Chapter 35
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
The limousine drops me at Evie’s a little after three in the morning, while the city is still half-asleep, heavy and wet with the night’s foggy cold.
The drive back was quiet, the others slumped into silence, hungover and weighed down by what we’ve seen and who we’ve become.
Each stop rouses the limo just enough for muttered goodbyes, a hand clapped to a shoulder, and a door thunking shut.
When it’s my turn, nobody bothers. They know I’ve won the game they’re still playing, and it isn’t worth pretending otherwise. I try to catch Jake’s eye before I go, but he folds deeper into his jacket and looks the other way.
Leaving him is the only part that stings. I dreaded it before the wheels even touched down. Now that I’m on the sidewalk, I take a page from Dae’s playbook and keep from unraveling by staring straight ahead until the limo disappears around the corner.
San Francisco’s silent chill welcomes me back, even though Evie’s place was never really home.
What I’ve done since the last time I stood here hits all at once.
I left as her employee and came back wearing Alistair’s clothes, with bruises under my skin and a story in my pocket.
I escaped the island, but I can’t escape what I did there.
I walked into a game to expose a monster and found a part of me that could be just like him.
Leaving Jake and coming back here has to be right. It has to.
Evie must be wrecked. I didn’t text after landing because it’s late.
And because I’m a coward who can’t bear the possibility she won’t answer.
She hasn’t heard from me in days, and while I was gone Alistair destroyed everything she built.
By now she’s pieced together the epic scale of my failure.
She’d have good reason to fire me, dump me, and cut me off.
And that’s before she learns what I did.
There are so many nails in this coffin; any one could be the last.
I punch in the gate code with stiff fingers. Between the time change and the adrenaline crash, the whole day’s a sleep-deprived fever dream, and it takes mistyping the code twice for me to finally wake up and reenter my body.
I’m shivering. My go-bag hangs from one shoulder, ready to run or already running.
I haven’t forwarded the article to anyone else yet. I need to talk to her first. She wouldn’t let me forget this story was hers before it was mine, and getting it cost us both. She deserves a say in what happens next.
The gate swings shut behind me with a metallic slam that makes me flinch. Opening the front door just lets the wind in behind me, like it’s following me.
Upstairs, my heart won’t settle. It could be exhaustion or jet lag, but I can’t help glancing over my shoulder before approaching her door.
The hallway outside her apartment is silent.
I raise my hand to knock, hesitate, then use my key.
The apartment is gutted.
“Evie?” My voice cracks against the silence.
I step back into the hall, rechecking the door number in case I’ve lost my mind. It’s right. There’s the kitchen peninsula where the fruit bowl always sat. But the bowl’s gone. So are the dishes, the magnets on the fridge, the rug, and the couch.
Everything.
“Evie!” I run for her bedroom.
It’s empty. No bed, no dresser, no half-packed boxes. Whatever happened here is finished. On the windowsill sits her coffee mug, half-full and ice cold, the cream curdled into pale islands that make my stomach turn as I bolt across the hall.
The spare room is technically mine, but I’d been sleeping in her bed before even getting the job. Still, everything I own is here. Whatever had lived in her bedroom, the kitchen, or the living room is piled on top of my bed like the apartment spat it back out.
My phone is in my hand before the intent catches up.
“Hey, this is Evie with Cable Car Chronicles. Leave me a message, and I’ll get back to you.”
Alistair has already made her voicemail a liar.
I send her a quick text: Evie, where are you? I’m at the apartment.
Her paper may have been the only way she could afford this place. Maybe she’s furious and doesn’t want to hear my voice.
Or maybe Alistair got here first. Maybe this is how he keeps me quiet.
The edge of the bed bites into the backs of my thighs as I sit, surrounded by sloppy, discombobulated piles of my life.
Breathing becomes a task. Planting both feet on the floor does nothing to steady me.
The ache splinters up my spine, slips under my skin, and spreads until there’s nowhere left untouched by it.
I head for the shower, forget my perfect temperature marker, and the cold water manages to freeze my collapse mid-fall. It’s when things turn hot that my welts come alive.
My last shower began with humiliation, sweat, and submission, and ended with me shooting thoughts of Jake down Alistair’s marble drain.
