CHAPTER TWO #2
“Not him either.”
It’s hard to focus with how fast and loud my heart is thundering in my chest, but I do it. I have no other choice. “So then, expand the search area. Ask more people. Someone must’ve seen something.”
He looks at me for a few moments, his face impassive, before saying, “There is another possible explanation to this.”
“What explanation?”
“That your friend never went to that café,” he replies. “That she could be lyin’ about where she went.”
My spine snaps straight, anger burning my veins.
Before, it was Reverie taking off without a word, and now she’s a liar.
I clench my teeth because if I don’t, I will lose it.
Detective Pearson doesn’t get that, however.
He takes it as a cue to keep talking. “I understand no one wants to hear that. Even less than their loved one disappearin’ on them.
But it’s more common than you think. You think you know someone, but you really don’t. You—”
“I know Reverie,” I say, shocking myself at how calm I sound.
“You think that, but—”
“I know that,” I tell him, interrupting him again. “I know everything about her. We grew up together. I’ve known her since I was five. So I know she didn’t just up and leave without an explanation. Just as I know she wasn’t lying to me about the café.”
“And what about you?” he asks, his eyes shrewd.
“What about me?”
“Does she know everything about you?”
“I’m not sure what that has to do with anything,” I say, fisting my hands in my lap. “But yes. She knows everything about me.”
“You sure about that?” he prods, tilting his head to the side. “There’s not one secret you’ve kept from your best friend. Not a single one?”
“Yes, I’m…”
I trail off because it’s a lie, isn’t it?
I do have secrets from my best friend. In fact, all I have are secrets from her.
Ever since I turned ten, I’ve kept parts of my life and my family hidden away from her.
She knows my father is a bad man, a controlling, manipulative businessman, and that my mother is flighty and as neglectful as her mother.
But she doesn’t know the extent of it. She doesn’t know the real truth.
She doesn’t know that my father keeps me on a leash.
Or that my mom isn’t out globe-trotting like I want her to think.
Reverie thinks I’m going to the Bahamas this summer with one of my boyfriends because that’s what I told her.
In reality, I’ll be spending my summer up in the mountains, in one of the family cabins, under my father’s strict supervision.
But I have a reason for hiding the nightmare my life actually is. I do it to protect her. I do it because I know if she finds out the truth about my father—the real truth—she’ll do everything she can to fix things for me. She’ll put herself in danger for me, and I won’t let that happen.
“I can see you get what I’m sayin’,” Detective Pearson continues, breaking into my turbulent thoughts.
“You can’t know everything about a person, and that’s normal.
People are unknowable. All I’m saying is there’s no signs of foul play.
No one remembers seein’ any struggle at the café.
There hasn’t been a ransom note or any sort of indication that this could be a kidnapping.
As of right now, we’ve got no reason to believe a crime has been committed.
Other than the unusual circumstances of your friend writin’ love letters to an inmate, there isn’t much to go on.
So unless you can think of anything else that’s unusual that we can actually investigate, I highly suggest you… ”
He says a bunch of things after that, but I tune him out because something occurs to me.
Something huge. Something that I can’t believe I missed.
They say every single thing matters. No detail is too small or irrelevant.
Every single unusual thing could help, and yet I overlooked it.
I overlooked one unusual thing. Possibly because it’s my unusual thing and I never thought it could be connected to all this. But what if it is?
What if the man who watches me every night, who follows my every move, my stalker, the man I call my Phantom, is somehow connected to all this?
I met him three months and four days ago.
Although “met” is a loose term. A term too tame for us. It suggests he happened to spot me at a bar, thought he liked me, and popped over to say hey. It’s too conventional. Too traditional and civilized. When I say I met him, I mean he saved me. From three drunk men in a dark alleyway.
I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
I was trying to dodge the man my father had set me up with.
He wanted to drop me off at home and I didn’t want him to know where I lived.
So I gave him a fake address, and when he pulled away after dropping me off, I decided to walk back to my real apartment.
A block away from my place, however, I stumbled upon three drunk monsters who thought a girl walking alone late at night was an opportunity.
That was when my life changed forever. Or at least, that’s what it felt like.
As soon as one of them grabbed my arm and yanked me to his reeking body, a man wearing all black descended on him from the shadows like some kind of a god of wrath, and tore him away.
I heard a frightening crack, possibly of a bone breaking, followed by a howling scream before the man who’d dared to touch me fell to his knees.
The other two suffered the same fate, bone-chilling cracks and pained screams before dropping to the ground like flies.
It all happened so fast that I was still trying to catch my breath when it was over.
To no avail, however. Initially, it was because of the awe-worthy display of this stranger’s strength, knocking down three guys and breaking their bones like twigs.
And then it was the fact that he was… large.