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“Helicopters gonna land,” Jayla says, as if reading my mind. “And that’s tomorrow at the latest. Bridget expects me home tonight. If I don’t check in before midnight to say I’m on my way, she’ll call me. Within an hour, she’ll be calling our parents, apologizing profusely but wanting to know if they’ve heard from us. Now, Mom might say Kit and I must be running late, and Bridget will buy that, but by the time Kit misses breakfast, the troops will be ready to launch. They know where we are, and they’re coming for us.”
“That’s the important part,” Kit says. “Help is coming, and that doesn’t mean our parents taking a leisurely drive to the coast. Therewillbe a helicopter, and it’ll have everything and everyone we need, maybe even a doctor if they’re worried enough. All we have to do is hold tight until—”
A shape lurches toward the huge bank of windows.
TWENTY-SEVEN
We all scramble up. Kit has the baseball bat, and Jayla scoops up a knife that must have been on the floor. When Madison takes a knife from the cushions, I feel like I missed a memo.
Kit opens his mouth, arm waving as if he’s about to tell me to take Madison into another room, away from that massive window. But then the lurching figure triggers a security light, illuminating the twilight, and it becomes two figures.
Garrett, with Sadie over his arms.
Garrett is at the door, punching at the keypad. We all stand there, frozen. When the lock beeps a negative, he pounds on the glass of the door.
“The code,” I say as I run forward. “I changed it.”
Madison races in front of me. “No, Laney.”
I stop. Behind her, Garrett pounds on the window.
“You changed the fuckingcodeon me?” he bellows.
“Don’t open the door,” Madison says. “Stop and think about this. Talk about this.”
I glance over at Kit and Jayla. Jayla nods, and Kit walks to the window.
“We need to speak to you first, Garrett,” Kit says, voice raised to be heard through the triple-pane glass.
“My sister is—”
“We will do what we can for you, but you can’t bring her in here.”
“What the fuck?”
“Are you sure she’s still alive?” Kit asks.
“What thefuck?” Garrett roars.
Madison moves in front of Kit. “The other people are dead. Clearly dead. But they were moving. Like Sadie.”
Garrett starts to snarl a reply. Then he seems to remember who he’s talking to. A moment’s pause, and when he speaks, his voice is almost soft. “I saw the guy, kiddo. There’s no way he could be alive, and yeah, he’s moving, which is messed up. This is different.” He hefts Sadie. “She wasn’t just moving her eyes or her mouth or her hand. She was running, right up until she collapsed and passed out. She’s alive.”
“And what if she doesn’t stay that way? What if she dies and comes back and tries to hurt us?”
He stares at Madison. Then his gaze swings my way, and his fist slams the glass so hard Kit yanks Madison back. Garrett doesn’t seem to notice. His gaze is fixed on mine, and it boils over with hate. Actual hate.
I’ve always known how Garrett feels about me. To him, I betrayed a trust. I was supposed to keep quiet, and it wasn’t like he’d broken into my bedroom, held me down, and raped me, right?
I was the source of a terrible experience for him. The experience of being made to face his actions and question whether what he’d done was wrong.
I got that. I didn’t want to—Jayla would kill me for admitting it—but I understood. Garrett had been raised in a world where you had to trick girls into sex, a world where, sure, sex with a fifteen-year-old was illegal but that doesn’t count if you’re both teenagers, right?Bringing a girl to a party and getting her drunk enough to have sex with you was a win.
I got that, and I have spent too much of my life wishing Garrett got it, too. Wanting him to realize what he’d done. Acknowledge his mistake and be changed by it.
Now I see the hate blazing from his face, and I know just how wasted those hopes were. This isn’t a guy who is secretly ashamed of what he did at nineteen and just doesn’t know how to deal with that. When he warned me to keep quiet—before I accused him of anything—he was acknowledging that he knew what he’d done.
Does he still know? Or has he rewritten history to a version that makes him the guy his mother and sister believe him to be? A guy falsely accused by a scared and pregnant girl who didn’t dare admit she’d had consensual sex.
