, too? More grist for the media mill?”

Chase looks horrified. “No!” He reaches for me, and I jerk away. Pain crosses his face, and in spite of everything, seeing it sets off a twinge in me. I hate myself for my weakness in that moment.

He holds his free hand up slowly. “I swear, I had no idea any of that stuff was going on until after it was already happening. And when I found out, I told Elise it had to stop. She was just doing it because she was pissed I stopped going along with her plan. I didn’t even know Sera was here until I saw those pictures.”

“Miss Prescott’s version of events differs,” Leon points out dryly. “The police caught her at the motel where they were searching for the Drummond woman.”

And I realize that’s why they’re here. They’re trying to figure out how much Chase had to do with the vandalism, with this crazy woman showing up here and making threats. Was he really desperate enough to participate in such a dangerous plan?

Suddenly, I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that question, in light of these new revelations.

“You better go with them,” I say to Chase.

He rakes a hand through his hair in a heartbreakingly familiar gesture of frustration. “Amanda, please, I screwed up in the beginning, but I never wanted to hurt you, and I didn’t have anything to do with the threats, I swear to you. And I was going to tell you everything this morning.”

This morning. After we slept together.

He registers the mistake almost immediately. “Amanda, no,” he says. “It didn’t have anything to do with that. I wasn’t waiting until … after. You have to believe me. You
know
me.”

The worst part is, I want to think that I do. I still want us to be real, want the pleading in his eyes to be genuine.

But I can’t trust that impulse. And I don’t think I can trust him.

“No,” I say, the word coming from what feels like a great distance. “I’m not sure I do.”

His face pales, and he lurches back a step like I’ve slapped him.

Though it feels like I’m going to break into a thousand pieces or vomit or both, I make myself nod at Leon and the two officers in the hallway, who are scrupulously pretending not to hear any of this. And then I turn and walk with wooden limbs toward my room. I have to get dressed. I have to get out of here.

“Amanda,” Chase says, but the fight has gone out of his voice.

“Chase. Leave it.” The warning in Leon’s tone is unmistakable.

I make myself face him then, even though I know I’ll hate myself for it later. He’s still dressed in nothing but a towel, his shoulders are slumped, and he looks defeated. His hair is rumpled from his hand and from sleeping next to me, and in spite of everything, I still want to run back to him and throw my arms around him.

Which only makes it all worse.

Hot tears fill my eyes, but I don’t want to cry, truly cry, because if I start now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop. “Bye, Chase.”

*   *   *

It turns out, when forced to consider it, there are very few people you can call to ask for an immediate ride home in the middle of the day when you’re sixty miles away.

Fewer still who will respond in the affirmative to me saying, “I messed up. I’m okay, but I need to come home now. Please. Don’t ask me why. And don’t tell anyone.”

All my friends from school are gone or might as well be, for the strangers that we are now to each other. Mia would have gladly ditched class, but she would have peppered me with questions the whole way here—on the phone—and back. My mom would have cried before even starting the car. I wasn’t sure if my dad would pick up until after I left a voicemail, which I didn’t feel capable of doing.

After Chase left with the officers, Leon offered to have someone take me home. An hour of awkward silence and pity, and me pretending not to notice or care?

No, I wanted someone who knew what it was to make a mistake with the best of intentions. So, after I asked Leon to do one last thing for me, even though it made my self-loathing reach new peaks, I made my call, packed up my stuff, and then went down to the hotel’s service entrance to wait.

Our battered red Toyota Camry, the one my mom used to drive before she got the van, rumbles into the back parking lot less than an hour later and screeches to a halt on the blacktop.

I walk outside. Thankfully, all the photographers are still out front or maybe they followed Chase to the police station, I don’t know.

Liza leans over the center console to push the balky passenger door open. “Hey,” she says. I must have pulled her away from studying. Her dark hair is up in a messy knot, and she’s wearing her thick-framed reading glasses and a serious expression, her forehead pinched with concern.

She is so familiar, so comfortingly Liza, and such a reminder of home that, suddenly, the tears that I’ve been working to hold back pour out.

She looks alarmed as I half-sit, half-fall into the car and close the door.

“Okay, okay,” she says, putting the car in park and then reaching out awkwardly to pull me against her shoulder. Her sweater smells like the lilac body wash in the shower at home and the coffee shop where she studies when Mia’s driving her crazy.

That just makes me cry harder. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Well, I do, but I’m safe now, away from the source of pain. I should be feeling better, but instead, I just keep sobbing, like I’m hoping that the tears will leach all the hurt out of me and I won’t feel anything.

“I know you don’t want to talk about what happened,” Liza says after a few moments.

“I don’t,” I manage between sobs and gasps for breath, feeling like a baby and yet unable to stop myself.

“Can you just tell me who I need to kill?” she asks.

That catches my attention.

I pull back from her shoulder and look up at my big sister, the one who is so painfully serious all the time.

And she nods, her mouth set in that prim straight line. She means it, in her Liza way.

I want to laugh, but I can’t, not yet. “Chase,” I say slowly, my voice rusty. “He lied, pretended to care about me to get media attention. He was working with his publicist even when he said he wasn’t. It was all for his career. And I don’t know if any of it was real.”

