Chapter 4
My heart pounds in my chest.
“What do you mean don’t go out there ?” I dart my eyes around the room, then out to the patio where she’d been looking.
“Okay. Don’t . . . panic.”
“Little late for that, Abby! What’re you talking about?” I slide head first behind the white leather couch that stands between me and the wall of windows. Of course there aren’t any curtains I could yank to block whoever is out there from seeing me. I’m completely vulnerable in here. “What’d you see?”
“Not one hundred percent sure.” It’s like she’s trying to remain calm, but her whole demeanor is making me want to hyperventilate. “I swear I just saw Rex out on your balcony.”
She purses her lips like she’s just made a crazed confession.
“No, you didn’t,” I pant into the phone. “Are you shitting me?”
“I’m not shitting you. It could have been my eyes playing tricks. I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours, and he was shirtless, which is not something I saw Rex do very often back in New York, but I swear it was him.”
I want to poke my head above the couch to see for myself, but the windows across the whole back half of the townhouse aren’t tinted, as far as I can tell. No window coverings and no tinted glass. Who owns this voyeuristic piece of shit townhouse?
And why would Rex fucking Thompson be out on my deck?
I’m sitting on an island, in the middle of an ocean, nearly five thousand miles from home. Abby has to be wrong.
The last time I saw Rex, he was at our old apartment asking if he could keep Toby, our cat, after humiliating me on national television. I’d thrown a handful of cat food at him on his way out. Then sat with my back pressed against the door while Toby purred at my ankles and ate the kibble scattered across the floor. I didn’t get up for an hour, praying I’d hear Rex’s knuckles tap quietly against the door, so he could tell me he wanted me back. While, at the same time, hating him so hard that I imagined him getting hit by a taxi on his way out.
“That would be completely impossible. Absolutely not. No way. The odds of Rex being here are just . . . I mean, he can’t be. Right?”
“Well.” Her voice rises, going from trying-to-calm-me-down mode to flipping-the-fuck-out mode. “You did say it’s a townhome, right? Shares a wall? And a deck?”
I maneuver onto my knees while staying in a crouched position. Then start rising up as slowly as I can, without attracting the attention of whoever is on the other side of that window.
The top of my head clears the back of the couch while I quickly scan the lanai.
And, sure enough, to the far-right side of the deck, I spot him.