Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Not even a drop of surprise on his face.
So, Grace had been telling the truth. “It was you that put Creepy Bea in Darcie’s daypack.”
“Yes.” He stared up at the ceiling. “Darcie freaked out after the doll appeared on our bed that first time. Total breakdown. All her filters gone. She said that no one should have had the doll, that the facility had disposed of all of Bea’s belongings after she died.”
His mouth twisted. “When I asked her what facility, she got this deer-in-the-headlights look that isn’t in any way usual for my wife, and then she told me that Bea checked herself into a mental health facility before her suicide. She said Bea hadn’t wanted any of us to know.”
His hand flexed flat against the blue hospital sheet. “I knew at that instant that she was lying. Bea was a people person. She hated being alone. You know that. You spent hours with her just hanging out—I used to be jealous until I realized how much she needed her people around her, and that if I tried to take that away, I’d make her sad. So I never tried. I loved her enough to never try. Our Bea would’ve wanted visitors, an endless stream of them.”
So Ash had decided to terrorize his wife. I couldn’t judge him for that.
“I guess Grace must’ve taken the doll,” he said. “Or Bea gave it to her. Place like that, they must’ve become incredibly close even after only a few months together.”
That was when I realized that, distraught or not, Darcie had managed to hide when she’d thought Bea had died. She’d stuck to the original story, with Bea dead only months after her disappearance.
“I should’ve tried harder to find her.” Ash’s calm tore apart in front of me, his features twisting into a rictus. “I looked so hard, but I had no idea where she might’ve gone. I asked Darcie for help.”
That flexed hand fisted to bloodless white. “She pretended to help me. Can you believe that? That bitch pretended to help me look for the woman I loved more than anyone in the world when she was the reason we lost her in the first place.
“I hate myself for ever letting her touch me, for betraying Bea by loving Darcie even as much as I did. I thought we were united by the same pain, but the whole time, she was crowing over what she’d done to my beautiful Beatrice. I’ll rip her online persona apart, destroy that precious reputation of hers, then take everything in the divorce. Just watch me.”
I touched him then, closing my hand over his fist.
He slipped into sleep with shocking suddenness, his injured body unable to maintain consciousness. I wondered if he’d even remember this conversation when he woke. I wasn’t sure. But I knew that the Ash who had left for the vacation wasn’t the Ash who’d come back.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
“Lu?”
I looked up to see Aaron in the doorway. A small white bandage marked the spot where I’d scraped his cheek against the door while hauling him to safety.
Angling my head, I invited him in. Ash wouldn’t wake now, his breathing so deep and even that I knew it was unnatural, a result of the drugs in his system.
Aaron dipped out for a second to quietly borrow a chair from another room, put it down beside mine. Then he sat hunched over with his hands between his knees, staring down at the ground. I stroked his back, my heart breaking for him. Of all of us, it was Aaron who had the best heart, was a person who was just quintessentially good.
That was what had drawn Grace to him.
“I fell in love with him through Bea’s descriptions of him,” she’d told me the last time we’d spoken. “She always said he was the caretaker of the group, the one ready with a warm hug and a cookie if anyone was feeling down. No one’s ever taken care of me that way before.”
The doctors had worried that he had hypothermia, but it turned out Grace had only given him a mild dose. He’d swum to consciousness an hour before the firemen who were the closest first responders finally got through to the estate; he’d figured out where he was and—after making sure Ash was as comfortable as was possible—had stumbled into the bloodbath of the living room.
It was Aaron who’d found my note.
His body quivered under my touch. “I’m sorry, Aaron.”
He tried to breathe. It caught, broke. “I still love her. I’ll always love her.” Red blood vessels snaked through the whites of his eyes when he looked at me. “She’s not . . . There’s something fundamentally wrong with her brain, Lu. But she’s loyal and she’s loving and she can be so fiercely protective.”