But he says he loves me and I want to believe him anyway. And that hurts worse than anything else.

I can’t make those words come out, though.

Liza blinks, the motion magnified by her glasses. “Well…,” she says, clearly struggling for words. “Well…”

I sit up, pulling away from her. “Liza, it’s okay,” I say wearily. “I know you liked him and—”

“Well, fuck that guy,” she finally bursts out.

My mouth falls open, and I stare at her.

She raises an eyebrow at me. “What? Do you want to sue him? We could probably do that. Emotional damages.” She waves a hand at me, then looks down at herself and her tear-spotted lavender sweater with a frown. “Dry cleaning, too.”

I do laugh this time, though it emerges more like a painful hiccup. “I don’t think he has the money for either, honestly.”

She scowls and opens her mouth.

I cut her off. “Thank you for coming to get me,” I say. My stomach twists with a fresh knot of anxiety. “You didn’t tell Mom and Dad, right?”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t say anything. They don’t even know I’m here.”

I let out a breath of relief. I have enough to deal with, without additional scrutiny. Easier that they don’t know anything until I’m ready to tell them. If I’m ever ready. “Thanks.”

Liza turns her attention to the gearshift, fidgeting with it as she puts it in drive. “Thank you for calling me,” she says. “I’m sorry I … I’m sorry I told Mom and Dad to have the memorial—”

“No apologies necessary,” I say, sagging into my seat. “You were trying to do the right thing by them. That’s all anyone could have done in that situation.”

We sit there for a moment, nothing but the whir of the heater and the rattle of the engine in the silence.

“It will get better,” she says in an unexpected hopeful, emotional statement.

“That’s the really weird thing,” I say, lifting my shoulder in a weary shrug. “I don’t know if I want it to, if I care. I’m just so … tired.” The word drags out of me like it’s bearing the weight of everything that has happened in the last four years.

Liza gives me a severe look. “Okay, Amanda, listen to me. You’re just feeling overwhelmed right now. But I have a very short and simple process for feeling better. Survival method for my extremely stressful torts class.”

I roll my eyes. My sister is back in lecture mode. “Liza…”

She pushes a button, and our windows go down with a groan, letting in cool, crisp air. “Now,” she says in a bossy voice, “you sit straight up in your chair—”

“And breathe in for four counts, hold it, and then out for eight,” I interrupt. “Yeah, I know that one. But trust me, breathing isn’t going to help.”

She glares at me. “Are you ready to listen?”

I hold my hands up in surrender. “Fine.”

“Extend your arm out the window.”

I frown at her in confusion, but mimic her actions in reverse. Her left arm is out the window, so I put out my right.

“Now raise your arm at the elbow slowly and extend your middle finger as far as it will go and then on the count of three, say whatever expletive will make you feel better.”

Still following her instructions, I gape at her. “Wait, what?”

“Assholes!”
she shouts on my behalf and peels out of the parking lot, and for a second, we’re both laughing like crazy people, our middle fingers up at the world.

My heart is broken, my belief in myself hemorrhaging like a fatal tear in an artery, but my sister came for me. And I have to admit that flipping off the Wescott Inn, and the mistakes made within it, makes me feel incrementally better.

For a second.

32

Chase

I’m a fucking mess.

After eight hours of interrogation, the police had to let me go. Couldn’t find enough to keep me. But my head is throbbing, the side of my face is bruised from an “accidental” brush with the frame of the squad car door, and from the sound of Karen’s heavy footsteps behind me in the hotel hallway, I’m in for an explosion of epic, ear-blistering proportions as soon as the door closes behind us.

But none of that compares to the gnawing anxiety beneath my ribs.

My hand shakes getting the key card in the door, and Karen sighs.

But I ignore that and get inside as quickly as possible.

Even with my single-minded determination, it slows me a little to see the room just as we … I left it eight hours ago.

Minus Amanda.

I knew she wouldn’t be here. But some part of me was still hoping, I guess.

The late-afternoon sun is slanting through a crack in the curtains that are drawn from the night before. Because Leon canceled housekeeping, the bed is unmade, the covers thrown back where Amanda left them when she got up this morning to toss clothes at me. It hurts my heart to see the two pillows pushed together on one side of the bed, the dents in them from our heads.

I would do anything,
anything
, to go back to that moment this morning.

But I can’t.

“I don’t understand what you were thinking,” Karen says, far more quietly than I was expecting. It sounds almost like she’s in shock. She moves deeper in the room, parking herself in front of the entertainment center and the mini-fridge. “If they could have found a solid connection between you and that crazy stalker bitch, you would have been done. Accessory to vandalism and stalking, assuming Amanda presses charges, which she should. The production company’s insurance sure as hell will.”

I find my jacket on the back of the dining room chair, where I hung it last night, even though the last time I saw it, Amanda had it wrapped around her.

I don’t let myself replay the moment because I’m afraid it’ll stop my heart.

Instead, I plunge my hands into the pockets, searching. But they’re empty except for a receipt and a plastic knife. From breakfast in the car the other morning. The memory hurts.

What if I never see her again?

“I mean, I’ve known you to do stupid things, sometimes selfish ones, too,” Karen says in wonder. “But never deliberately cruel like this.”