AllFreeNovel
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I
lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, sleep eluding me for the fourth night in a row. This apartment was my safe place. It was my home and my refuge from all the shitty things I’d lived with growing up.
Those diaries had thrown me back fifteen years into an unhappy childhood where my only escape was to Zee’s house. I hadn’t known it wasn’t normal to have rats living in your house until I’d seen Zee’s. I hadn’t known that playing on piles of piss-soaked newspaper and soiled clothes wasn’t normal, that a kitchen full of cracked plastic fast food containers with rotting food inside and dirty dishes piled on whatever surface that could be found wasn’t the norm.
Mum and Dad had started collecting junk when Dad got laid off. They were always planning on selling it, but then it got too hard to find what they were looking for. The collections grew and grew. By the time the piles had reached window height, they were attached to the security that having so much stuff gave them. It was a way they could escape the poverty they found themselves in, but they never acted on it. They never did anything except collect more junk.
Stuff got broken, but they never threw it out. It got ruined, but they never tossed it. By the time the rats and mice moved in, they were both drunks and so far beyond a healthy mental state that they didn’t even know what to do with either the mess or the rats.
I should have been taken away long before I moved out. Monroe reported my living situation over and over to child services, but nothing ever happened. Nothing ever changed.
Until Zee moved me out. My apartment was her first big purchase, before her car, before she even got her dad a place. It became my sanctuary. Everything had its place, everything was clean, and it was secure. Safe. I was protected from them.
I loved my parents, but our relationship hadn’t been easy. I was cheated out of a childhood. I’d shouldered responsibilities that no five- or six-year-old should have had to bear. I’d hidden how bad it was from people I now knew were only trying to help because I didn’t want my parents to get in trouble.
They repay that loyalty with demands for me to take care of them. The security guard who is as loyal to Zee as they came—thanks to Queen helping him and in return asking him to look after Zee and me—the security-coded lift and a deadbolt programmed to only a handful of people’s fingerprints, were just an inconvenience to them. In their twisted minds, I was rich because my home was clean. Nothing was expected of my sisters and brother, but they all turned out just like Mum and Dad.
But despite how difficult my relationship with them is, I still have them. Zee doesn’t. She lost two-thirds of her family in one go. The woman she wanted to be like never came home to her. The brother she adored went out for the weekend and failed to return. Reading her mum’s words so many years later had to be hard.
She was exhausted when we’d left her. Ry told me she was already in bed before Tristan and I had even reached his car. She’d slept through to lunchtime the next day, then come to class. The discussion about planning the podcast hadn’t been easy. But our time afterward…. I flushed at the memory, heat crawling over my skin.
We’d talked some since then, but not a lot. We’d texted too. I missed my friend. I missed my girl. I wanted her back. I wanted to be there to support her, and so did Tristan.
He had to be careful that no one saw us together. It had been hard not being able to greet him the way I’d wanted to in class. Then yesterday, we’d met at the coffee shop, going through our results so far, building a picture of the companies Rosa had picked to invest in. The only saving grace for the half a day’s torture was that we had to sit close on the tiny table, pressed together from shoulder to knee as we shared our results on a laptop.
Now, today was the day. I was seeing Zee as soon as I could get over to the marina and take out the runabout.
At least it would be the day, once the sun rose, but time was crawling at a snail’s pace and I couldn’t even sleep it away.
Twiddling my thumbs wouldn’t get me anywhere though, so I threw on some sweats and searched through my fridge for almond milk that was still within its use-by date. One hot chocolate later, and I was sitting on my balcony with my laptop as I sorted through spreadsheets of raw data, compiling graphs to analyze the timelines of decisions made by Zee’s mum.
When I next looked up, the pinpricks of light in the pitch-black sky had given way to a grey dawn, and I was ready for food.
The vibration of my phone made me jump. Who was calling me at this time of morning? It was barely even 5:00 a.m.
“Hey, Ry,” I answered, my brow furrowed and fear swirling around in my gut. Why was he calling? “Is Zee okay?”
He hesitated, and that only made my unease spike higher. “Flynn… I… I don’t think so.”
“What the heck, man? Why didn’t you call me sooner? What’s going on—”
“I just went past her cabin to check on her like I do every morning. Her bed hasn’t been slept in. Again—”
“What?” I shrieked. But then it occurred to me that I’d spoken with Zee twice since she’d left class a few days earlier, and she hadn’t told me anything. This time my voice was quieter, confusion colouring my tone. “Why didn’t you stop her?”
He huffed out a laugh, but it held no humour. “We are talking about Zali, aren’t we? Short of carrying her into bed and tying her there, what could I have done?”
“You could have called me sooner,” I grumbled, the fight leeching out of me. He was right. My girl was too damn stubborn for her own good, and there was no way either one of us could have stopped her. Tristan, on the other hand, might have, but he also wasn’t our babysitter.
“Has she eaten?”
“She ate breakfast with me the day before yesterday. Since then she’s eaten in her office, but she’s only picked at everything I’ve given her.” He sighed, his voice weighed down with concern. “Flynn, she’s still wearing the day before yesterday’s clothes, and she hasn’t been in the water since we got here.” The clothes were a warning light. The lack of swimming was the emergency siren. But maybe there was a simple explanation. Possibly?
“What’s the water like?” My voice wobbled, and I swallowed back the lump in my throat.
Ry blew out a rough breath. I could hear the seagulls in the distance. If I closed my eyes, I could picture the spot where they were anchored. On a sunny day, the water was the most surreal cyan, so clear that you could spot different-coloured shells on the sandy sea floor.
“There’s no one here. It’s perfect. The water is pristine. Any other day and I’d be dragging her out of the water, but she’s drawn the blinds and locked herself indoors.”
