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ChapterFifty-Two
VERA
“Vera!” Maddie shouted from outside my house, pounding on my window.
I slowly opened my eyes and pulled the blankets over my head, hoping that this was a dream. João hadn’t come home to get Ana until, like, two in the morning last night, and I didn’t know how much sleep I had actually gotten.What time is it anyway?
“Vera! It’s freezing-ass cold out here. Open the freaking window!”
After grumbling to myself, I sat up against my headboard and glanced toward the window. My eyes widened when I really caught Maddie standing outside, banging on the glass, her eyes big in an urgent stare.
“Open up. It’s important.”
I leaped out of bed and hurried toward the window, then unlocked it and pulled it open.
Maddie jumped through it and into my bedroom, shaking the rain off her bright yellow rain jacket. “You need to answer your messages!”
Wiping my tired eyes, I sat back on the bed and pulled the blankets around myself. “Maddie, it’s, like”—I glanced at the digital clock Mom had gotten me for my birthday last year and groaned—“four in the morning. We have school in three hours.”
“Yeah, well, who cares? We have a problem.”
“I didn’t get to sleep until two thirty this morning.”
“Did you see Piper’s text message?” Maddie asked, ignoring my pleas to sleep.
I grabbed my phone from the charger. The screen lit up with at least a hundred messages from the group chat I had with Maddie and Piper, starting at three in the morning. I furrowed my brows and scrolled through them to make sense of what had happened.
“All you guys said was my name and, like, called me a bunch of times.”
Maddie rolled her eyes and pulled my phone away. “It’s about Blaise.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, sitting up straight. “What happened?”
“You know, I would roll my eyes and poke fun at how much you fucking like him, but …” Maddie paused for a long moment, tore off her jacket, and sat on the edge of my bed. “You know how Piper’s dad works at the police station?”
“Yeah,” I said, tugging the blankets closer to my chest. “Why? What about it?”
“Well, Piper overheard him telling her mother that Blaise Harleen had been brought in.”
I slammed my hands against the mattress. “What the hell do you mean? For what?”
Hours ago, Blaise had dropped me off at home and told me that he was going to the skatepark for a little bit. Had he gotten into a fight with someone there? Had the police found something on him, pinned something on him? He was innocent, right?
Maddie stayed quiet, brows furrowing together.
“For what, Maddie?! What happened? Tell me.”
“They brought him in for questioning about the murder of Skylar Walker.”
“The … murder of Skylar Walker?” I whispered, my mouth parched. “S-she’s dead?”
“Apparently, they found her body washed up on the beach.”
My heart dropped, my body going rigid.
Oh my fucking God. This couldn’t be real. She had to be lying.
I scrolled to the very first message that Piper had sent in the group chat this morning, stating that she had overheard her father say Blaise really had been taken into custody for the murder of his ex-fling.
