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“But don’t you think we should?” he suggests in a hopeful tone.
“Why?” I cross my arms and look away, wishing this wasn’t his grand solution. I’d much rather go after Vivian and Lily.
“Maybe he never intended on stopping after he took my father down,” Emmett explains with a furrowed brow. “Maybe he wants to take over Jameson Automobiles for himself.”
“Then why wouldn’t he have just come straight for you?” I wonder out loud. “You’re the one in control of it all now, right? Bernadette doesn’t have rights to any of it unless you give them to her.”
“I know, but it’s not completely unbelievable,” he continues to my dismay. “I don’t know what exactly he’d be up to with Bernadette, but there is a motive there.”
“There’s a motive for Vivian and Lily, too,” I remind him bitterly. I can’t believe he’d rather go accuse my father than the two of them. “Lily did say my father was back.”
“What? What do you mean?” his tone grows urgent.
“Before you found me and told me about Bernadette,” I explain. “She was angry with me. She said everyone knew my father was back around.”
“What do you think that means?” he pushes, but I only reply with a flustered groan. If I had known what that meant, maybe I wouldn’t have rushed off and accidentally landed right back in Emmett’s arms.
“So, we should talk to him,” he persists, this time standing to look deep into my eyes as he caresses my arms. “I know it’s scary for you. But I promise if we talk to him and nothing comes out of it, we can try with Vivian and Lily.”
I collapse against him, pushing my forehead to his strong chest. The idea of talking to my father again terrifies me. He may have looked harmless the last time we parted ways, but the cops let me know he is definitely not some innocent guy to feel sorry for.
“What if it’s dangerous?” I ask against his shoulder, feeling suddenly exhausted. “You said you offered to take me captive because you were afraid of what he might do to me. You made it sound like he’d sooner kill me than let the Elites use me to get an advantage over him.”
His initial silence only makes me feel worse. He knows what I’m saying is true.
“I’ll protect you,” he promises in a deep rasp, brushing his hands along my hair.
“I know you’d try, but…I don’t think any of us stand a chance against my father,” I reply bleakly. “Your father didn’t. None of the Elites did…except for you. And if this is just his way of coming back for you, I think we should stay far away. Or go to the police. They told me they were looking for him anyway.”
“And why didn’t you tell them how to find him?” he asks in a leading tone. “You may not have known exactly where he was, but you could have found out if you tried.”
“Because I was worried I couldn’t trust the police,” I sigh, hating that he has to be right. Hating even more that this town has to be so fucked up.
He kisses my forehead, as if to apologize for making me eat my own words. “It’s okay,” he says softly. “I’ll help you track him down. We’ll figure out where he is during lunch and try to go see him after school if he’s nearby.”
Regardless of what Lily tried to say about my father being back, I have been clinging to this blissful notion that he had run back off to California or Spain or any other far corner of the earth that is nowhere near here. I swallow hard as I try to wrap my head around him lingering so close that we could pop by after school. I hope Emmett is wrong. I hope we can’t find him at all, or that he’s much too far away to be implicated in any of this.
“We better get going,” he nudges me, giving one more soft kiss before we make our way out of Bernadette’s room.
It feels wrong to be walking away from it, as if we’re walking away from her. Her disappearance has apparently softened my feelings towards her, and I can’t help but feel incredibly sorry for her. I stop and look back over the empty room once more. “Wherever she is, I hope she’s okay,” I pray out loud, grazing my fingers across her open bedroom door.
“You hate my sister,” he shoots back with a cold smirk.
“That doesn’t mean she deserves for anything bad to happen to her,” I defend. Suddenly I feel tears welling up. “I’m sorry, Emmett. You were right. I was so wrapped up in my jealousy of Vivian and feeling hurt by Lily that I let it distract us from finding your sister. I shouldn’t have been so selfish.”
His hand reaches for mine with a tight squeeze. “I’ve been just as selfish,” he confesses. “Probably much more so than you.”
I want to stay in this moment with him, where we are both humbled enough to just be sad and afraid together without all of our fucked-up defense mechanisms getting in the way. But the sunlight sprinting across the empty room beckons us to get moving. Standing around won’t do anything for Bernadette.
We
go to school and spend lunchtime on the computers in the library, hunting down my father just as Emmett said we would. We don’t find any clues, so I reluctantly sneak off and call Malcolm. He is able to give me a cell number to reach him, but I don’t tell Emmett how I got it.
I ask him to call my father, not having the nerve to do it myself. He gets off the phone and gives me a nod and sympathetic grin, signaling that my father is close enough for us to make the visit that afternoon.
8
Chapter Eight