Where is he now? What’s he doing? Is he back at Alistair’s?
I drag myself out of the shower, shove my stuff off the bed, and collapse.
A few hours pass in black, dreamless sleep.
Morning finds me before the sun can crack the blinds, a fitting punishment for island time to have followed me back.
Evie still hasn’t responded, and even pushups have run out of magic. The movement only sharpens my exhaustion and makes me realize the welts are already fading. I manage two bites of the yogurt left in the fridge before noticing the tremor in my hand.
I’m not okay. That truth gathers like a wave just off shore.
I text JP: Hey man. I need to talk. Any chance you’re free?
The wave crashes hard. My chest locks, and the room distorts into swarming thoughts: You’re dying. You’re unraveling. You destroyed everything. For what?
My phone buzzes.
JP: Big preso today. Brunch tomorrow?
Relief punches a hole through my panic, and I cling to my phone while texting: Yes. Please. Same spot?
He sends a thumbs-up, then messages the group chat and their replies are all dumb, familiar jokes. These are my friends. They know me.
Evie will respond, but I can’t sit in this empty apartment waiting for my thoughts to eat me alive. I pull on a hoodie and head downstairs.
The iron gate slams behind me, startling a tall man on the sidewalk with his hands buried in his pockets. He half turns, his eyes flicking to me and away.
Brushing past him sends a prickle down the back of my neck, but I keep my eyes forward, locked on Golden Gate Park.
The panic I left upstairs snaps at my heels, hissing that winding paths and tourist maps won’t help me outrun it.
I give it my best shot anyway, tuck my chin to my chest, and charge into the park.
The Conservatory of Flowers looms ahead, its glass fogged and milky with morning, and my thoughts fall into the same dull groove: Evie is gone. If Alistair took her, he did it to leave me with nothing but my own guilt.
At the de Young’s copper tower, the story claws its way back in. Alistair’s fingerprints may sit in my pocket, but every hour I waste gives him time to erase every other trace of what happened.
Near the bison enclosure, Jake finally breaks through everything else, still trapped inside Alistair’s game. He handed me exactly what I needed, and after one night I repaid him with betrayal. He said we’re even, but I know a good lie when I hear one.
My thumbs shake as I type and delete one sentence after another: I’m sorry. Are you okay? I’m worried about Evie. Have you seen anything strange? In the end, I keep only the first two and hit send.
By the time I reach Blue Heron Lake, my focus has splintered so badly that a single ripple across the mirrored surface can hold it hostage.
A jogger catches my eye as he passes, then catches it again twenty minutes later when he loops back on a different path.
That’s normal. Runners circle. They come back around.
But there’s also a man on a bench with nothing to do but sit there, and once the questions start, they won’t stop.
What’s he doing? Who’s he waiting for? How much of this could Alistair have staged?
The path spits me out at the beach, where salt rides the wind and tastes too much like the island. The ocean swallows the city’s noise, but it can’t drown the thoughts ping-ponging inside my skull. My life is unraveling in ten directions at once.
My phone buzzes. Hope lunges toward Evie. But relief follows when I see Jake’s name. Then the floor drops out.
Jake:
A dozen replies surge up at once, angry, defensive, apologetic, and all of them die before I can send a single one, because cowardice wins in the end.
At least silence keeps me from repeating the line I’ve been hiding behind—that this is for his own good—because if I say it again, I’ll have to hear how much it sounds like a lie, and right now I need it to be true.
I turn back toward Stanyan. An itch between my shoulder blades keeps dragging my gaze behind me until I’m back inside Evie’s apartment.
Making it through the day marks a full twenty-four hours of radio silence. I keep imagining my phone flaring to life with her name and end up staring at my own reflection in its dark, mirrored glass. I was supposed to get out looking like a hero. Instead I’m the same man I’ve always been—a liar.
Evie is gone. Jake is furious. Brad is missing. And even alone in an abandoned apartment, I can’t help but bargain with myself about what truths I can survive.
This can’t keep going. I can’t keep splitting my life into versions and pretending they’ll never collide.
Tomorrow, I’ll sit down with the people who knew me before all this. They’ll know what to do. They’ll know who I am, probably better than I do at this point.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell my friends the truth—or as much of it as I can afford.