Chapter 20 Eternal Sunshine
CHAPTER TWENTY
ETERNAL SUNSHINE
HAZEL
The tension in the car is enough to snap in half.
Even with the heater blowing warm air across my legs and the sunrise trying its best to spill some kind of hope across the sky, everything inside the vehicle is tight—my shoulders, his jaw, the air between us.
I can practically see Zack sinking into himself, folding smaller and smaller with every mile we put between us and his apartment.
So. I do what I usually do when silence threatens to swallow me whole: I talk.
I point out useless details on the road, marvel dramatically over the color of the sky, though it looks like the inside of a washed-out seashell, and joke about how Zack turns corners like he’s auditioning for a car chase scene.
The more he retreats, the brighter I force myself to become.
Sunshine, sparkles, glitter, whatever keeps his guilt from crushing us.
He doesn’t say much in return. His grip on the wheel is tight enough his knuckles have gone pale, and he keeps working his jaw the way people do when they’re trying not to say something they’ll regret.
He watches the road with an intensity that borders on painful, and although he glances at me occasionally, each look feels like it’s dipped in some emotion he’s trying very hard not to show.
I don’t know if my babbling helps or makes him feel worse, but I keep going.
My effervescence is its own sort of shield, but I can feel the guilt radiating off him like heat from an engine, and I can’t stand the idea of being the reason he folds further into himself.
When he finally clears his throat, the sound slices through the humming silence. I turn toward him, ready for a half-hearted deflection or a comment about the GPS, but instead his voice comes out quieter than usual. “I talked to Lincoln last night.”
The name flickers through my memory. He’s been mentioned once or twice in passing as one of his friends who “helps with things,” whatever vague hacker-coded statement that is.
I try to remember anything else Zack told me about him, but there’s nothing.
Lincoln is just a name to me. No face, no personality, no context.
So, I sit up a little straighter, curiosity pricking beneath my ribs.
“Okay…and who is Lincoln again? Your tech guy?”
A muscle in Zack’s cheek twitches. “He’s the one I call when I need deeper searches. He’s…good at what he does.”
The way he says it, his voice is careful, restrained, makes me think “good” is an understatement. But I make the executive decision to let it go for now. “What did he find?”
There’s another pause, and for a moment I think he’s going to shut down again, slide behind that wall he built last night and leave me staring at the surface of it.
But then he exhales, long and slow, and something like defeat settles across his features.
“I had him look more into Detective Alexandra. Beyond the usual department files.”
A cold ripple moves down my spine. That woman already unsettled me, from the moment I met her as a kid. There was always something that was just too polished, too controlled, too focused on certain details while ignoring others. “And?”
“And it’s strange,” he says, choosing his words like they’ve been burning holes in his mouth all morning. “Her past doesn’t line up. There are pieces missing that should exist. Records that aren’t there. A history that seems almost…too perfect.”
I frown, trying to process that. “Too perfect, how?” My brow furrows as I try to understand what is happening. I didn’t want to jump to some sort of conclusion, but the way things were sounding…does he think that Alex was the reason for their death? Disappearance?
“There’s no trace of her before she transferred here,” he explains. “No verifiable employment history. No certification hours. No ID photos on file from any previous precinct. The logs say she worked in Chicago, but Chicago’s records don’t list her. At all.”
Confusion twists into something darker in my gut. “So…someone erased her past?”
“Either someone erased it,” he says, his eyes still fixed on the road, “or the past she’s claiming never belonged to her in the first place.”
I stare at him, the weight of that sinking heavily into my chest. Alexandra’s clipped, precise voice flashes in my memory.
The way she studied me like she already knew what I was going to say before I said it.
The way she kept circling back to certain questions, like she was looking for confirmation rather than truth.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I say, even though a part of me feels the pieces clicking together in a way I don’t like.
“People don’t just…lack an entire background. ”
“That’s why Lincoln is concerned,” Zack says.
“He doesn’t get stumped. But this shit—this is just too fucking clean.
Too perfect. If you try hard enough, you can usually find at least a trace of someone’s life.
A school record. An old ID. A random forum account from when they were a teenager.
But Alexandra? Nothing. It’s like she appeared out of nowhere. ”
“Zack,” I whisper, feeling the truth settle uneasily into my bones.
“Why would a detective hide her whole past? I mean, she’s been around my entire life.
From as young as I can remember.” I think back to the days of LeBauer group, and a shiver rolls through me as memories of unsettling moments sink into me.
I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to begin to separate the past I remember and the past that might have actually happened.
His silver eyes swim with what I can only begin to describe as concern. I watch as hands tighten on the wheel again, his knuckles so white I can hear the leather creaking. “I don’t know. But it means we can’t trust her. And it means whatever she’s involved in…it’s bigger than we thought.”
“Do you think she’s The Whispering Killer?” I blurt out, fully knowing that sounds absurd, but it would make sense.
“No. There’s no way it’s her; she’s not organized enough. But she definitely knows something.”
The car goes quiet again, but it’s different now.
Not the heavy tension from before, but the kind that comes after someone pulls a curtain back and reveals something you weren’t prepared to see.
My brightness dims a little, the cracks in it showing through no matter how much I try to smooth them over.
We’re heading to a safe house, to discuss what actually happened, and the more and more I think about the absurdity of it all, it shatters this fun little facade I’ve been keeping up for so long now.
The silence must go on for just a moment too long, or maybe Mr. Tall, Dark, and Broody, has a little bit of foresight in him after all.
“Hazel,” he says after a moment, softer than before. “You don’t have to pretend everything’s fine.”
“I’m not pretending.” The lie comes easily, almost habitually, but my voice doesn’t carry the conviction I want it to.
He glances at me then, eyes softer than the rest of him. “I feel guilty,” he says quietly, “because I care.”
The words hit too hard, too fast—like a sudden gust of warm air in a frozen room. They make my throat tighten, and my heartbeat kicks uncomfortably against my ribs. But before I can say anything, because God knows I would mess it up, the GPS chimes, announcing our next turn.
The moment dissolves, swallowed by the road ahead.
And even though I sit up straighter and force my voice into something passably cheerful when I ask how much farther we have, the truth is humming underneath everything:
Zack cares.
And we might be driving straight toward something that takes advantage of that. Going back to his home made me smile more than I’d like to let on. It’s time to figure out what’s going to happen with all of this, and I’m so ready.