I do everything in my power to keep the emotions off my face.
If Parrish can stand inside that room and use a grimace to hold back crushing despair, I can do this. I can wait.
“I’m glad you’re home safe,” Tess tells me, studying me and then letting her gaze trail across the two boys. Her expression falls, and I just know she’s thinking about Parrish, about how handsome he’d look in a suit standing beside his friends.
Like, say, for prom.
Will Parrish really come back tonight? Could he, maybe, possibly, in some alternate universe go to prom with me? But then what about Chasm?
Ugh. Nope. Chasm warned me not to obsess over the romance, so I won’t.
I don’t give a shit about that in the scheme of things. If Parrish dumps me, I’ll be heartbroken, but it’ll be offset by the fact that he’s alive, that he’s safe, that I was able to fix what my horrible father broke in the first place.
“We’re exhausted,” Maxx offers up politely, taking over whenever Chasm and I are tongue-tied or, in this case, just too stressed to make small talk. “Is it cool if we go upstairs?”
Tess looks a bit worried as she crosses her arms, but she nods slightly, her eyes tracking me up the stairs. Next chance she gets, she’ll ask me all about the party, I’m sure of it.
The three of us end up sitting in Parrish’s room together.
I change into a pair of mismatched Chucks and cuddle GG, Chasm sits on the roof and chain-smokes, and Maxx paces the floor.
We barely talk. Time ticks by. Every minute feels like agony, like a rusty nail being shoved into my chest. Thump, thump. My heart beats, slow and even. Calm. I’m calm. I’m fucking calm.
We all pause at the sound of frantic footsteps, of screaming.
Someone is screaming.
For the briefest of seconds, I can’t ascertain who that person is and if they’re happy or emotionally destroyed.
He’s dead, I think in a sudden panic. Oh my god, we left him, and he’s fucking dead.
“They found him!” Tess is screaming. She throws the door open so hard that it smashes into the wall and scares the bunny. She’s shaking and crying, and she looks very similar to the way she did when I met her for the first time. “He’s alive; they found him. Get up!”
She turns and takes off as the three of us exchange looks.
There’s a flurry of activity as we scramble up, put the bunny away, and sprint down the hall, down the stairs. Kimber is at the bottom, shaking and crying as Paul wraps the littlest kids in their coats and Tess opens the door to the garage.
“You take the babies and follow me,” she barks out, not bothering to see if Paul heard her or not. She climbs into her Mercedes as I stumble over to the front passenger side, opening it and slipping in while the boys—and Kimber—squeeze into the backseat.
Tess is reversing out of the garage before the door is even fully open, whipping us around to face the gate in a jerky motion that reminds me of Parrish’s driving. I see now where he gets it, I think, curling my fingers around the edge of my seat and digging my nails into the leather.
“Mom, what’s going on?” Kimber asks, leaning between the two front seats and trying to look at Tess.
She is a woman possessed, her eyes fixated out the windshield, her foot pressing the gas pedal to the floor. She barely manages to avoid killing any of the bloodsucking paparazzi at the end of the street, rolling through the stop sign and skyrocketing down the road.
“Your brother is alive; they found him,” she whispers, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Milk Carton found him.”
I go completely still, resisting the urge to look over my shoulder at the boys.
“Between the traffic cam footage that was found this morning, and an image of him on the dark web …” She trails off. “They found him, that’s what matters.”
The dark web? That doesn’t sound good.
The dark web is like … like the pit toilet of the internet. It’s only accessible via an anonymizing browser, and almost sixty percent of the content found there is illegal, illicit, and totally fucked-up. Murderers for hire? Yep. Sex trafficking? Uh-huh. Buying bundles of other people’s credit numbers? You can do that. Counterfeit cash? Absolutely.
So, what was Parrish doing on the dark web? Why did Justin put him there?
Tess stays stone-still and silent as she drives, and the rest of us follow suit. The atmosphere is too thick with tension to make any sort of conversation feasible.
My mind spins with possibilities as I reconsider Maxx’s words over and over again. Justin will be looking for more leverage. But how long will it take him to get some? Who will that leverage be? My mind strays back to Maxine, back to my grandparents, to Saffron.
