Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 121871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Was this love?
This agonizing crack down the center of my chest?
Nee might have left, but she had other reasons—big reasons—to seem distant and distracted. Not long ago she’d finally told me she was working with an investigative reporter to prove her parents’ death wasn’t accidental. That the CEO of the Silver Group, Halston Cole, had them killed to stop them from whistleblowing on their own company for unethical practices during the build of one of their resorts—a member of the security team hired to protect the construction crew killed an unarmed displaced local, and they’d covered it up.
Nee had confided in me because she was being warned to stay quiet, and they’d threatened to hurt me too.
When she called me about it, I felt a spark of my old self reignite. Grief and rage had burned through me from the tip of my toes to the top of my head because Tierney wasn’t the only one who’d lost Maura and Gordon Silver. They’d been better parents to me than my own. If someone had killed them, I too wanted justice for them.
“Well, fuck that,” I told my best friend after we’d cried together over the news. “Do not let that stop you. I will be fine, Nee. Everyone knows I’m dating Nick, and Nick has more power in this city—fuck, in this country—than most. They won’t touch me and risk Nick’s wrath.” Despite my doubts about our relationship, I meant those words at the time.
So, okay … he’d punched me when I tried to break up with him a few months ago, but he promised he wouldn’t do it again, and he hadn’t since. He excused the assault by telling me he was just so afraid of losing me.
I’d thought of our first meeting and the kindness I’d seen in him then, all those years ago. I’d thought of the way his father treated him, controlling and constantly critical, and convinced myself he needed me. He needed someone who understood. I’d been too critical of him when he said something pompous. You didn’t break up with someone over something as silly as disliking a comment they made. At least that’s what he told me before he’d pressed a kiss to my bruised face.
It was easier to tell myself that the attack was my fault, that it would never happen again if I was who he needed me to be, than to think about the fact that I’d allowed this abuse to happen to me. That I’d become someone I didn’t recognize.
My fingers trembled across the screen at the memory.
I’d lost me.
But I hadn’t truly realized just how much until I tapped on that alert notification.
HOTEL HEIRESS TIERNEY SILVER STABBED IN SCOTLAND
The room spun at the headline, my breathing shallow and panicked as I quickly scrolled through the article. Tears flooded down my cheeks at the realization that this had happened several days ago.
Then I was scrolling through my phone notifications because surely someone would have contacted me. Tierney and I had been best friends since ninth grade. We’d both attended a private New York high school and bonded because despite our privilege, neither of us was ostentatious nor pretentious. While Tierney’s parents were loving and supportive, my parents were too busy being acclaimed surgeons to have any time for me. Nee had become my family, my support system. She was like my sister. I was the one who held her hand at her parents’ funeral and slept beside her on the nights she’d cried herself to sleep.
But there was no contact. Nothing on my phone to suggest someone had tried to inform me that my so-called family had been brutally attacked.
I searched her name, trying to find a more recent update, and there was a post on the island’s social media informing everyone Nee had been discharged yesterday. She couldn’t be too bad if she’d been discharged already, right?
While relieved, I was selfishly furious and hurt as I hit her name in my contacts.
“Spoon!” Nee answered, sounding worried. “Where have you been?”
In the back of my mind, I acknowledged my relief at hearing her voice. In the front of my mind, I was pissed. “Where have I been?” I snapped. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been stabbed? I had to find out on a fucking Google Alert!”
There was stunned silence on the other end, and all I could hear was my harsh breathing.
“London … Cammie called you the day it happened, and Nick picked up. She told him what had happened.”
Wait? What? “He … he … no … he didn’t tell me.” What the hell? I tapped on my call list. “No, there’s no incoming call listed from a UK number on that day.”
“What about the voicemail I left you yesterday?”
My heart hammered hard in my chest as I checked my voicemail. There were no messages. “What? No. I don’t have any recorded calls or voicemails from you or Cammie.”