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Garret
I flopped down on my bed with my phone to my ear. “I know, Dad. I’m worried too. But we have to stop thinking the worst.” I swallowed hard when I heard his ragged inhale.
Mom running away was my father’s worst nightmare. She’d done it before, years before they had gotten married. Back then, it was because she was having trouble getting over the loss of a child—a miscarriage from a beating that had nearly killed her. Losing Nova had sent her running again, and no matter how many favors anyone called in, we couldn’t find a single trace of her. Not even Emmie Armstrong had seen or heard from her, and she was the one Mom had run to the last time she’d decided to hide from her pain with a new life.
Every woman I loved was either dead or missing, and it was destroying my gut. I was pretty sure I had an ulcer at this point. Food was unappealing, and what food I did eat fucked up my gut so badly, it was a wonder I didn’t puke blood.
“If I don’t get her back soon, I don’t know what I’ll do,” Dad muttered, sounding even more tired than I felt. “At least with her here, I was able to hold on for her sake. But with you in New York, what do I have left?”
“Dad, I need you to stop talking like that. Mom… She just needed a little time to herself to heal. That’s what she does. She hides her pain from everyone, especially us. Once she’s come to terms with Nova being gone…” I closed my eyes, fighting the fresh burn of tears. “She’ll be back, Dad.”
“Fuck, I hope so,” he muttered. After a pause, he cleared his throat. “I gotta get back to work, son. You stay safe, and if you hear anything, call me.”
“Yeah, Dad,” I promised, keeping my eyes clenched tight. “You too.”
The phone went silent in my ear, and I let it fall to the bed as a few tears slipped through my lashes. It had been months since Nova’s death—since I’d lost Lis. But the pain I felt at both of their losses never got any easier. Every mistake I’d ever made with either of them came back to haunt me. Sometimes the memories would hit me out of nowhere, and it was enough to have me clutching at my stomach as I bent in half, my entire body locked with the force of the pain.
It was too late to say I was sorry, too late to make it up to either of them. The “what-if” scenarios played out in my mind every night, keeping me from falling asleep until the early hours of the morning from sheer exhaustion.
Between all the hours I’d been working and even more time I spent trying to find Mom, what little sleep I’d been able to get was starting to catch up to me. I felt sick to my stomach, and I was hoping it was just from the lack of rest, so I’d swallowed two sleeping pills before my shower. With my eyes growing heavy, I barely had the sense to turn off my lamp before I crashed.
Something touching my face tried to break through my drugged brain, but I was too tired to care.
“Garret,” a voice I recognized hissed. But there was no way it was real. Nova was dead. I had to be dreaming. Then I felt the sting of a slap. “Wake up, you dumbass.”
Pissed that my mind and body were trying to play a sick joke on me, I grunted and tried to turn over, only to get a harder slap. “If I didn’t love you so damn much, I would smother you with your own pillow.”
My lashes were hard to lift with the effects of the sleeping meds, but when I realized there really was someone standing over me, I reacted instantly. I reached for the gun I kept under my pillow, my thumb already releasing the safety as a light weight landed on top of me. Sharp knees squeezed into my ribs, knocking the air from my lungs from the pain as the person on top of me grabbed my wrists, stopping me from squeezing the trigger.
“Garret,” that beloved voice snapped, louder this time. “Stop before you hurt one of us.”
Realizing that I wasn’t dreaming, I jerked at the sound of my sister’s voice. “N-Nova?” I rasped, emotion clogging my throat.
She eased her hold on my ribs enough to let me roll onto my back as she took possession of my gun.
“Nova?” I shook my head in denial. “No, you’re dead. I saw you.”
“Did you, though?” The snarkiness in her voice made me question everything I knew as truth as she flipped on the light. Blinking at the new brightness of the room, I gazed at my sister for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. “Do I look dead to you, big brother?”
Nova moved to sit beside me on the bed while I sat up, trying to separate reality from dream. My hands shook as I touched her face and hair before I grasped her wrist and rubbed my thumb over Ryan’s name on her skin.
“But I saw you,” I muttered to myself. “Even the necklace.”
She pulled her hand free of my grip and reached under her hoodie, pulling out a platinum chain with the Russian rings on them that read “Ryan’s Heart.” “This necklace?”
I wrapped my finger around the chain, skimming my thumb over the two rings. “Yeah, this necklace. It was…” My tormented gaze, full of the nightmarish things I’d seen that night, met hers. “She played us?”
“You would have known that already if you had just talked to me when I tried to contact you,” she complained, a pout in her sweet voice.
She was trying to be cute and tease me, but that didn’t stop my anger at her. “Why the fuck haven’t you come home before now?” I raged. “Do you know what we’ve gone through? Mom and Dad…” My voice broke. Now I had to tell her. Fuck! “Mom ran away, Nova. She couldn’t handle what happened, and she just up and disappeared. We’ve been looking everywhere for her.”
“Not everywhere,” she said, as if it was no big deal. “And she didn’t run away. I needed her help, so she came with me to Colombia to talk sense into Cali and—”
I saw spots for a moment at the mention of that name. Maybe I was wrong. Perhaps this was a dream after all. One where my sister tormented me with the possibility of Lis actually being alive.
“Cali?” I nearly choked on the name, cutting Nova off before she could get my hopes up any further. “Did…you…say…Cali?”
She pressed her lips together in displeasure at being interrupted, but she nodded.
