Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
*
“Where’s Malachi?”
“Gone,” Gracen said, slamming the fridge closed.
Harder than she intended.
She didn’t offer more details about her missing counterpart, either, despite the fact his lack of a presence couldn’t be missed in the kitchen that morning.
Delaney didn’t overlook Gracen’s attitude, and her tone pitched slightly higher in her curiosity when she asked, “Gone?”
“Gone,” Gracen confirmed, turning away from the fridge with a carton of eggs in hand. “Jetted this morning before I had even got out of bed, actually.”
At the table, Delaney’s eyebrows lifted high. “What?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Really?”
Gracen couldn’t help but sigh. At the stove, she got to work on cracking eggs to mix up in a pan, still trying to work out how she felt. Surprise, like shit.
“Really,” she told Delaney. “You want some scrambled eggs?”
“Sure ... Are you mad?”
“A little.”
Delaney muttered a quiet yikes under her breath. “I thought he had planned to stay the week?”
“Me, too.”
Plans changed, apparently.
She didn’t add that information out loud.
Delaney seemed fine to let Gracen stew in her silence while she cooked at the stove. After grabbing the milk to add a splash to the mixture of eggs in the heating pan, she scrambled the yellow liquid again, and then tossed the dirty whisk into the sink. Out of the two girls, Gracen was the only one dressed and ready for the day. Delaney had yet to even run a brush through her hair or change out of her pink silk pajama shorts and matching spaghetti strap top, but with an hour to go before they had to open the Haus, she had lots of time.
“Did something happen?” Delaney asked while Gracen dug for a spatula in the cabinet. “You guys seemed great last night.”
Gracen had thought so, too.
“Not that I know of.”
Which made everything slightly worse.
“Not much for conversation this morning, I guess,” her friend noted.
Gracen couldn’t ignore the comment, so she turned at the stove so the two of them could see one another when she explained, “If I sound a little short, it’s not about you. He said something for work came up, or whatever.” But the randomness of the late-night conversation and then his disappearing act in the morning ... Well, Gracen couldn’t help but wonder if his story might have been bullshit, not that Malachi had any reason to lie to her. “I just woke up alone, and since we have work in an hour there isn’t a lot I can do. I know there’s not even any point in calling him to say hey, fuck you, so.”
Fuck you for doing that to me, she finished silently. Her heart screamed it—maybe the fact that she did hurt so much about the way he’d left should have told Gracen something about her feelings for Malachi.
No doubt, her friend got the point.
Delaney flinched. “Why not?”
The clock told the story better than she could, but gesturing to it did nothing. Delaney only glanced between the clock and Gracen with confusion setting her lips into a frown.
“Is it too early?” she asked.
“Partly. He’s probably still on the road, and he’s not going to talk when he’s driving his bike. I don’t know what time he left exactly, but—”
“It’s like a three- or four-hour drive to the Miramichi, right?” Delaney interjected.
“Four or more,” Gracen corrected.
“Let me check the cameras. Maybe if he left super early ...”
Gracen rolled her eyes and went back to the thickening egg mixture on the stove to break some of it up. The spatula acted as her weapon to take out her current mood, and the eggs became her unwilling victim. “Don’t bother.”
“Well, I am.”
Her friend’s no-nonsense tone suggested she didn’t care if Gracen liked her choice to check their two security cameras. After Checkered & Cheese had burnt down next door, Delaney came home a week or so later with two home security cameras she assured would be an easy install after taking a trip to the falls. So much so, that she set them up herself and downloaded the app to monitor the feeds on both of their phones. It took an hour at the most, so it was pretty simple to get the system up and running.
At least.
Gracen still didn’t care for the little white cameras over the top of their back and front doors, if she were being honest. The app pushed through notification after another and other alerts to her phone for everything—including a bug crawling across one of the camera lenses, or when it heard someone’s dog barking in the back streets behind their house. Nonstop. With one of the cameras being right at the front of the house, pointed at their driveway and the town’s main street, she could get a hundred notifications a day, easily, from just cars going by.
That was too much for Gracen. Obviously, she forced the app to go on silent. Rarely did she check the feeds, otherwise, and the cameras barely crossed her mind. She’d not even mentioned, or thought to, the cameras to Malachi.