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“I’m sorry.” Eric won’t move.
“Come on.” Scarlett stops me, wrapping her arm over my twitching shoulder, wanting to reach for my gun, my only way to get to Redix.
“Give him time,” she says. “He’ll come around.”
The disbelief, the defeat, I walk with it out of the Emergency Room.
“Take me back to his room,” I tell Scarlett when we crawl into her sports car.
I still have the key fob, and I want to know what the hell happened.
It doesn’t make sense. How did we go from the most incredible night, where he swore his love to me and dreams for our future, to two days later, and he relapsed? And he fucked Angie? And some random woman?
What forced him to the edge of death again?
I comb his hotel suite. Empty bottles, of beer, of Absolut, of Johnny Walker, fuck, it’s a mess. But I know him. This isn’t him anymore. It feels so wrong.
Scanning the room while Scarlett checks the bathroom, my eyes fall on the nightstand.
The nightstand.
When we were teens, he always kept candy in his nightstand for me. Lemonheads. Like he knew I belonged in his bed. I pull the brass ring on the drawer, and there it is. His black leather journal. The one he’s been writing in for months.
Sliding down the edge of the bed, I have to read it. His darkest thoughts. His pain. His secrets. They’ll be no more.
What fills my eyes over the next hour reading it?
I barely can through my tears. They’re falling over the pages, over all his capital writing and love. Over all the answers I need.
Gentry with his taunts.
Derek Baucom was the driver, the third guy.
TJ targeted Pamela before she disappeared.
How Redix tried. How he fought until he could take no more.
There’s one last journal entry. It’s barely legible. Like he wrote it drunk.
Hey Candy Cade,
Remember how I used to carry you into the ocean? It made you laugh. I wanna go back to those waves with you. I wanna drown there, loving you for infinity.
Hey, God.
He said I’m the beginning.
Now I’m the end too.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Gravedigger by MXMS
Pamela Ryan wore a yellow sundress the night she went missing.
It was the same one I borrowed the night they went after me and took Redix instead.
Pamela was always sunshine.
