Bonus Chapter
Bonus Chapter
SHILOH
Fall Apart
I swiveled my chair side to side slightly while eating a sour gummy straw. “Do you think it’s wrong to be eating candy in a gym?”
Taking a bite from her own gummy straw, Isabelle turned her chair toward me. We were both sitting behind the front desk at Desert Stone. Isabelle had been back to work for a few months now after having to take nearly half a year off to heal. Physically, she was sound. Other than losing a little bit of weight, she looked fine, but that was just the surface. I noticed that sometimes she struggled to hold onto her old self. She’d force a smile when expected or give a reply as if it were automated.
All I could do for my best friend was be patient and be there for her when she was ready to accept that what she’d gone through may have changed her.
“I feel like wrong is such a harsh word to use. Impolite, maybe?” she said.
I paused before I took another bite. “That makes me feel worse.”
Isabelle giggled around the huge bite of candy in her mouth.
“What’s impolite?” Derek said as he approached the side of the desk. He had been working as a personal trainer today and I was waiting for him to finish up so we could have our sparring session.
Isabelle picked up the package of candy straws and held it out to him. “Eating candy in a gym.”
He nodded as if he agreed, but still took a candy straw for himself.
“Did you finish with your last appointment?” I asked as I watched him wince a little after biting off a piece of the sour candy.
“Yeah. It wrapped up early?—”
A voice interrupted Derek. “Excuse me? Are you Shiloh McConnell?”
The three of us looked toward the front of the desk, where the entrance of the gym was. A middle-aged man with short, graying, curly brown hair was standing there staring right at me. He was dressed nicely in a powder blue button-up. I couldn’t see his pants because he was standing on the other side of the desk, but regardless, his nice shirt and the lack of gym bag was enough to tell that he wasn’t here to work out.
He was grinning at me like he had hit the jackpot. Then his gaze shifted to Isabelle and that unsettling smile grew even more. “And you must be Isabelle Clark.”
I felt Izzy go still next to me. “Can we help you?” I asked.
The man pulled out his phone and pointed it at us. “I believe you can. My name is Craig Baker. I’m an investigative journalist and I’m making a documentary about the X Killer. I was wondering if you’d be able to answer some of my questions or possibly —”
“No,” Isabelle and I said at the same time. Not wanting to be recorded, we shot up from our chairs and begin backing away.
Craig tried to round the desk, his phone still pointed at us. “Hey, come on now. I just have a few questions?—”
Derek blocked him. “You got to go, man.”
Isabelle and I dashed down the hall that led to Knox and Keelan’s offices. “Knox!” I yelled in a panic.
Just before we made it to his office, Knox came rushing out into the hall. He looked from me to Isabelle and back to me as if to make sure we were all right. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s a journalist trying to question us about Mr. X, and he was recording us with his phone,” I said quickly.
Knox stared down the hall behind us. “Go in my office. I’ll take care of it.”
Isabelle and I did as he said as Knox stormed down the hall. Feeling anxious, neither Isabelle nor I sat. We both stood in the middle of Knox’s office and waited.
“It never crossed my mind that…” Isabelle trailed off, looking angry.
I took her hand and squeezed it. “I had this assumption that now that he was dead, we could move on. That I could go back to just being another person living their life.”
“We’re carrying enough wounds we’re still trying to heal. We don’t need someone ripping them back open just because they want to make a fucking documentary,” she seethed.
I squeezed her hand again. “We won’t give that man or anyone anything. And if he still manages to produce something, we’ll face it together. All right?”
She squeezed my hand back. “All right.”
Later that evening, I was in my room assembling moving boxes to fill. The guys and I were going to be moving into our new house in the next few days and I hadn’t even started packing. I supposed I’d felt like I would jinx us if I started sooner. Like things would fall through if I got ahead of myself.
“Shi, I’m going out!” Logan shouted through the house.
“Have fun on your date!” I yelled back.
“I told you it’s not a date!”
It so was. After Logan was well enough to travel back to Arizona after having lifesaving surgery because of what Mr. X had done to him, he’d had to do physical therapy for a while. Now that he was better, he had asked his stunning physical therapist out to dinner. He’d said he was buying her dinner as a thank-you for helping him. I’d told him I wasn’t born yesterday.
