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What if he finds my daughter? What if he finds Brad? What if they want all of us gone, just because we’re related to Dean Swartz? Who is this man? What did he do? Why am I involved in this?
Why did I ever find that stupid diary?
I should have listened to my gut.
I should have gone on a date with Matt and just tried to be happy in California.
It’s not like I can “have it all at forty-two,” the way the magazines all say. Right? It was delusional to think so.
Now, I’m off-topic.
Her thoughts swirled. She couldn’t make sense of any of this any longer.
“Mom? Are you there?”
“Yeah. Sorry, baby. I think I just have a bad signal. But I’m so excited to hear your audition went well. Will you promise to celebrate today? Even if you do it alone?”
Penny laughed. Elise wished she could bottle the sound of her daughter laughing. “I’ll try.”
“Even if it just means having dessert,” Elise said.
“Dessert? Really? Is this my mom?”
“Just promise me you’ll enjoy yourself,” Elise said. She wasn’t sure why she pushed this so hard. Maybe because she had just seen a horrendous darkness and now wanted her daughter to feel only light.
Maybe because she had just realized nobody ever knew what would happen next.
Finally, Elise found a way to hang up. She tossed the phone on the bed and blinked at it. Her emotions felt like an ocean, drowning her. She had no control over them.
She only knew two things.
She had to stop crying.
And she had to get out of that room.
Elise packed a smaller backpack with essentials, thrust her laptop into the back of it, then zipped it uptight. When she left her room, she didn’t bother to lock it. She had all her essentials, and it wasn’t like it was safe, anyway. When she appeared in the foyer, she hunted around for Connell, who, it seemed, had decided to be scarce when she wanted to scream at him the most.How dare you let that horrible man in? Who is he? Why does he want to threaten me? Why did he say he owned the place?
As Elise stomped down Main Street, she considered leaving the island altogether. Heck, it wasn’t like she had ever been threatened back in good ol’ Calabasas.
That said, she’d never been more curious in her life. She hated this about the situation, but it was true.
It was like a dramatic mystery had just flung itself out in front of her.
She had thought she’d been in the midst of aLifetimemovie: on the hunt for her long-lost father, finally putting together the pieces of her life. If she was honest, she had imagined them having some kind of tearful reunion on the beach, where she would tell him that she had always dreamed of meeting him.I dreamed of you, too, Elise. Every night. I knew you were out there somewhere.
She had been delusional. Of course, she had been. As a writer, that was one way to describe her everyday existence.
Still, it was outside the bounds of reason to imagine herself this far into some kind of murderous plot.
Elise snapped open the door of The Grind coffeehouse with much more violence than she had anticipated. Her eyes burned across the counter and into the bright blue ones of Wayne. The smile fell from his cheeks as his eyes scanned her expression, her backpack, everything about her demeanor.
“What happened?” he asked. It was like he already knew.
Elise flared her nostrils in rage. “You told me I shouldn’t spread that information around the island. You told me to keep it to myself.”
“Yeah...” Wayne said.
“Well, someone took that information and spread it like wildfire. And now, people are breaking into my room and threatening me,” she blared.
