71. Now
SEVENTY-ONE
now
She’s gone.
Again.
After everything she told me. After insisting that she had tried to come back last time. After swearing Maggie never told her that I tried to find her. After explaining how she went to therapy and demonstrating how much she’s worked on her anxiety triggers…
She still ran.
I hover on the threshold between my bedroom and the great room for an eternity, unable to process her absence. Not believing it .
Because that’s just it: I don’t believe it .
This time, I refuse to.
I no longer feel angry or numb or spiteful. Instead, complete certainty solidifies into concern. Determination.
Something is wrong. I need to know what it is. And if she won’t tell me, I’ll figure it out myself.
Whipping my phone out, I dial Marco’s number immediately.
“Amir,” he answers, unusually alert for so early in the day.
Good . I need him on his game. “Marco. Where are you? There’s a situation.”
“Downstairs,” he returns. “We had a workout scheduled, sir.”
I totally forgot… and probably would have gotten my ass handed to me after spending the better part of the night making love to Ellie. “I need you to come up. And I need the security footage from the penthouse for the last two hours.”
While he makes his way to my door, I hustle to retrieve the dossier he compiled on Ella. By the time Marco sweeps through the door, clad in a casual version of his usual all-black, I have it spread out over my coffee table.
“Ella was here overnight,” I begin without preamble. “She left early this morning. I think within the last hour. We’re going to figure out why.”
Marco drops onto the stark white chair perpendicular to my sofa. His focus snaps to the contents of the file. His hand reaches into the pocket of his joggers. “Right. I pulled the footage.”
Disquiet mars the space around his dark eyes as he sets the phone between us. “She didn’t just leave,” he murmurs. “She ran . Out of the apartment, out of the building, into a cab. She didn’t take anything with her aside from her purse and phone. Not even shoes.”
Fuck. Ellie. I wrap both hands around the back of my neck, pulling at it. “Well, did you see what she was doing before she bolted?”
Marco’s finger adjusts the video, rewinding it. I bend forward, peering down at the imag e. Ella shuffles out of my bedroom, her gate sluggish. She surveys the damage from the night before and shakes her head before crossing the wide floor to the kitchen area. She picks something up. Freezes. And seconds later, tears out of the room.
“What did she?—”
Marco has his answer ready. “Her phone. I’ve already tapped into the building’s Wi-Fi to see if any calls or messages pinged off our service. No dice—she probably didn’t have the passcode to connect to it, so she was running on cellular data. I can get records from nearby towers, but that will take a while.”
“We don’t have time for that,” I decide, shaking my head. “What else is there?”
“Well…” Amir trails off, considering. After a few moments, I notice the way his eyes flit to a document in the far-right corner of the coffee table. Each time he glances at it, his mouth tightens.
Without a shred of patience, I snatch it up. Marco’s hand halts me, wrapping around my forearm. “Wait.”
I shake him off. “Why?”
A hard edge creeps into his features. “Have you read all of this yet?”
“No,” I admit. “It felt like an unnecessary invasion of her privacy. I only glanced at her personal information and her schedule. I don’t even save her number in my phone or I would have called her by now. Or had you call her, since she blocked me years ago.”
Marco sighs heavily. He looks back at the pages curled in my fist. “You might not want to look at those right now, Grayson.”
He never uses my real name. A frisson of panic slices down my spine. “Why not?”
His eyes burn like coals. “Because it will distract you from the task at hand. Trust me .”
My attention snaps to the pages. “What is it? Could it explain why she ran? Why she left back then? ”
He doesn’t reply. My mind reels to the worst-case scenario. “Is she… sick? Or a murderer?”
“No.” His impassive mask breaks as his head falls forward. “It’s—When I compiled her information, I used everything NYU had in their system to track her past addresses, her tuition payments, and her graduation info. All standard stuff. But there was an ‘incident report,’ they called it. I thought it might have been some type of disciplinary thing, so I pulled it.”
Unable to stand another moment of uncertainty, I bring the pages to my face and scan them. Incident Report , the form reads. And there, under her name and a date, three words: student alleges rape .
It makes horrible, perfect sense. I always suspected she had some history of sexual assault. Even though she refused to tell me details, her triggers and nightmares gave her away. But I always allowed myself to believe—to hope —that it was something less insidious than rape.
My stomach flips inside out. “No.”
Before Amir can stop me, I turn the page. A roar tears from my chest. “ God. NO. ”
The second sheet is a supplementary report from the campus police. Including pictures. Bruises on her neck and deep purple fingerprints smudged over her jaw. A bald patch above her temple where her hair was ripped out at the root. Her small, elegant hands… with dark shadows blooming over her wrists and half her nails ripped from a struggle.
Blood. Bloody stockings. A bloody skirt.
No underwear recovered , the page informs me.
I drop the papers and double over, putting my head between my knees. Visceral pain gores into my guts. My diaphragm heaves. It takes everything I have to force air in and out of my body, to keep from vomiting.