“Isabelle’s here!” Logan yelled before I heard the front door close.
I turned toward my bedroom door to see Isabelle walk in from the hall. Even though she was trying to look like she was fine, her red-rimmed eyes said differently. “Hey. Are you free for a while? I could really use some girl time.”
I had planned on ordering takeout with the guys later after I got some packing done. They were next door packing up their stuff, too. They were, however, a lot further along than I was. “Yes, I am. Do you mind hanging out while I pack?”
Isabelle nodded before reaching into her purse and pulling out a bottle of tequila. “Can we drink while we pack?”
I didn’t even bat an eye and made a mental note to text the guys that I wouldn’t be coming over tonight. “I think I have limes in the kitchen.”
Isabelle didn’t tell me what was wrong until we’d downed five shots of tequila and were sitting on the floor in my closet, trying to pack but failing because we couldn’t stop laughing. Piles of clothes, shoes, purses, and a few boxes were scattered all around us.
“Stop it! I’m going to pee!” I begged as I hugged my middle.
Isabelle was laughing so hard she snorted again, making me fall over onto a pile of clothes I planned on donating. I was sure we would’ve sounded ridiculous to anyone who wasn’t as buzzed as we were.
Isabelle wiped at her eyes as she laughed. At first, the tears leaking from her eyes seemed happy, but soon her laughter stopped and the tears kept falling. “I’m sorry. I can’t make it stop,” she said as she wiped her cheeks.
I quickly sat up and scooched closer. “Hey, it’s okay. If you need to cry, then cry.”
“I can’t,” she said between sniffles. “I can’t fall apart.”
“Izzy—”
“No!” she snapped. “I need to keep it together, because if I don’t, who the fuck will?”
Hearing that and watching her struggle felt like I was seeing my past self. It broke my heart.
“I’m going to therapy,” she said angrily. “I talk about what happened, but it isn’t working. I’m supposed to be getting better. I feel like everyone is watching me expecting to see progress.”
“Your parents?” I asked.
Isabelle’s jaw clenched for a moment. “If I let it show or try to talk to them, it blows up in my face. My mom doesn’t know how to handle it. She gives me a pat on the shoulder and tells me, ‘You’re strong, Isabelle. You’ll get through this.’ And my dad gets pissed off and starts yelling, ‘Why are we paying so much money for therapy if it isn’t working?’”
“What about Ethan?”
A new wave of tears hit her. “We fight all the time. He expects me to be better by now. He doesn’t outright say that he does, but he shows it.” A big sob rocked through her. “We haven’t been able to have sex since Mr. X. For months I was healing and now, when he tries to…I just can’t. There’s so much pressure to be better and I just want to scream that I’m not.” Her breathing was becoming labored, and I could see the panic attack taking over fast. “I feel like I’m a captain of a ship and if I fall apart the ship is going to sink. No one is going to step up. No one. I’m on my own.”
I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to me. Wrapping my arms around her, I held her tightly and began rocking us. “You’re not on your own, Izzy. I have you. I have the ship. It’s not going to sink, I promise.”
She began wailing as the agony she had been holding onto ripped out of her.
I ran my fingers through her hair that she had changed to ashy blonde a few months ago. “You can’t bottle up what you went through. I did that and it nearly destroyed me. So fucking explode. Feel the pain, face the fear, and after you do, I promise it will get better. Because once you completely break, you can start gluing the pieces back together. It will be slow, it will be difficult, you will not be the same, but it is progress. I promise, Izzy.”
I held her as I fought my own tears. Guilt was eating at me, but I did my best to ignore it. I would not cry or make this moment about me. Isabelle needed me. So I would be strong for her.
It took a while, but her crying eventually shifted from body-shaking sobs to quiet sniffles.
Still rocking us back and forth, I said to her, “You know, I have a lot of bad memories with closets. I always seem to be at my lowest points when I’m in them. As bad as those moments were, they were also my strongest.” As I spoke, I continued to run my fingers through her hair. “There was this one time my mom found me hiding in one and she told me something that will stick with me for the rest of my life. As a reminder—as a way to help me when I’m at my lowest of lows.”
While Isabelle listened, her sniffling lessened. I continued sharing with her my bittersweet memory of my mother and her wise words, hoping it would help her as it had helped me.