I’ve never seen Gabe look so panicked. He looks between us, brows drawn together. “Laurel’s gone.”
thirty-five
This Summer
“What do you mean she’s gone?” I ask, pulse hiking.
Gabe shakes his head. “She’s not in her room, she’s not anywhere in the house. I drove us home last night, but—” He winces. “Her car is gone.”
“What?” I say. Suddenly, I realize I’ve been strangling Everett’s fingers with mine. He just squeezes back, gently, when I loosen my grip.
“Did you see it when you got back?” Gabe asks me.
My shoulders slump, guilt washing over me. “No,” I say hoarsely. I’d been so focused on Everett last night that I hadn’t even thought to look around.
“Sutton,” Everett says quietly, like he can read my mind. I look up at him, surprised to find his face a little blurry. “It’s okay. Why would you have even thought to check for her car?”
But that’s not it, I realize. It’s not just last night. I’ve been focused on Everettallweek. To the point that it made Laurel angry. To the point that she and I fought. To the point that I told myself she was fine, even when I knew she wasn’t, and that I waited to find her this morning in favor of talking to him.
“Wait,” I say, pulling my phone out of my pocket. “I think she’s still sharing her location with me.”
But Gabe stops me before I can even unlock my screen. “She left her phone in her room,” he says. “We tried calling and Davi found it.”
“Laurel,” I say, half growl, half sigh. I’m both annoyed she would be stupid enough to leave without any way to contact her, and guilty that I didn’t see this coming.
“She can’t have gone far,” Everett says. “If she left her things here, she’s planning on coming back, right?”
I’m wracking my brain as Gabe and Everett discuss where she might be, why she might have left.Where would you go, Laurel?I think of her favorite places in town, but if she left sometime between Everett and I getting back last night and everyone waking up, none of them would even be open. I picture her scrambling up the rocky incline of her favorite sunrise hike alone, slipping on a loose stone and plummeting down the drop-off. Her speeding down the PCH and overcorrecting and—
I stop myself there. Going to the absolute worst-case scenario isn’t going to help us find her any faster.
“Did she leave a note or anything?” I ask Gabe. He shakes his head. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Just when we got back last night,” he says. “Davi saw her before he went to bed, I guess. Said they talked about the party and our last night here for a minute, but...” He trails off, shrugging defeatedly, but something about his words rings in my head.
“I think I know where she is,” I say. “Maybe.”
Poppy Cottage has fallen into even further disrepair since we last stayed here. The succulents are gone from the flower boxes and the paint job they were promising when we first checked in clearly never happened. Flakes hang on perilously from its weather-beaten, peeling siding, and for a minute itseems like quite the metaphor for us. A once-steady foundation, left alone to rot for too long. A shiny new place to stay that matches the surfaces of all our lives. But we’ll always have come from here.
The door is unlocked when I try it. It’s clear no one is staying in these cottages or has been in a while. When we walk in, there’s a breeze blowing sand and salt air through the main room. It’s coming from the deck door, thrown wide-open by the person sitting out there alone.
“Oh, thank god,” Davi says, drawing a hand down his face. He’d been white as a sheet when we went downstairs, gathering numbers for morgues and hospitals at the kitchen island while Gabe tried to get him to stop.
We all start toward the door, one collective body, but I stop halfway, everyone pausing behind me.
“Can I—” I glance back at everyone. “Is it okay if I just talk to her alone for a minute?”
“Probably a good idea,” Davi, who needs approximately three business days to decompress after something high stress happens, says. “If we all go rushing out there she might run off again.”
“She’s not a deer,” Gabe says. Davi shoots him a look. “But good point.”
Gabe and Davi start toward the front door. Everett pauses for a minute, hand finding mine.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod. “I’m good.” I squeeze his hand—less violently this time. He lets go and gives me a small reassuring smile.
I wait until the front door has closed behind him to turn back toward the deck, where Laurel is sitting. I realize I don’t have a great opening line, or really a place to start. All I have is some jumbled approximation of what to say to her, or somepoint to get to. But there isn’t time to get it perfect now. All I can do is be there for her.
