37. Wake-Up Call
37
Wake-Up Call
WINTER
“Judy, you okay in there?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest and leaning back against the wall. Alone in the wedding venue’s never-ending hallway, I tug at my low-cut lavender bridesmaid dress. Judy wanted me to wear it for the rehearsal dinner. “Judy?” I knock on the bathroom door when she doesn’t answer.
“Just a minute,” she calls. Turns out, my future stepmom couldn’t care less that this isn’t the real wedding. She needs her makeup to be on point either way. I’m surprised she didn’t insist on wearing her wedding dress tonight.
“Your makeup was already perfect,” I say, and she laughs.
“Thank you, sweetie, but my sister’s supposed to be giving the toast, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to need waterproof mascara.”
With a chuckle, I pull my phone out of my cleavage—what? This dress doesn’t come with pockets—and eye the date featured on my locked screen. The wedding is tomorrow.
“We should go down. They’re waiting for us,” I say.
“I’m almost done,” she assures me.
Unlocking my phone, I select the text conversation I’ve probably read an unhealthy number of times in the last three weeks.
Haze: Meet me and we can figure this out.
Haze: Don’t… and I’ll never bother you again.
I never showed up that night.
Well, technically, I did , but Haze didn’t see me. When 7:30 struck, I gathered every single drop of courage in my body, got into a cab, and headed for the park where Haze gave me Waze. It’d just started pouring outside—because of course it had—and when the cab slowed down across the street, my heart broke in six. I saw him. Sitting alone by the water fountain. He didn’t budge, just let the rain soak him to the bone. I tried, Lord knows I tried, but I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the car. I told the driver I’d changed my mind, and we sped down the street in a roar. I started bawling in the back seat and sent him a message.
Winter: I’m sorry.
Albert Einstein said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Going back to Haze would’ve been exactly that: insanity. We’ve been here before, with our hearts on the line, our heads filled with false hopes and promises, and every single time , without exception… it ended in tears and heartache.
Losing him once almost killed me.
Losing him twice definitely would have.
During the week following Kendrick’s party, I felt a bit guilty about how things ended with Matt. After all, I slept with Haze barely one day after we called it quits, but my guilt was cut short when I saw a picture of him at his parents’ charity event online. He was all smiles, kissing another girl. Good for him. He deserves someone that’s not hung up on their ex.
“There you are.” I see Allie striding my way and assess her as she walks: her gorgeous pale pink dress, her long, curled hair. I have a hard time believing that, one day, she might be the one freaking out over her makeup at her rehearsal dinner. In a few years, she might be marrying Kendrick. “What’s taking so long?”
“She’s waterproofing her makeup.” I chuckle.
“We thought you got lost on the way here or something.”
“We almost did.” I recall our hunt for the bathroom. “This venue is huge.”
“I know, right.” Allie makes it rain imaginary dollar bills with her hands, and I laugh. We hang outside of the locked bathroom for a good ten minutes, mocking Kendrick’s complete incapacity to wear a tie. He can’t stand it, constantly fiddling with it. Judy walks out of the bathroom the next second, and we hurry back downstairs.
“Dear Lord, where do I even start?” Margo, Judy’s older sister, says, wrapping a shaky hand around the microphone. She’s already fighting tears. Sitting around a beautiful rose-petal-covered table with Jay, Kendrick, and Allie, I eye the near-overflowing champagne glass in my hand. “A year ago, I told my sister she worked too much. That I was worried about her becoming a cat lady.” The audience laughs. “She told me that you don’t find love—love finds you. Even if you don’t want it to, even if the timing isn’t right, even if the odds aren’t in your favor. She used to say what’s meant to be yours will always find you, so you might as well stop running. I’ll admit I laughed in her face. I said how can you possibly meet someone when you’re working so much? And well, because that’s what Judy does, she just had to go and prove me wrong by meeting her husband at work.”
She proceeds with a tear-jerking speech. By the time she’s done, there isn’t a single dry eye in the room.
“A toast to Harry and Judy, who defeated all the odds and will continue to do so for the rest of their lives.”
We all get up, clapping, as Judy wipes her face and embraces her sister. I bring the champagne glass to my lips, but just before I can take a sip, my phone rings in my breast—literally never thought I’d say that in my entire life. I forgot to put it on silent.
The whole room scowls at me.
“Sorry,” I mouth. Plucking my phone out of my dress, I peek at the caller, just in case it’s important. No caller ID. I motion to Allie that I’ve got to take the call and slip out of the reception room. By the time I step into the entrance hall, I’ve already missed the call.
Luckily, a new voicemail pops onto my screen the next second. I dial my voicemail password and stick the phone to my ear.
“You have one new voicemail,” the automated voice informs me.
Beep.
Static.
A male’s voice.
