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And then my phone buzzed again.
“Guys, sorry, this computer is having a stroke, and this internet is being run by hamsters. I can’t—”
The screen blinked into black as the laptop finally threw up its keys and pooped out. I sighed, wondering if my new subscriber was going to regret ever giving me three dollars. Or maybe they’d see how badly I needed it.
Another vibration.
Okay, what does he want? Did I leave something at his house, maybe?
I grabbed the phone before it slid between the scratched-up brown leather cushions. I unlocked the phone and read the text. Then I read it again, and then another time, just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating anything.
ROCKY: Hey. Are you busy today? I’ve been thinking a lot about you.
Every neural network in my brain fried like a crispy chicken nugget. Rocky, the handsome and mysterious and devastatingly sexy detective, had been thinking a lot about me? The same way I’d been thinking about him? Or maybe he was just thinking about me in the way a young kid thinks about their new puppy back at home? Maybe he was just worried if I had enough food or water?
No. That definitely wasn’t it. He was thinking about me the same way I thought about him… I wondered if he had the same dreams I had, too.
“Sam, you okay?” It was my dad. He looked at me with a caterpillar eyebrow arched into the air.
“What? Yeah, why?”
“You’ve been staring at the wall for a good five minutes now.”
My mom chuckled before getting up to go to the kitchen. I heard the ancient coffee machine roar to life. It sounded like a jet plane was about to take off. Probably because it was about as old as me, but my parents couldn’t really afford a ton of new stuff on their salaries, so it was either the coffee machine or gas for the car.
Clearly, they had their priorities in order.
My dad went back to reading the paper after he was sure I didn’t just have a stroke. Meanwhile, I tried formulating a response to Rocky’s text that wasn’t just a string of random letters, numbers, and emojis.
SAM: I’m free!
Nope. Too excited.
I deleted the text. Rewrote it.
SAM: Yeah, I’m free.
Ugh, too cold.
Deleted it again.
SAM: Yup, I’m free :)
Okay, that’s as good as it’s getting.
I hit Send. Before I could spiral down into a self-doubt pit of what-if text messages, I got up and went over to the small, cracked blue suitcase I had set next to the couch. I knew I’d have to go back to my place eventually, but the thought of sleeping inside the same four walls where a murder happened was… well, it wasn’t great.
I rummaged through the suitcase and grabbed a pair of khaki shorts and a clean gray T-shirt. It was wrinkled to all hell, but the iron at my parents’ house was more likely to set my clothes on fire than get rid of the wrinkles, so I laid it out on the couch and tried to hand-press the wrinkles out. It was a great way to work out my building anxiety, too, so win-win. My phone buzzed again, and my heart skipped a beat, but the name on the screen wasn’t Rocky’s.
HAZEL: Hey boo. How’s it going today?
SAM: Gooood! Just here in my parents, trying to stream a little. Rocky texted me like five minutes ago.
HAZEL: No way, saying what?
I chatted with Hazel while I waited for Rocky to text back. She was having a rough go of things, but Shonda was keeping her updated every step of the way, and things were looking better than they had the night when everything went down. She was able to prove that Hazel was out of the apartment at the time of death and that, even though her knife was missing, there was still more than enough reasonable doubt to keep her out of jail.
At least for now. Without the actual killer caught, Hazel still remained a suspect. I knew Jesse’s parents had also hired a five-star attorney and investigator, and I had a feeling they still had their targets set on Hazel. After everything that had happened, I understood things could change on a moment’s notice, and that scared me the most. I used to have a sense of surety, that things were good and they’d remain good. As if the train tracks my life were riding on had zero bumps or detours, just a straight line toward a happy ending.
How dumb I’d been.
The fear of the uncertainty was strong. It kept me up most nights, worried that I’d get a call saying Hazel was back behind bars. Even though I tried keeping positive, it was difficult, especially after seeing her wearing jailhouse jumpsuit.
My phone buzzed, and this time Rocky’s name popped up on my screen.
