Evan
I check my watch again. Where is she? She told me she’d meet me here at six and yet she still hasn’t shown up.
Pulling up the tracking app on my phone, I see that she’s still at home. Harper’s never late to anything. It’s weird that she’s not here.
I send her a quick text, but when five more minutes pass and she still hasn’t responded, I give her a call. It rings a few times before going to voicemail.
She isn’t standing me up… right? I can’t mess this up. I have two days to convince her we belong together. Two days to send Dennis proof of our happy engagement. If not…
I shake my head and try to focus on what needs to be done next.
I have no choice but to go to her house and find out why she didn’t come here.
I really wish those cameras were working.
I'm not sure what happened after her power went out. Surely the power has come back on by now. There’s no way she still doesn’t have it.
Maybe the power outage caused a surge and it messed up the cameras in some way. Or maybe they didn’t connect to the internet the right way when the power came back on. Either way, I need to fix them so I don’t need to constantly go over and check on her.
Pushing back my seat from the table, I rise and grab my coffee, as well as the one I ordered for Harper.
I keep my shoulders back and exit the coffee shop like I wasn’t just stood up by the one woman in the world who hates me and I need more than anything.
Without her, my life will crash and burn around me.
The drive to her house is quick, but when I pull into the driveway something feels off. Her car isn’t in the driveway, but maybe she parked it in the garage? She does that every once in a while.
No, there’s something else that feels off, but I can’t put my finger on it.
After I exit the car and climb the stairs to her front door, I knock loudly and wait. After a few tries without any answer, I'm growing angrier by the second. I don’t know what sort of game she’s playing but I'm done.
I take a kit out of my pocket and quickly pick the lock. It takes me less than thirty seconds before I'm pushing the door open and stepping into Harper’s home.
I stop dead in my tracks as I take in the empty room.
“There’s no way,” I whisper as I spin in a circle.
I scramble to get my phone out of my pocket. I quickly pull up the tracking app and confirm her location.
“Her cell phone says she’s here.”
Hurrying from one room to the next, I find each one empty. Panic settles heavily in my stomach. She has to be here! She has to!
Placed in the center of her bedroom floor, I find her cell phone sitting like she placed it there just for me to find.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I roar, tugging on the ends of my hair.
I frantically pull my app up again and track her car.
I swallow hard when I find it’s still here.
Wasting no time, I sprint towards the door to the garage.
When I fling the door open and flick on the lights, I find the tracker sitting in the center of the floor.
This was intentional. She wanted me to know she found them.
Backtracking through the house, I check her study. The built-in bookcase has the cameras I hid around her house, all sitting perfectly on the shelves.
“How did she find them!”
My phone pings with an incoming text and I swallow hard. This can’t be happening. Everyone is relying on me to pull us out of this misery and fix it all.
Dennis: Tick tock, Evan.