“Hi, this message is for Winter Kingston. This is Dr. Reegan. I’m just calling to tell you about the results from the tests we ran last week.”
I’ve been feeling bleh for a week now, could barely keep anything down. My dad forced me to go to the doctor to run some tests.
I nibble at my bottom lip anxiously. What do I have? The flu? Some viral virus? A serious disease?
Am I going to die?
“I double-checked the results myself, and you couldn’t be in better health. You’re not sick at all.”
Thank God.
“What you are is pregnant.”
My vision goes blurry.
“Congratulations.”
End of voicemail.
My full champagne glass slides right out of my hands and crashes against the carpeted floor.
A piece of broken glass digs into my foot, but I don’t blink.
Did he just say…
Because it sounded liked he said…
I’m…
No, I can’t be. It’s impossible. I’ve always been safe. I’ve…
Memories knock my soul right out of my body.
Haze.
Me.
Against the door.
No condom.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I’m not on the pill anymore. I didn’t see the point after we broke up. I just thought I’d take plan B. I took it two days after. I completely forgot about it the next day and… I knew the success rate wasn’t as good past the first twenty-four hours, but I didn’t think I could…
Oh my God.
I watch the spilled champagne at my feet, the stained carpet. Thank the universe I didn’t drink that. All I can do is stand there in complete and utter shock. I’m pregnant. Me, the dumbass who can never find her other sock, is creating a whole new human. There’s a person growing inside of my body at this very moment.
A person made of Haze and me.
I think I’m going to faint.
I stare at my phone blankly. I have no idea what this means… But I know one thing: I need to tell him, so I call back the number he used to text me.
He doesn’t pick up.
Not on the first call. Not on the fifth.
Pick up, damn it.
On call number eight, I give up and settle for Vic. I have to get his number directly from my contacts log since it’s been so long. He’s Haze’s best friend. Maybe he knows something.
“Yeah?” a voice says.
“Vic, hi. It’s Winter.”
“Winter, long time.”
“Tell me about it. Hey, I really need to get a hold of Haze, but he’s not picking up his phone. Do you know where he is?”
“He’s not home, that’s for sure.”
I frown. “How do you know?”
“He’s my roommate. I just got home, and his car isn’t out front.” I hear motion down the line. “Wait…”
“What?”
“There’s a note on the table.”
“What does it say?”
It takes him an irritatingly long time to answer.
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
Fear slams against my rib cage.
“The place is a fucking mess. It looks like he left in a hurry,” he states. “What do you want with him anyway? Didn’t you break his heart three weeks ago?”
A raw edge of regret cuts through me.
“I’m pregnant.”
A beat of silence.
“It’s his,” I add.
“Oh,” he says in realization.
“Do you have any idea where he could’ve gone? Can you, I don’t know, remember any of the places he went to while looking for Marcus? If you could just give me something, I’d—”
“Wait… he didn’t tell you?” He sounds surprised.
“Tell me what?”
“For crying out loud, Adams, you can be so slow sometimes,” he mumbles under his breath.
“What, Vic? What didn’t he tell me?” I press him.
“He’s not looking for Marcus, Winter. He hasn’t been looking for a year now. He stopped when you broke up with him.”
My heart drops to my stomach.
“What?”
This makes no sense.
“Then why did he stay in Canada?”
He scoffs. “What do you think?”
It hits me.
He stayed for me, didn’t he?
Because he thought, one day, we’d find our way back to each other.
“But… why didn’t he just tell me that? That’s all I ever wanted.”
“He said it wouldn’t have made a difference.”
I’d love to deny it, but deep inside, I know he’s right. Even if he had come up to me and said he was going to stop looking for Marcus, would I have been able to believe him? To trust him again? Would I have taken him back after my father’s accident, the lies, the letter, the toxic behavior? We were broken beyond repair. Not to mention that, if I hadn’t left him for good, he might’ve never stopped looking in the first place. Maybe he needed that push, to really lose everything to want to change.
“He said one day he’d be someone who deserved you, but first he had to get his shit together. He couldn’t do that if he lived in the past.”
Judy’s sister’s speech crawls back inside my brain. You don’t find love—love finds you. Even if you don’t want it to, even if the timing isn’t right, even if the odds aren’t in your favor. What’s meant to be yours will always find you, so you might as well stop running.
I’ve been running from this, from us , for so long. I don’t want to run anymore. I want to let him catch me.
“Did he say anything weird to you recently?” I’m grasping at straws at this point.
He stops to think.
“He did say one thing yesterday.”
“What?”
“I think it really hit him that you weren’t getting back together last night. He got drunk and said if he’d really lost you, he had some unfinished business to take care of. He talked about a lead he never followed up on. Something about a motel, I think.”
The motel. Of course.
“Thank you.”
I hang up and type the name into the internet search bar. I remember it like it was yesterday. Holland Motel.
