Page 217 of Rising Heat

“—it might get awkward.”

By the time I get back downstairs, Mack’s already holding the front door open.

“You done?”

“Yeah.”

He locks up behind us.

“Let’s go get our girl.”

That finally gets a real smile out of him.

“Get in the truck, Tyler.”

I grin despite myself.

Road trip.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

darcy

My mother turned my childhood bedroom into a home office eight months after I moved in with Brett.

At the time I took it personally before deciding it was romantic, like she was so confident I wasn’t coming back that she’d already repurposed the room. Looking back, she probably just looked at the empty space and thought finally, somewhere for the printer, which is honestly the most Mom explanation possible.

The powder blue walls have been repainted a shade that isn’t quite beige or white. The full-sized bed I used to sit cross-legged on doing homework is gone, and somewhere along the way the glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck to the ceiling when I was eight disappeared too.

Now it’s just a wooden desk shoved into the corner beside a pink chair that should feel aggressively feminine and somehow just looks charming, a crafting cabinet I reorganized on day two because apparently emotional avoidance comes with a sudden interest in ribbon storage, and a daybed pushed against the wall over a Persian-style rug in terra cotta and navy. I’ve spent the last few days staring at that rug like it’s eventually going to reveal the meaning of life.

So far all it’s revealed is that one corner curls up slightly if you catch it from the right angle.

I’ve been sleeping here for three nights.

Sleep feels ambitious.

Mostly I’ve been lying under the floral throw blanket my mom pulled out of the linen closet, staring at the ceiling where the stars used to be while my brain picks apart the same five conversations, rearranges them into entirely new ones, and starts over somewhere around one in the morning in case I missed a clue the first thirty-seven times.

At least Roxy’s been keeping me company.

She’s seventeen now and almost completely gray except for the white patch under her chin that makes her look permanently disappointed in everyone around her. The first night I got here she wandered into the room, stopped in the doorway long enough to survey the sweatpants, the mound of ice cream pints and bags of junk food, and what I can only assume she correctly identified as an emotional hostage situation before hopping onto the bed and curling against my hip like she’d reluctantly accepted responsibility for supervising whatever this was.

She’s barely left since.

Every morning, I wake up with her stretched across my legs purring hard enough to vibrate the mattress while she stares at me like she disagrees with every decision I’ve made since Sunday morning.

I’ve eaten enough mint-chip ice cream over the last four days that the inside of my mouth feels like frozen toothpaste. At some point yesterday I realized I was three true crime documentaries deep, still in the same sweatshirt, balancing the container against my stomach while the TV asked if I was still watching like it had concerns.

By documentary number five I wasn’t even following the killings anymore. I just needed somebody else’s life to be worse than mine for forty-five minutes at a time.

My phone spends most of the day face down beside me on the blanket because apparently I keep convincing myself I can outsmart my own anxiety through strategic placement. Every few minutes I cave anyway, flipping it over before the screen even finishes lighting up, but it’s always the same thing—Bex checking in, my mom asking if we need milk, my dad sending me a picture of Roxy asleep somewhere else in the house even though she’s currently asleep on my legs.

Which shouldn’t matter this much considering I’m the one who left.

My parents, meanwhile, have been suspiciously normal about the whole thing.

Mom cried when I showed up, hugged me until I finally stopped insisting I was fine, then immediately asked if I wanted lasagna. Dad just started talking about whatever crisis was currently being broadcast on the news, because that’s what he does when something’s wrong and he doesn’t know how to fix it.