Chapter Four
Hasaan was already talking three miles a minute as he made a U-turn and began their long trek down.
“Do you think they’re hiring? I’ll even take the front guard position. Wow, that was unreal, am I right? Those people are intense! I think I nearly shit myself. But you’re in luck, because I didn’t!”
Isla rubbed her eyes, all the adrenaline oozing out of her. “If you give me your Cash App, I’ll split the thousand dollars they sent me on top of the fare.”
As Hasaan rambled on about his good fortune, Isla quietly removed a set of keys from where she had wedged them into a crevice between the passenger seat and door. A dorm key, car fob, and student ID jangled on the Mary Washington lanyard. She studied Holland’s beaming image.
“Sorry, kid,” she mumbled regretfully.
Hasaan asked, “Say something?”
“No.” But she was about to do something.
She had been watching Holland Corrigan for days.
The youngest Corrigan had a predictable routine when she was home on break from college.
Practice with her trainer, then the coffee shop.
Rinse and repeat. Usually she was driven, but when she was let off the leash and allowed to roam the city like a normal nineteen-year-old, her routine remained relatively the same, and it wasn’t that hard to keep track of the unsuspecting girl.
At first, Isla hadn’t been sure if Holland was the right way in.
She was easygoing. Too sweet, too sheltered from the real world.
Upon meeting the young Corrigan, Isla had found the girl to be very real.
She had liked her immediately, though she hadn’t wanted to.
She’d even felt a twinge of protectiveness toward the naive Corrigan, who couldn’t tell when someone was being insincere or had designs on her.
And it had gone much better than Isla had planned.
Those same attributes were what made Holland the door Isla needed to get into their world.
Someone who wouldn’t easily suspect the friendliness of a stranger—one who happened by to offer assistance at the same moment her tire had obtained a mysterious flat—to be a setup.
She wouldn’t catch the purposeful hand miss that had rendered Holland’s phone unusable.
Or that her uniform-clad savior had chosen Uber because Lyft had a new algorithm that matched female riders with female drivers, and Isla knew that Holland Corrigan would balk at riding alone with a man not employed by her father.
Holland had fallen into the setup. She had trusted Isla emphatically, held out a branch of friendship. It tweaked at Isla’s guilt. Holland was the path of least resistance, because once in, Isla would have enough suspicion directed her way.
Isla would have to atone for her deceit later, because if she wanted to expose the secrets the Corrigans thought they had buried, if she wanted to finally find out what had happened to Eden the night she’d disappeared without a trace, leaving Isla alone in this town they were just supposed to be in for a couple of days, then she’d have to set her conscience aside.
Still, Isla fought her conscience and trepidation all the way to her rented studio apartment.
She should, could, say something to Hasaan and end this crazy plan before it began, turn back and return the keys, go back home, to her real home in Los Angeles, letting guilt eat away at her and pretending once again that the Corrigans and that time of her life didn’t exist. Even Eden.
But she didn’t. Not when she was so close and could actually do something now, no matter the outcome.
Instead, she palmed the keys, feeling their weight and their significance, heavy in her hand. Holland was the first step to Isla’s true objective.
“On to the next.”
“What was that?” Hasaan asked over Kendrick Lamar. “Everything all right back there?”
As the car wound its way down the treacherous mountain road, Isla’s grip on the door tightened.
She imagined the steep drop-offs and shadowed valleys, all reminders of how precarious her situation was, of how she stood on the precipice.
One wrong move, one misplaced word, and everything she had returned here to fight for could come crashing down.