Which seemed more plausible than I wanted it to be with every passing day of my life.

21

“I have to admit that I don’t want to leave,” I said when we got back in the car on Monday morning.

“I know,” Michael agreed. “I don’t want to leave either.”

The drive back to Charlotte was long and quiet. We held hands the whole way and I was happy to be together and happy to be getting back to see Adam. Yet still, it was starting to feel like every time we left Asheville, another piece of me stayed behind in the little cottage just waiting for me to return.

“Do you think there will be more notes there when we get back?” I asked.

I hadn’t wanted to think about it over the weekend while we were away, but now that we were almost back to Lineage, I felt like it was all I could think about. I didn’t want there to be more notes. I felt like my head and my heart had been cleared while we were in Asheville and I didn’t want them to get clouded again. Whoever was writing the notes and whatever they were sorry for, I didn’t care.

I simply wanted it to stop.

“There are more notes,” Michael said, and I felt my heart drop. “Adam messaged me about it yesterday just to let me know. I didn’t want to tell you until I had to.”

“Thanks,” I said with a sigh. “I’m honestly glad you didn’t.”

Michael sighed with me and rubbed my forehead with my other hand to stave off the coming headache. “Were there a lot of those notes?”

Michael paused. “Yeah.”

I scoffed. “Does Rob have any idea where they’re coming from?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Michael answered. “Although it seems strange that someone could leave so many notes and yet not be seen doing it by anyone.”

I snickered. “Yeah, I was thinking that too.”

“Look, they’re just little pieces of paper, right? I mean, someone obviously is trying to make some sort of point. But you, and me, and Adam, have been through much worse than being bombarded with tiny paper squares. Rob said that if it were an actual threat, like a physical threat or something, that whoever is doing this likely would have done it by now. So I think we should just go back, finish our work at Lineage, try to enjoy our time together as much as possible, and ignore the notes.”

“What if there become too many notes to ignore?” I asked.

“Then we grind them all up into little paper note confetti and we’ll shoot them out of some prop cannon at the Diplomatic Dinner party with Goldshire in a couple of months.”

I giggled at the thought of paper note confetti, I actually thought that was a great idea.

“Gosh I almost forgot about that Diplomatic Dinner party,” I said as I rolled my eyes. “Remind me again why we have to do it?”

“Because you said that you wanted to make sure the two colleges had a solid relationship before the year was up and you handed the keys to someone else, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” I said as I shook my head. “Me and my big mouth.”

Michael grinned as he tried to hold in his laughter. “I tried to tell you,” he teased.

“Who’s running Goldshire now?” I asked as I saw the Lineage campus come into sight of the car.

“Not sure, I think it’s changed hands a few times. I guess we’ll find out at the dinner party. It’s a fancy one too, so everyone will be dressed up in their formal attire.”

“Well there’s a positive there at least,” I teased. “At least I’ll get to see you guys dressed up in your sexy formalwear.”

Michael huffed and pretended to be offended. “Oh please, we both know you like it when I’m naked much better.”

“You’re not wrong,” I said with a wink.

When we pulled back onto campus and parked the car, the grounds seemed kind of quiet for a Monday. We went back to the apartment first and unpacked our bag from the weekend. Then we walked together to the halfway house to check in with Adam. On the way there, though, we passed the garden and I was immediately horrified to see what had happened. It looked as someone had come into the garden and yanked out each and every flower and plant and strewn them across the ground. The wrought iron fence looked as if it had been run over by a car.

And all of the little seedling trees had been pulled out and torn into shreds.

“What happened?” I cried when I saw it.

It was an absolute mess and whoever had done it had been sure not just to pull the plants out, but to completely destroy them past the point of saving so that they couldn’t be replanted.

“I don’t know,” Michael said as he squeezed my hand tight. “Adam didn’t mention this in any of his messages.”

Michael pulled out his phone and started quickly texting with his one free hand.

“We’re on our way to see him now anyway,” I said, unsure why he was stopping to text Adam when we were almost there.

“I’m letting Rob know. I think this might be a bit more serious than just the paper notes now.”

Speaking of which, I didn’t see any of the notes around the garden. At least hopefully they were gone. But my beautiful garden; David’s beautiful garden that I had spent such time and care with, was gone. I would need to start completely over from scratch. It was the shredded up plants that bothered me the most. It reminded me of the crushed up insect wings. I hated it when beautiful and helpless things were destroyed.

When we neared the halfway house, we soon saw that there was something wrong there as well.

Michael’s phone rang and he picked it up to answer.

“Hey Rob,” he said into the speaker.

“Hey, I’m at the garden, I see what you mean,” Rob said.

“Yeah I think we have another problem too. Can you meet us at the halfway house?”

“On my way.”

The outside walls of the building had been sprayed with graffiti, but not the cool artsy kind that Adam had painted. The word “Sorry” was sprawled in giant red letters over each of the four walls.

Rob came up right behind us as soon as we got up to the doors.

“Well, that’s a big note,” he said as he stared at the big red letters. “Someone is really trying to get your attention, Lisette.”

When the three of us walked inside the halfway house, everything on the inside seemed to be in order. There wasn’t any damage inside the building at all. I was scared to go and check the mural in the storage room alone, it just too closely resembled the incident with my mother’s murder. So, the guys came to look at it with me and I was relieved when I saw that there wasn’t anything damaged in there either.

My mother’s beautiful mural was pristinely staring back at me.

Then, we checked on all the kids that were living there, which was a total of seven currently.