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Thank you for not letting me freeze in your backyard. Since I woke up lucid this morning, that also means you didn’t poison me, so thank you for dinner. Despite being too proud to admit it, I was hungry. Sorry for the inconvenience of showing up unannounced, although I have my suspicions someone you know is more to blame for that than I am. Regardless, thanks again.
Best,
Sadie Davis
I wasn’t ready to confront the unexpected disappointment that rolled through me when I’d figured out she was gone. Having just come downstairs to make some coffee, I didn’t even realize I was looking forward to seeing her until that note punched me right in the gut.
When I got upstairs, the door to her room was closed. I knocked on it anyway, holding out a tiny shred of hope she’d still be in there.
Instead, I found the bedding folded in half across the bed, the sheets stripped, the trash can emptied—even though the only thing that could have been in there was the wrapper from the protein bar and maybe an apple core—and she’d even managed to find the recycling bin in the laundry room for her empty water and Gatorade bottles. Besides the whooshing of the washing machine, because she not only stripped the sheets but also threw them in the wash, it was like she’d never even been here.
My jaw clenched. I had no business still thinking about her. She’d moved on to more appropriate lodging and I was back to my usually scheduled programming of spending my days avoiding the whispers and stares. It was for the best that she was gone. Her time in Kelly Bay was temporary. The disaster status of my life was permanent.
Wrenching my brain back to the task at hand, I responded to Val.
Drew: I can see how that would come as a surprise. Sorry you got blindsided. It was a one-night emergency thing and she split before I woke up.
See, I could still acknowledge other people had emotions, like a functioning human.
But that was as far as it was going. I wasn’t volunteering anything I didn’t have to give. The house wasn’t suddenly open for some kind of “let’s hash out our repressed issues kumbaya-style” intervention. I didn’t need Val getting any ideas.
The bubbles popped up as she typed out a response, but then they stopped and my screen lit up with an incoming call. That was such a rare occurrence these days that I reared back from my own hand.
Why the fuck would Jessica Pellegrina be calling me?
My gut reaction was to send the call straight to voicemail but a whispered inkling in the back of my brain forced my thumb to pause over the decline button. Jessica worked at the Pines Motel.
What if this had something to do with Sadie?
That was ridiculous. For all I knew Sadie ended up in a hotel over in Rosewood. And Jessica would have no reason to call me about her.
Except for the fact that two-thirds of the town knew she’d spent the night at my house.
I took too long and the call stopped ringing.
Jessica Pellegrina: pick up your phone asshole
Leave it to Jessica, she didn’t pull her punches with anyone. She called again. This time I picked it up on the first ring.
“Yeah?” The trepidation seeping into my voice surprised me.
“Holy shit, you actually answered.”
“You told me to,” I said dryly.
“If I’d realized that was all it took, I would’ve been texting you to answer your phone for years.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Why are you calling me?”
“Aren’t you just a ray of sunshine? Look, your friend blacked out and the stupid asswipe here—”
“That’s Doctor Asswipe to you, Pellegrina,” Dr. Ashwood barked in the background.
“His lord, majesty, know-it-all king of the ER, Dr. Asswipe, won’t let us sign her out unless we prove she has somewhere to stay tonight that’s not K.B. Pines.”
“You never should have been renting rooms out this early after the fumigation,” Dr. Ashwood yelled.
“Wasn’t my decision, bro,” she snapped back at him.