The address pops up.
There.
This is where I have to go.
HAZE
The establishment in front of me clashes with the faded memories I have of it. The large window by the door is shattered, and the Holland Motel sign isn’t lit up, nor is the inside of the building. What the hell happened here? The parking lot is empty, has been since I got here thirty minutes ago. There’s a sign on the door.
It reads Closed Permanently.
Tanner was right: the motel was abandoned. For good.
But why?
A few days back, when I realized I had nothing to lose anymore, I flinched and called him. Winter didn’t show up that night. She couldn’t have made herself clearer. She doesn’t want me. I decided to look into the leads Tanner has been sending me for months.
At first, it was the leaked surveillance tape. The day I went to look into it and lied to Winter about hanging out with Vic, I rolled into the parking lot only to find it completely deserted. On the front door was a sign that read Closed until further notice. It was suspicious. Almost made me wonder if they somehow knew that someone was onto them. Maybe they’d found out about Tanner’s guy hacking their system. My brother used to say that sometimes the best thing you could possibly do to save yourself is nothing.
Straight up nothing .
He said if things got too hot, it might be good to disappear for a while. Time heals almost everything , brother. Play dead. Just make them forget. They always forget.
A bit ironic that I once had to take Winter to my family’s lake house in my hometown precisely so that he would forget about wanting her head—my own brother. Yet, there I was, following a lead the very same bastard had given me. After he saved my life and got me out of a dangerous drug operation, might I add.
When Winter broke up with me, Tanner started sending me more and more tips. This wasn’t just a “senseless” revenge obsession to him anymore. It was like he knew we were actually getting somewhere this time. The day I called Winter and found out that she’d changed her number, something died in me—something broke.
And I told him to stop sending me tips.
He listened.
Until he texted me, four months later, to tell me the motel had been reopened. Whoever didn’t want that surveillance tape found thought four months was long enough for us to forget.
They were wrong.
I almost went back on my word right then. I came so close to continuing my investigation. But then I thought of her. And talked myself out of it. You’ve come too far to regress to your old ways, Haze.
But now, it’s closed again.
Has been for around three days according to my brother. He told me to come prepared, that something definitely went down between these walls and that someone could still be hiding inside.
And if we’re lucky…
That someone is Marcus.
It’s a long shot, I know. But this was the last place he was ever tracked back to, and everything about it is so fucking sketchy. This has to be the answer. I glance at the gun lying on my passenger seat from the corner of my eye.
It wasn’t too hard to get my hands on one. All I had to do was go back to the shady guys I met up with when I was the organization’s little bitch.
I exhale a long breath and reach for the weapon next to me. I curse myself for forgetting to charge my phone before coming here. What dumb fuck forgets to charge their phone in a moment like this? This dumb fuck. It’s almost dead. I had to turn it off in case I need to make an emergency call.
Slipping the gun inside my coat pocket, I stalk toward the entrance of the beat-down motel. The front door isn’t locked, nearly coming off its hinges. It opens with a screech, and as soon as I walk into the dark building, the absolute most horrendous smell I’ve ever experienced in my life guts me. I slap my palm on my mouth with a gag. What the fuck is that?
The very same lobby I once stood in has been turned upside down. The furniture has been knocked to the floor, some snapped in two, some wrecked. I grab the flashlight I brought and turn it on as I venture deeper into the dark corridors. The farther I get, the more awful the smell. I cover my mouth with the inside of my shirt as I pass countless rooms, my eyes watering to the point of blindness.
That’s when I hear it.
The sobs.
They’re faint, almost inaudible.
But real.
Somewhere, in one of these rooms, there’s someone crying.
I follow the noise, which seems to grow along with the awful smell, all the way down to the end of the hall.
Room 25.
The sobs are clearer now. They’re deep.
This isn’t a female.
This is a man.
I reach for the knob. My hands are shaking.
One, two, three.
I swing the door open.
The smell hits me a million times harder when I walk in. It’s so fucking strong that it takes me a second to focus on what’s in front of me. Who’s in front of me.
Two windows illuminate the room, but the sun will be setting soon. I shine the flashlight directly onto the scene, and my stomach flips over.
Sitting on the carpeted floor with his legs cradled up against his chest is a forty-something man holding a bourbon bottle. Brown hair, crooked nose, dried tears on his face.
Every single hair on my body stands on end.
The picture I saw so long ago returns to me. He still looks the same. Just older.
Marcus.
I don’t know how the fuck to feel when our eyes meet.
We just stare at each other in silence. He seems surprised to see me, at first, but quickly, the shock dissipates. Like his emotions just said, “Meh. Never mind.” He blinks at me. I blink at him.
I gaze downward and stop breathing.
There’s a puddle of blood on the carpet.
But that’s not the worst part.
