I drag my eyes up and down the wood, studying the door with a sense of foreboding. After a few seconds, my fingers loosen around the lock and my arm falls back to my side. I give the heavy oak door a once-over. Deadbolt locked. Knob locked.
I take a step back and look down at Soda, “Not tonight. You have to wait until morning.”
Routine and structure are invaluable, but so is intuition. We’ve been taught to ignore gut feelings, but they used to save us. They still do when we stop second-guessing ourselves and pay attention to things right in front of our eyes.
And, tonight, I heard something walk up the stairs onto the front porch.
But I did not hear it leave.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Brett
One Year Ago
By morning, the wall is patched, painted, and aside from the 9x12 photo missing from the middle of the photo montage, it looks like nothing happened.
But I know it did. And today I’m going to find out what did happen in this house while we were gone.
I haven’t pressed Bowen about the wall—why Emily’s name was painted across it, why Hildy, Jay, Hannah, and his faces were cut out of a photo with knives stabbed through them, and how that’s related at all to Colson stealing all of my underwear. I also haven’t told Bowen about my pills disappearing, but I don’t know why. It should seem like the least terrifying of everything that happened last night, but for some reason it’s the most unsettling to me.
Maybe because it makes you doubt yourself even more than you already do.
I’ll go to the pharmacy this afternoon at lunch. I’ll get Plan B, say a prayer, and hope for the best. Oh, yeah, and get a refill. I just want to have a normal day, a normal week, a normal life again. I’m not cut out for terror and drama. I try to leave that in my books.
My book…
I can’t think about that, either, so I try to busy myself with packing my work bag. Water bottle, snacks, laptop…
Bowen is otherwise his usual self, checking emails on his phone on the other side of the island and snapping the lid on my travel mug for me. I’m about to tuck my phone into the front pocket of my bag when it vibrates with a text. My heart sinks when I see the anonymous sender and, against my better judgement, I open it to see what cryptic, asinine message Colson has for me this morning.
UNKNOWN (6:49AM): You’ve been a bad bad girl Honeybee
That’s cute.
Maybe I’m just getting used to Colson’s antics. Normalizing…
But before I can even close the text, another comes through. This time, it’s a photo, and when I see it, it takes my breath away and sends a chill through my chest all the way down to my fingertips.
The first thing I recognize is Colson’s blue STI. And when I click on the image to enlarge it, I see him sitting in the driver’s seat and me standing on the other side of the car, propping the door open with my arm as I talk to him.
Colson didn’t take this picture. Someone else did. And Colson didn’t send this text.
Which means someone else knows everything.
●●●
I don’t know what it’s like to be in battle. But I imagine it’s a lot of tension while you wait for something terrible to happen, which is why I feel a bizarre mixture of fear and relief when Colson finally steps through my office door around noon. He’s carrying a paper bag from the sandwich shop down the road, which he drops on my desk on his way to his usual spot next to my window.
“Turkey and provolone on wheat with lettuce, tomato, mayo, and hot peppers,” he collapses into the chair, “and kettle chips.”
I shoot him a side-eye, “Did you do anything to it?”
“Is that a request?” he smirks as he checks his phone.
I stare at the bag and then peer at Colson out of the corner of my eye. He looks so normal. He’s acting so normal, bringing me unsolicited lunch—which I shouldn’t accept, by the way—and making himself at home in my office as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. But he was in my house yesterday, painting the wall and stabbing knives through photos at some point before I saw him at the park and he…
I swivel around in my chair, “Someone broke into my house.”
Colson arches his brow, “Did you call the cops?”
I glare back at him, “Do you want me to call the cops?”
He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms with amusement, “You think it was me?”
I’ve had enough of his infuriating non-responses, “Of course it was you,” I retort, “you know how to unlock doors and windows. You’ve done it before. People here ask you to do it all the time when they lock their goddamn keys in their cars! Who else would’ve done it? I had to go to Wal-Mart because they were the only place still open just so I had clean underwear!”
Colson gazes back at me with a glint in his gemstone eyes, “Tradesies...” he murmurs.
I stare at him, astounded that he’s finally admitted something—anything—to me.
“You can’t do this,” I whisper, panic building in the pit of my stomach, “You can’t do this, Colson. You can’t just come into my house and steal my underwear and—” I stop short, I haven’t even broached the topic of the painted wall, the knives, and…
I’m still not to the point where I can outright accuse him of tampering with my birth control pills. For some reason, I still can’t decide whether someone else actually did it or if I’m a victim of my own decaying consciousness.
I grab my phone off the desk, pull up the creepy text from this morning, and thrust it into Colson’s lap, “What are these?” I demand, “Tell me. Now.”
Colson picks up my phone and starts scrolling through the texts. His face cycles through a mixture of blank stares, faint smiles, and rounded eyes, none of which I know how to interpret. After about a minute, he leans over and slides my phone back onto my desk.
