Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 87573 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87573 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
I clenched my jaw. “And?”
“And you need to stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Trying to control the situation.” West set his beer down. “Eve hasn’t called or texted. She left for home without you. There’s nothing you can do about it, man.”
“But I want to be there for her.”
“You’re just going to have to deal until she wants you there,” West said.
Harley nodded, downing more of her drink. “It’s not going to be fun, but she’ll appreciate that you’re waiting for her when she returns.”
I sighed heavily, dropped my phone and beer onto the coffee table, and put my head in my hands. “Fuck.”
Harley patted my back. “It’ll be okay.”
West plucked the beer off the table and took a sip. “In the meantime, we can still drink.”
“Yeah,” I grumbled. “Thanks for coming over.”
“Anything for your melodrama,” Harley said.
I jerked my head up at her, but she was already laughing.
“Siblings are the best,” I muttered sarcastically.
Harley and West laughed at me, but they did the best by me that they could. Harley turned on some rom-com that we both groaned about. West ordered pizza. It tasted like ash in my mouth, but at least it helped me forget, even for a short period, that I still hadn’t heard from Eve.
I got up to get another slice of pizza when Harley called from the living room, “Oh, your phone is ringing!”
I rushed back into the room. “Eve?”
Harley shook her head, and I frowned, snatching the phone off the coffee table. Colton’s name showed on the screen. What the fuck?
“Colt?”
“Hey, boss,” he said, the sounds of a raging party in the background. “I think I messed up.”
30
Eve
No one knew where Bailey was.
I’d reached out to every person in her phone who might know where she was. Her volleyball coach said that she’d never shown up for tryouts. The girls on her team claimed that she’d gone off and gotten “weird again.” Trevor, the last person she’d contacted in her phone, said he hadn’t heard from her, but she owed him two hundred dollars.
Not promising.
I’d driven around every place I could think that she might frequent.
The high school claimed she hadn’t been at her last class on Friday. I didn’t inform them that the dentist note was definitely forged. The gym she went to said they hadn’t seen her in weeks. Ellen at Boose said the last time she’d seen her was when I was in town.
And each and every single place I’d tried, progressively getting more desperate, had the same story.
“She isn’t here.”
“We haven’t seen her.”
“Not in weeks.”
I sank into the front seat of my 4Runner and slammed my hands on the steering wheel. It was nearing evening, and I’d been in the car all day with no luck. I couldn’t call it quits. There had to be somewhere that I hadn’t looked. I couldn’t get the police involved…not yet.
My phone buzzed, and a text came in from my dad.
Any luck?
I blew out a breath. The best I could say for the man was that he’d gone out of his way to look for Bailey, too. I’d covered one half of town, and he’d driven to the other. He’d grumbled about it since he wanted to get the police involved. I’d vetoed that immediately, but I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out. If Bailey was back to her ways—and everything indicated that she was—then we were going to need all the help we could get. The longer she was gone, the harder it would be to find her.
Not yet. You?
Nothing. We’re going to have to call it.
I closed my eyes and clenched the phone in my fist. No. I wasn’t ready to give up.
This was Dad’s fault. She was his responsibility. That had been the entire point of making her stay with him through her senior year. I’d wanted custody, and he’d insisted that we shouldn’t uproot her life any more than it had been due to rehab. But he should have been checking his accounts better. The fact that Bailey had been siphoning money without him even realizing or checking to see what was going on was bullshit. And he’d accused me of not giving him enough money when, in fact, Bailey had stolen it.
This was my fault. I should have been paying more attention. Instead, I had been so into my own life that I neglected what was right in front of me. If the money was missing, then there was a reason. I didn’t want to believe that the reason was Bailey. But I should have been more diligent. Not wrapped up in my own shit.
And the truth of it all, this was Bailey’s fault.
She’d chosen to steal from Dad.
She’d chosen to lie to us.
She’d chosen to disappear.
I loved her, but right now, I had never hated her more.
Let me check a few more places.