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“Good news!”
“Oh?”
She holds up a pair of keys in her hands. My car keys with the Lenox University key chain dangling on it.
“How?”
Crap. Now I have to go back to my apartment.
“How do you think?” she says, taking my hand to place the keys in my palm. “Isaac apparently worked his MC magic. Your car’s in the garage. He just had someone drive it over.”
“My car? He actually found my car?”
“He said your purse is in the front seat, along with your phone. Oh, and that the landlord changed the locks on your town house. The new keys are already there on the ring.”
I hold up the key ring and notice the new gold key.
“Isaac, I mean, Mr. Perry did all of this today? How?”
“We probably don’t want to know the gory details,” she says as she turns to walk back to the living room. “My son can be vicious when provoked. Or when someone he cares about is wronged.”
Someone he cares about?
“He doesn’t even know me,” I mutter in confusion.
“You’re Lyla’s best friend, which means you are family,” Mrs. Perry says when she turns back around in the open room to face me. “Everything okay, dear?”
Family.Isaac thinks of me like a daughter?
Ew.
Unless…maybe there’s another reason he went to all that trouble.
Either he’s worried I might tell Lyla about last night, which of course I won’t, or he cares in a nonfamilial way.
I’m probably wrong.
At least that’s what I tell myself as I say goodbye to Mrs. Perry and go outside to inspect my car.
It looks the same as it did last night before it was stolen. Not a ding on it. Even the coins are still sitting in one of the little cup holders.
The only thing out of place is the folded piece of white paper on the floorboard of the driver’s seat I felt under my feet when I sat down.
Reaching for it, I pick it up and open it to find handwritten cursive words in blue ink.
While I was hoping unrealistically for him to ask to see me in my underwear again, what I got instead were a few suggestions and an apology.
You need a roommate. It’s safer than living alone. And stop talking to strange men you meet at gas stations. He was lurking there, waiting for someone like you to come along and buy his bullshit.
Then there’s the final line, the one that I love most and find the most confusing:
Sorry about last night. I didn’t leave to hurt you. I left because I had already stayed too long.
CHAPTERSEVEN
Isaac
Like a pussy, I waited down the street in a neighbor’s driveway for Holly to leave before I returned to shower and finally eat for the first time all day.
