“You’re not staying with your parents tonight?” Tess asks him and Maxx pauses on his way toward the stairs.
“Nah. They’re staying in one of Seamus’ rentals out in Gold Bar. I’d much rather stick around here in case …” he trails off, but he doesn’t have to finish that sentence. Tess knows exactly what he means. She waves him away, and both Maxx and Chasm head for the stairs, casting glances back at me.
But they can’t protect me from this.
Nope, this is all on me.
“I’d like to have a conversation with you tonight,” Tess tells me, her voice simultaneously hard and soft all at once. Her expression reminds me a bit of a wounded tiger. Like, she’s bleeding, but she can still crush skulls with her teeth. “About your … Justin.”
“Of course,” I reply, taking the brief lull in conversation to snatch my chance at an exit.
Tomorrow, I’ll have lunch with the guy and see what I can’t do about Parrish.
But if I don’t have to see him again before he leaves right now, that’d probably be best for both of us.
The boys leave a short while later, but only after Maxx apologizes to me about a million times over. At this point, there’s nothing we can do about what happened. So far, so good though. Killing Parrish because Maxx punched him in the face wouldn’t serve Justin’s purposes at all.
Actually, the whole Milk Carton facial recognition app thing has made me feel slightly better about the situation. It seems to me that Justin wants his stupid software to ‘find’ Parrish, so that he can launch his new product to fanfare and praise.
That means that Parrish cannot die … right?
How, exactly, he might keep us all gagged once we get Parrish back is a problem for another day.
I take an hour or so to go over my social media, once again looking for clues that seem frustratingly out of reach. What I can’t ignore, however, are texts from Sally and Nevaeh telling me that Maxine is desperately trying to reach me.
That, and a text message from my grandparents begging me to call them.
With a groan, I put my phone up against my forehead. What a mess. My easy, average, boring life has become a twisted tangle. Everywhere I turn, there are thorns and shadows. Nothing is simple. Nothing is what it first appears to be.
While I can’t avoid my grandparents—or Maxine—forever, I don’t have the emotional energy to deal with that right now. I drop the phone to my lap and stare at the dark screen for a moment. I remember Grandma Carmen telling me to give my new situation three months. Just three months, she’d said, and if it doesn’t work out, we’d look for other solutions.
Well, it’s been more than three months. While my fish out of water feeling isn’t gone, I have much more important things to worry about. At this point, if I can just get Parrish back safely, I’ll swallow down the rest of my pain and forge through. I’ll stay here, because staying here means I can be with him—whether Tess and I form a mother-daughter bond or not.
A firm knock sounds on my door and I very quickly open my nightstand drawer, chucking my Maxine-phone inside before Tess comes in without bothering to wait for my confirmation.
“How are you holding up?” she asks, which seems like a strange question coming from someone whose son has been missing for two weeks.
“I’m perfectly fine,” I say, which maybe isn’t the best response. But I have a feeling that if I let on in any way that I dislike Justin, Tess will fight him with everything she has. She might still do that, but I can’t give her any fodder. I cannot be the reason that she goes after him, not with Parrish’s life on the line.
“May I sit?” she asks, but then she’s sitting down on the bed anyway, like her body’s too heavy to hold up any longer. She closes her eyes for a minute, digging her nails into the blankets like she’s struggling to bring a surge of wild emotion under control. “I’m sorry that you had to see and hear all of that today.” Tess opens her eyes back up and glances over at me.
I fidget slightly beneath her stare, swinging my green and black hair over one shoulder so that I can braid it. It gives me something to do, at the very least.
Tess looks over at me, an unsure expression crossing her face. This is her ‘dorky author’ look, the one that she affects when her hair is mussed and she’s puttering around the kitchen mumbling plot points. Sometimes, she’ll forget to fully close her office door and I’ll hear her having conversations with her characters out loud.
Those are the parts of her that I really like.
