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“Okay,” Lily says. “I’m hanging up now.”
“The fuck you are.”
“It’s not safe to be on the phone while you’re driving.”
“I’m not even—” I let the phone drop into my lap, then stab at it with my thumb until it switches to speaker. “I’m not touching it.”
“Concentrate on driving. I’ll see you when you get here.”
“Lily—”
She hangs up on me.
Shehangs up onme.
Lilith Hayes, who just ran away from her grandfather’s house and asked me for a ride, hung up on me.
I accelerate away from the hospital at twenty-five over the speed limit.
It’s half an hour to Cobble Hill from the Upper East Side on a good day. Forty-five minutes onthisday with all the traffic. I cut people off like I’m rushing to the hospital with my pregnant wife.
Which is not a scenario I’ll ever have to worry about. I just have to worry about picking up my not-fiancée before her evil prick grandfather gets to her.
This motherfucker tried togroundher?
I have less than zero business getting indignant about that, but it’s never stopped me before, and it doesn’t stop me now. My jaw hurts from gritting my teeth by the time I’m five minutes out from the Brooklyn Bridge.
A text appears on my phone.
It gives the name of a coffee shop and a dry cleaner’s. I put the first one into the map. It’s in Brooklyn, a mile, mile-and-a-half from Cobble Hill.
“I hope you haven’t been standing in one place this whole time,” I say to the text message.
Snowball gives significant commentary from the backseat.
Traffic sucks in Brooklyn, too. I have to go around two extra blocks with one-way streets to be in the correct position to literally drive up on the sidewalk if I have to.
My heart feels as big as a soccer ball, thumping away at my ribs. Half a mile. A quarter mile. A tenth. Lily’s not tall enough to be visible over parked cars, and it’s driving me out of my fucking mind. If I don’t see her in the next five seconds, I’m parking in the middle of the street and going to look for her.
There’s the sign for the dry cleaner’s. The coffee shop next to it has a blue awning.
And between two parked cars, I get a glimpse of red hair. Black leggings. My shirt.
I brake so hard the guy behind me swerves around, his horn blaring in a tinny, pathetic way. Lily’s green eyes snap to mine, and she runs.
There’s nobody on the sidewalk around her, but I get wanting to leave as fast as possible, so I lean over and throw the door open.
Lily scrambles inside, breathing hard, and yanks it shut.
“Hi.” She fumbles for her seat belt, sinking down in the seat, her hair windblown and her cheeks pink. “I realize this is awkward, but I didn’t want to call any of my friends.”
“Oh? Did they sell you out?”
I pull the SUV back into traffic. I want both of us away from this place as much as I did the night I took Lily.
“Uh, yeah. They did.” Lily frowns, like this betrayal is the most upsetting part of having a corrupt prick of a judge for a grandfather. “I guess we never had an explicit discussion about covering for each other.”
“Huge oversight.”
