Total pages in book: 152
Estimated words: 147545 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 590(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147545 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 590(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
I have to stop her from leaving.
I have to fix this now, before it’s too late.
I race down the stairs after her and fling open the front door just in time to see Cassie getting into the car I gave her.
She sees me and fires up the engine.
If I ran, I could reach the car, but she’ll have locked the doors, so I won’t be able to drag her out of it. All chasing her will do is further upset her.
It takes every bit of my self-control to stop myself.
My mind jumps to what else I can do. If I can’t get her out of the car, I can follow her, but it would take too much time to get my car out with all these fucking people here. She’ll be too far ahead for me to catch up to her, and I don’t know where she’s going.
She shouldn’t even be driving right now, not in her emotional state. It’s not safe, and if I chase her, that will only make it worse.
I have to let her leave. I can go after her, but I can’t have her distracted watching for me in the rearview mirror and risk something happening to her.
“Fuck,” I say, startling one of my mom’s friends who came in to get some air. “Sorry,” I mutter, then I close the door and head upstairs.
I go to my bedroom this time, then straight to my closet. I pull down my suitcase because that’s where I keep my Cassie computer when we’re not traveling.
I lay it on my bed and unzip it, taking out the laptop and headphone case, then I sit on my bed and get to work. She said Nina told her everything, so hopefully she had her phone with her.
She did.
I feel a touch of relief, but it’s premature, so I cut it off until I’ve heard exactly what Nina said.
Her purse was with her in Tim’s bedroom after the encounter with Nina, so I play that back too. I wish I had video so I could see, but I can hear her struggling, panicking, denying the thoughts as they hit her.
Then I come in and make everything worse.
That fucking sucks.
Once I’ve heard all I need to, I close that out and open the tracker to see where she went. I’m guessing she didn’t go back to her apartment since she knows I can easily get to her there.
I frown when I look at the map and see she drove to her mother’s house, then turned her phone off.
Maybe she just remembered I could track her with it, but I have a hunch she’s trying to throw me off. I can’t see her going back to her mom’s house, even if she doesn’t really have anywhere else to go. There’s no comfort for her there.
Fortunately, she’s in the Lexus, and I have a backup tracker on that, so I pull it up and see that my instincts were correct. She did drive to her mother’s house and shut off her phone, but she didn’t stay there. I open another window and type in the address she drove to afterward.
Shaley’s place. It’s a house she’s renting from her sister.
A house is easier than an apartment to get into if there’s resistance, so there’s that.
But I don’t know if Shaley lives there alone, or what Cassie is telling her right now. That complicates things.
My bedroom door opens, snagging my attention. I didn’t hear a knock, but I wouldn’t have with the headphones on. I remove them, and my mom tentatively pokes her head inside.
“Hi, honey. I heard Cassie left. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I mutter.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“I’ll let you know.” I turn off the headphones since I don’t really need them anymore, then I close the computer and stand.
I’m about to go after her, but seeming to anticipate this, Mom says, “I think you should give her a little space.”
I don’t want to give her fucking space.
The more space she has, the farther away from me she can get.
“Let her calm down a little, then you can go talk to her if you still want to,” she advises. “Why don’t you come downstairs? The fireworks are about to start.”
Tim always liked fireworks.
I was supposed to watch them with Cassie, out on the water with my arms wrapped around her, my lips on her skin. It was supposed to be romantic.
But my mom is usually right about these kinds of things, and I’m not thinking clearly.
I guess my world can’t implode any more in the next fifteen minutes.
And I could use the time to think, anyway.
Cooler heads prevail, and instead of leaving the lake house, I head to the back deck and sit on the steps alone.
When the first explosion of color lights up the sky, I think of my brother.