The worst part is the lifeless body lying next to him.
I instantly recognize her. The woman I talked to when I came in looking for information. The same woman that was on the stolen video tape.
She’s dead, wounded to the stomach.
And from the smell of this place, not to mention the looks of her rotting corpse, she’s been dead for a while now.
Heaven only knows how I manage not to vomit right then. Has he been sitting here with her decomposing body this whole fucking time? The guy looks distressed, disconnected. This woman was special to him, probably his girlfriend. I remember hearing her call him babe on the video.
“If you’re here for revenge, don’t bother. They already took everything from me,” he says blatantly. For a second, I think he knows who I am. That he remembers me from the night he broke into my house. But the vacancy in his eyes proves me wrong.
“You don’t even recognize me, do you?” I scoff.
He takes his time to answer, clearly wasted.
I notice the tremble of his body, the lack of color in his face. I know an addict when I see one. He’s not that big of a guy, most likely shorter than me. God, he seemed so fucking scary when I was fourteen. So terrifying when he forced a tape onto my mouth and tied me to a chair. Now? I could take him in a heartbeat.
“You’re that kid who came lurking around here searching for me, aren’t you?” He takes another sip from the glass bottle, unbothered by my presence. “I assume that means I did something to you, and you want revenge.” He cracks a laugh. “I suggest you get in line.”
My fists clench on their own.
“That all you recognize me from?” I can’t believe I’m actually talking to him right now. That, after all this time, I’ve found him. I guess I never thought about what would happen once I did. He arches an eyebrow at me, thinking long and hard, and nods to confirm my suspicions. Rage boils within me.
“Five years ago. Colton Gate. You broke into my house.”
As soon as the words leave my mouth, his eyes widen in realization.
“No…” he says in disbelief. “It can’t be.”
“I assure you it can.” I step forward.
Suddenly, the once careless guy is paler than his dead girlfriend.
“I’m not going to lie. You were pretty hard to find. Took me a long time to track your murderous ass.” I move closer to him, and fear finally seems to settle into his wrinkled eyes.
“Listen, kid,” he babbles and drunkenly rises to his feet. “I’m not a killer. I’m a thief, a drug dealer, a piece of shit, I admit, but… that little girl…” His hands fly up as if he’s begging for mercy as he steps backward. “That little girl was the worst mistake of my life.”
That does it for me.
A mistake?
“That little girl had a name!” I shout, and he jumps. “Did you ever think about that?” I keep stepping closer. “Did you even wonder what her name was?”
He remains quiet, scanning the crass motel room as though he’s searching for a weapon of some sort. He’s scared of me.
Good.
“Desiree Adams. Brown hair, blue eyes.”
The murder seems to unfold in front of him.
“You shot her in the stomach. She bled out on the carpet.”
“I-I’m so sorry,” he says in a crammed, desperate sentence.
“She was five years old.”
“It was an accident, I swear.”
I’m not sure when or how I throw the first punch.
I must black out for a few minutes, running on rage, because by the time I come back to my senses, he’s bleeding all over. His mouth, his eyebrows, his cheeks—everywhere. He spits out blood while I pummel his face with a strength I’ve never let myself use before. Tanner always used to tell me there was a clear line between fighting to harm and fighting to kill. Right now, I’m crossing that line. I’m fighting to kill.
And it scares the shit out of me…
Because I can’t stop.
I push him to the floor, and he groans in agony. Yet, I kick him in the stomach over and over and over. Nothing is too far.
“Get up,” I belt out. When he fails to do so, I lift him by the collar and force him off the ground.
All I can see when I look at him is the end of her life. Her body in my arms. Her funeral.
Her small casket.
If I thought I’d seen him scared before, I was wrong. Nothing, and I mean nothing , compares to the look that covers his face when I get the gun out of my pocket with a shaking hand.
I point it at him.
Tears fog my sight.
“Please, don’t. I’m begging you.” He puts his hands up.
It all happens too fast.
“Stop!” a voice screams from across the room.
I jolt around.
And see her.
In the doorway.
Eyes full of tears. Fear.
Her gaze travels to the floor.
To the decomposing corpse. She gasps in horror, her hand flying to her mouth.
What the fuck is she doing here?
No, no.
She can’t be here.
The rapid pumping of my heart echoes in my ear. Then the bloody mess on the ground speaks.
“Winter?” he chokes.
I frown.
She arches an eyebrow, just as confused as I am. Marcus’s lips quirk up into a smile. He’s happy. The bastard is actually happy that she’s here.
Why?
His smile seems to trigger something in her.
Life drains from her eyes.
Trembling fingers sneak into her coat pocket, and she pulls a piece of paper out.
A picture.
Her eyes sway back and forth between the waste of oxygen and the photograph in her hands.
Then she says something straight out of my worst nightmare.
“D-Dad?”