Chapter 6 #3
“Are you kidding me?” Jack yelps as he points to his computer screen.
Jitter yelps too, then dives and tries to hide under the curved couch I’m sitting on.
Unfortunately, there’s like an inch of space under the couch, and Jitter, who’s a foot tall even when he’s lying flat on the ground, can’t make it work.
He looks at Jack, who’s still making outraged noises, then up at me with his massive puppy dog eyes that silently ask if he can climb into my lap.
“Go sit on Theo so he doesn’t take his clothes off and horrify Jack,” I tell him.
“Love you too, Sabrina,” Theo says while Jitter scurries around the table and climbs up on his lap.
“I’m not worried Theo’s getting naked,” Jack says to me.
“Look. Look .” He spins his computer around so we can see a picture of Grey in a suit in some business article.
“The guy invented those self-sealing cereal bags and he basically makes bank every year just for licensing out his patent. I fucking love those things. Why? Why ? Why does it have to be him ?”
“No,” Decker says. “ No . Shit. Have we been quietly funding his rise to world domination this whole time by loving Lucky Charms?”
“Two-faced asshat,” Jack mutters.
Decker scowls. “I hate him extra for making me love him without even knowing it before he betrayed me.”
“ Oh my god , are you two serious?” Laney says. “ Him inventing a better cereal bag is not personal . It’s also not something we can use against him unless they’re bad for the environment or cause weird diseases or something.”
Jack sighs. “Nope. They’re ecologically and environmentally friendly too.”
Theo pinches his lips together and buries his head in Jitter’s fur like he’s afraid they’ll hear him laughing at them. And considering Jitter is massive, it doesn’t take much for Theo to hide behind him.
“It could be personal that he’s converting Bean & Nugget into a bee heaven though,” she says. “That feels personal.”
“It does,” I agree. “How well does he know Chandler? And what about his family? Ugh , I hate this. I want to go talk to his family. Not ask a stupid computer to tell me the news. Computers have no nuance. But it’ll take me a while to get on Zen’s good side. They’re hardcore private. It’s a vibe.”
“I gotcha, Sabrina,” Decker says. “Smartest of the bunch right here, four steps ahead of these doofuses. Guess who started undergrad at Carnegie Mellon?”
I sit straighter. “When?”
“Looks like his junior year corresponded to Chandler’s freshman year.”
Chandler was a legacy admission at Carnegie Mellon. Special treatment because Grandpa went there too. That’s likely how he would know Grey, considering Chandler’s never lived anywhere except here and college, and there’s no indication Grey’s ever been a mountain person.
“What do you mean, started undergrad?” I ask.
“You wanna do this googling yourself, Sabrina?” Jack asks. “Here. I’ll show you how to use a keyboard.”
“She sucks at Google,” Laney says. “Like, she’ll google when does the sun rise? and she’ll get answers about astrological anomalies. It’s a fascinating superpower. Haven’t you ever noticed?”
“Oh, shit, that’s all the time?” Decker whips his phone out.
Yes , it’s all the time. And I’m fine with that, because I prefer— preferred , in my gossiping days, which are numbered—to hear news from people .
Not machines. “If you write my internet failures in your character quirk notebook, I swear on my newly reclaimed powers of gossip that you will regret it,” I tell Decker.
He eyes me.
I give him the raised brows of don’t test me on this , even though I would absolutely not spill any secrets that I’m trying to forget I know about him.
“ Fine ,” he grunts. “But the next time I have writer’s block, I’m remembering you wouldn’t help me.”
“If using someone’s terrible googling powers is what you need to get over writer’s block, you need a new profession.”
Jack snickers. Theo keeps his face buried in my dog’s side while he rubs Jitter’s fur.
And I thrust my fingers into my hair. “Sorry. That was rude,” I mutter.
“No, I think that was spot-on,” Jack interjects.
Theo’s phone audibly dings, and Laney and I look at him.
It dings again as he’s pulling it out of his pocket.
My heart takes flight and hovers in my throat.
Laney leans closer to him, peeking as he glances at the readout.
“Are his texts that fascinating?” Jack asks.
“It could be Emma, dumbass,” Decker mutters.
“But she’s on her honeymoon through the end of the week, isn’t she?”
“Her runaway-moon .”
“Oh, look at you, finding your writer words.”
“Off, Jitterbug,” Theo says, lifting up from the chair and shoving his phone in his pocket.
Everything inside me freezes like I’ve been dipped in dry ice at the expression on his face. My pulse rockets and makes my fingers and toes tingle. “Emma?” I ask.
He ignores both me and my dog, who’s pushing against him like he can shove Theo back into the chair and climb back into his lap.
“Bring my crutches?” Laney says.
He kisses her on the head. “Yep. Who do you want to take you home?”
“I’ve got her,” I say.
“Sabrina’s got me,” she agrees.
Theo eyes me.
I toss my hands up. “I’m not going to drop her and break her other leg. Go .”
“What just happened?” Jack says to Decker while Jitter slinks around the table to settle his head in my lap and whine.
“Emma’s coming home?” Decker guesses.
Theo doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t have to.
There are very, very few reasons he’d leave Laney alone in public and dependent on anyone else to get a ride home.
If there was something wrong with his dad, he’d say so.
The fact that he’s saying nothing means it’s Emma and she asked him not to.
And the fact that Theo wants Laney to get another ride home means that Emma doesn’t just want a phone call with her big brother. It nearly certainly means he’s headed to Denver to get her from the airport.
Theo kisses Laney once more, then salutes the rest of us and heads for the door without filling in any blanks that I’m not filling in for myself.
“Do not read anything into this,” Laney orders me.
“She doesn’t want to see us?” I whisper.
“ Do not read anything into this.”
Translation: I saw the text, she doesn’t want to see us, and we need to give her space to fill in the answers whenever she’s ready.
While Laney was the one who let it slip to Emma that Theo had taken the fall for Chandler with jail time a decade ago, she didn’t know until basically the minute she relayed the information to Emma shortly before the wedding was supposed to happen.
I, meanwhile, was the one who’s known it for practically a decade.
“ Theo should’ve told her since Chandler didn’t,” Laney says softly, like she’s reading my mind, which she probably is. We’ve known each other for a long, long time. “And he’ll be the first person to tell you so.”
“Gotta agree,” Decker says.
“Thirded,” Jack chimes in. “And fourthing for Lucky. He’d be on Team Theo Fucked Up Second Most After Chandler .
And all of us say that as dudes who love the guy.
But mostly, I think we need to remember that Chandler can be a charming asshole when he wants to be, and Emma wouldn’t have believed any of us. ”
I hear them. I hear their words. But—“It’s hard for my heart to agree when she’s hurting and I could’ve prevented it.”
“You’re a font of information about our community, but you aren’t psychic,” Laney says. “Cut yourself some slack. And have faith in her. We’ve been through too much for this to break us apart.”
“Have we?”
All Emma’s wanted since she was little was to get married and have a massive family.
And now, after waiting for Chandler to walk down the aisle with her for seven years, she’s alone.
No husband. No kids. No white picket fence with the dog in the yard and the cat inside.
It’s not my dream, but it was hers. If I’d told her, would she have found a different dream man and be living her dream life now?
“ Stop it ,” Laney says. “Let’s get back to solving the problems we can solve and waiting until we know if everything else even is a problem, okay?”
Jitter whines and puts a paw on my knee.
I bump my forehead with his. Cute massive dog.
“Okay,” I agree, even though my heart isn’t in it. “Solvable problems first. What else does anyone have on Greyson Cartwright?”