“I’ve missed you so much,” I said, trying to hold in my tears.
“I’ve missed you too,” he said. He pulled his head away to look in my face. “Lisette, why did you do it? You told me you wouldn’t.”
“I know,” I said as I started to cry.
I couldn’t ever seem to hide my emotions with him. “I’m so, so sorry, Julian. I had to.”
“I know,” he said as he pulled my head down onto his shoulder and stroked the back of my hair. “I know why you did it. I just wish you would have admitted things and not lied.”
I cried quietly against his shoulder for a few minutes as he patiently held me. I thought about when we were kids, and I had fallen off the top of my treehouse. Julian was there, and he caught me before I crashed onto the ground and likely would have broken a leg or an arm. He was always catching me, even now.
“Are they treating you okay?” he asked when I finally looked up.
“Yeah,” I said.
It wasn’t a total lie. Now that the vetting was finished, they were treating me just fine. I didn’t see any need to burden him with the knowledge of how awful the past several days had been. It was over, and that was the end of it. Even Michael seemed to have moved on.
“And what about Adam?” he asked.
I blinked. “What about him?”
“Well, he’s your new boyfriend now…or so I’ve heard.”
“Don’t go getting all jealous,” I teased, although there was some truth to why he might be. “I still kind of hate him.”
Julian laughed, but it was a sad sort of laugh.
“It’s just an arrangement to get me in here,” I said.
“Does he know that?” Julian asked as he shot a look in Adam’s direction.
I peeked over my shoulder. “Yeah, I think so.”
We talked for a little while longer until Adam signaled that it was time to get going before we risked being seen. And it killed me to move away from Julian. In the space between his body and Adam’s, I felt more vulnerable than I’d ever felt in my entire life.
Even during that moment where the entire world stilled as I gazed upon my mother’s failed body.
“I’m still here watching over you, Lisette. I always will be no matter what,” Julian said as he kissed me gently.
I saw Adam shift restlessly on his feet as he watched that.
“I don’t care what campus you’re on, or what rules I need to break in order to protect you. I’ll always be there when you need me,” Julian said.
“I know,” I replied. “And hey, when this is all over, let’s move as far the hell away from here as we can get.”
Julian laughed again, this time, it was a happy sound. “You’ve got yourself a deal, gorgeous.”
As soon as I turned around to leave, Adam took my hand, and we walked quickly back toward the apartment together. Tomorrow I would have to start my classes there, but that night, I would think about Julian and all that I had left behind, at least temporarily.
I took one last look over my shoulder to see if he was still standing there, but Julian was already gone.
And while I should have felt alone, Adam’s reassuring grip reminded me that I wasn’t.
My class schedule here had plenty of holes in it in which meant that I could start snooping around on campus. But I decided that for at least the first week, I should lay low and remain as inconspicuous as possible. So, I stuck to making my way through classes and staying beside Adam as much as I could.
Michael became more and more visibly unhappy that I was there at all, and he didn’t hold back from taunting me at every opportunity he could get. He and Adam weren’t talking as much or spending time together as much as they had previously. Mostly because Adam was constantly with me, and any time I was around, Michael acted like a playground bully.
It was when Adam wasn’t around that Michael was at his worst. Things like blocking my way into or out of a room, whispering threats about finding me underground in the cemetery, and teasing me about ending up like my mother, were the everyday occurrences that I was just getting numb to, which made them easier to ignore. But during the few times Michael caught me alone, it left me feeling shaken and with a growing sense of panic. It wasn’t so much what he did or said, but rather the way that he looked at me, like he couldn’t help but want to kill me.
I mentioned it to Adam, but he reassured me that Michael looked at everyone that way and that he wouldn’t let him hurt me. I believed that he meant what he said but doubted whether or not anyone could actually protect me from Michael once he finally decided what awful thing he was going to do to me.
Being in the apartment together was even worse. At least on campus, there were lots of eyes watching all of the time, and I doubted that Michael wanted to get caught crossing his mother. But at the apartment, even though Adam and I were essentially inseparable most of the time, there were moments when I was alone. When Adam took a shower, I would lock his bedroom door and stay inside his room until he returned. But even then, sometimes I would hear Michael’s quiet footsteps walk to just outside the bedroom door and stop. Once I even went to the door and pressed my ear to the wooden panel to hear if Michael had left and gone down the hall. But instead, I heard his labored breathing on the other side of the door as if we were breathlessly still stuck inside the moment in the dark, stone room. I was too afraid and too enthralled to take my ear away from the door until I heard the shower water turn off and heard Michael walk away. It was those moments that caused me to be afraid.
The following week, I began to carefully stray off on my own a little bit more. I always made sure to have my cell phone in hand, just in case Michael tried to follow me, and I found myself in some dangerous situation that warranted my calling Adam for help. I started by creeping around the main offices, trying to get my hands on anything that seemed to stick out as being unusual or out of place.
And I was surprised by how quickly something reared its suspicious head.
As I was pretending to be lost and looking for the maintenance office to register a repair request for faulty shower pressure in the apartment, a wadded-up piece of Lineage letterhead caught my eye in a trash can just outside the office. I never would have noticed it at all if the image of that letterhead in the trash hadn’t been a memory ingrained into my brain. I looked around to make sure no one was watching me and then picked the paper out of the trash can and unfolded it.
Impossible, I thought as I looked at the name signed to the bottom of the letter…Jack White.
What reason could my deceased father’s name possibly have for being on the bottom of this letter? I skimmed the writing and saw that it looked mostly like a ledger filled with dollar amounts and a few scattered comments about bank transfers and names, one of which was Marta’s. I started to read the letter from the top but jumped and dropped it onto the floor when one of the maintenance workers came up behind me and asked me what I was doing there.
I launched into an explanation about my water pressure, which sounded much more believable in my head than it did once it started spewing out of my mouth, and he ushered me into his office to fill out a work order. However, by the time we had finished and I had walked out of his office, the letter was gone.
Shit! Are you kidding me!?
