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A SLUT LIVES HERE
BUT NOT FOR LONG
My blood runs cold. Never, not even when our affair had been made public, had someone gone so far as to vandalize Reese’s house.
I’m suddenly very much aware that I’m outside. That whoever did this could be watching me. That, at any moment, someone could come for me and make good on that threat.
My legs act on their own accord. They rush me back around to the front of the house, where I bolt inside and double-lock the doors again. Despite what I just learned, I run up the stairs two at a time to check on Violet.
Her window is closed and locked.
She’s sleeping.
Dread continues to surge through my veins, however. If they’re so confident about coming to the house, what will stop them from coming inside? What is it that they want from me?
It’s only then, as this terror takes me while I look down at Violet, do I consider an option that hadn’t even run through my mind until now.
What if it’s Holly?
She is the only person in the world who’d want to scare me away from where I am. Rather than frighten me, though, I’m surprised to find that the thought mostly just pisses me off.
Who the fuck does she think she is?
29
REESE
I’m halfway up the stairs when I look up and see it.
Dozens of pictures taped to my door. Black and white photographs of Olivia in a collage like wallpaper. From the front, from the side, from the back. Laughing, frowning, smiling, zoning out. It’s a hundred or a thousand of her, so many different sheets that I can’t even see the stucco of my wall past them.
And spray-painted on top of all of it in huge, sloppy red letters is a single word.
WHORE.
I drop the bags of food in my hands to the ground. Pad thai goes spraying over the hedges, but I don’t give a fuck. When I try the handle of the front door of my house, though, it jiggles but doesn’t turn.
My thoughts are reduced to monosyllabic grunts. GET IN. NOW. GET IN. NOW. I’m raging, incoherent. The fucking door won’t fucking open, why won’t it open, what’s happening inside, where’s Olivia, where’s my daughter, why won’t the fucking door open?
After a moment, I say to hell with it and throw my shoulder into the center of the wood. Something splinters but doesn’t give. I ram it again. Step back and kick it. Ram it again.
Finally, it breaks and I go tumbling inside.
I’m back on my feet in a second. My eyes swivel to the stairs—right as something hard cracks me over the head. Darkness crowds in on the edges of my vision as the world tilts and wobbles.
Half a beat later, a sudden, apologetic yelp slices through my dazed, pained confusion.
“Oh, fuck, Reese! It’s you! I’m so sorry!”
I blink, trying to get my sight back as I rub the sore spot over the top of my head. Olivia’s face comes into view. The rest of her materializes shortly after.
She’s standing there with her hair wild and her hands gripped around the shaft of the baseball bat that she brought with her when she moved in from her apartment to here—“for intruders,” she explained back then. This despite the fact I have a license to carry, because she just couldn’t see herself using a gun if something wrong happened while she was here alone with Violet.
“Good to know you can actually swing that thing,” I mutter weakly. If she’d aimed just a little bit more accurately or if my skull was just a little bit less thick, I might be on the floor with a crater in my head right now.
She drops it. The bat clatters to the floor and she runs over to me quickly.
“I’m so sorry!” she repeats. “I heard weird shit at the front door, so I grabbed that and?—”