Ella . All the moments she shrank away from me. The fearful way she looked at me the first few times I touched her. The way she used to panic if I settled my weight over her .
She was brutalized. Savagely.
“Who?” I bite out, my wild gaze staring at the white oak floor. “Who did this?”
“She only filed a report with the campus security people and student health. No police, no DNA evidence. From the scant wording of their reports, I get the sense they didn’t plan to pursue her attacker.”
I’ve never felt such outrage. “ What? ”
His bleak eyes look black. “If she went home and showered, if too much time had passed before she came to them, if she was drugged—the campus police would have known they couldn’t build a case based on her testimony.”
“ Drugged? ” The blade wedged into my stomach twists. “He drugged her?”
Marco looks at his folded hands and squeezes them, clearly repressing his own fury. “They didn’t even test her, Grayson. She couldn’t answer any of their questions about who did it or how she knew him. She told them she was at a frat party and had some drinks. They took that to mean she was an unreliable witness and didn’t do any follow-ups—aside from charging the fraternity in question an administrative fee.
“Six weeks later, Ella was sent to the dean of her college for issues with her grades slipping, and they added her name to an endless list of students who needed ‘psychological screening.’ I never found any record of her seeing anyone, though.”
Sweetheart .
My heart shatters, thinking of her suffering alone. Scared. Not knowing who violated her or how to keep herself safe from them.
“She sees a therapist now,” I mumble, hoarse from horror. “She probably couldn’t afford to before she got her full-time job.”
In this moment, I hate myself so much that I want to pitch myself off the balcony.
I could have paid for her to go to therapy.
I should have seen that she needed that.
I should have asked if she wanted me to go with her .
Jesus. No wonder she ran from me. How could anyone go through what she went through and not have massive panic issues around sex and intimacy?
Issues she did her damnedest to overcome.
For me. For us.
The need to hold her rips through me. I have to know she’s safe. “I need to go to her place,” I say. “I need to see her.”
Ever practical, Marco makes no move to leave. “We don’t even know if that’s where she went. Or why she left this morning. If there’s a threat that requires some sort of backup, we need to know.”
“Then call backup,” I demand, stalking to my room. “I don’t care what it takes. We’re going to find her.”
I sit in the front seat next to Marco, too keyed up to drive myself or sit in the back. We use his phone to call hers several times before giving up. Each attempt goes straight to voicemail without ringing, which only heightens my dread. I know her cell isn’t dead.
Halfway through the Lower East Side, without moving his eyes off the road, Amir asks, “Did you ever—? You never told me what happened in the Hamptons, did you?”
No. I never spoke about it to anyone. Apart from the family members who bore witness and, eventually, Graham.
“I’m thinking,” he goes on, “I get that she had the urge to run from trauma. But why run when she did? Today, a text message set her off. But what was it that day? What changed from the day before—or even the night before—when she was totally fine?”
I’ve asked myself the same question a million times. There’s only one answer. And it makes absolutely no sense. “Danny got there after we were all asleep. Aside from that, nothing was different. I guess she spoke to him before she left because he was in the kitchen when I came down that morning, and he told me Ellie had gone for a walk to call her mom. I never saw her again.”
Marco’s head snaps to the side, pinning me with an urgent look. “Daniel? ”
“Yes.” I blink at the vehemence in his features. A chill moves through me. “What about him?”
He shakes his head as if dismissing his thoughts before they can take hold. “I’m sure I’m mistaken.”
I don’t have the fucking patience for him to tiptoe around my feelings. “About what ?” I growl.
He shrugs, but the motion is tight. “You know I have security files on everyone at Stryker & Sons. Your father requested extra detail for the one I compiled on your uncle, after what happened with the company funds and his pension account. So I did that, and I also took the liberty of using the same broad scope for Daniel. There was nothing of note, obviously, or I would have told your dad.”
“But?”
His fists blanch against the wheel. “ But there was a sealed juvenile record. From his time in prep school. I couldn’t access it because of the seal. From what I gleaned from school records, he had some sort of incident with another student and was subsequently charged and then expelled. He transferred schools. His father paid to have the record sealed and then expunged.”
I remember him changing schools during his junior year. Uncle Ted made it seem like a financial decision—the result of my father’s move to dissolve Ted’s interests in our company following his misconduct. I heard some rumors about Danny getting in trouble, but no one had ever implied anything sinister.
“Did you tell my father?”
Amir nods, his jaw clenching. “He told me that Ted had spoken with him about it, and they decided among themselves that the issue didn’t merit any further action. It was a ‘youthful indiscretion,’ he said. A fight or some other immature shit. Standard stuff, which is why the courts allow juvenile records to be sealed in the first place. I figured he knew the details and trusted his judgment on the matter. Only, one thing about the school incident report did give me pause. ”
We hit the Brooklyn Bridge as I stare at him, too dismayed to ask.
He answers anyway.
“It was a girl,” he mutters. “The student who reported him to their school… was a female classmate two years younger than him. ”