The Best Lie (Damaged Book 2)

by Jenna Mills

  He shook his head. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  The smile flashed out of nowhere, a sharp, brilliant streak that lit up his whole face. “Why I wanted to take your picture. What I see when I look at you.”

  And then it was happening again, I couldn’t breathe, the air was being squeezed out of me, every molecule—

  “Your pictures,” he said. “Why do you take them?”

  More puzzle pieces, drifting, shifting. “Because I like to.”

  “But why?”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help it. There was no way to look at his crooked smile and not smile back at him.

  “There you go again,” I said. “Pulling a Dr. Rivers on me.”

  He stepped closer. “I really need to meet this guy.”

  “Or not,” I murmured.

  The green in his eyes darkened. “When you go out and look around, what makes you lift your camera? Why do you do it?”

  I was starting to realize he wasn’t going to let me off the hook. “To capture the image,” I said, trying to find the right words. “To save what I see, so I can go back to it.”

  “And remember,” he finished for me. Still looking crazy boyish, he extended my camera to me. “So you never forget, right?”

  It was like he knew…

  Mechanically I glanced down at the LCD display, and saw. Saw what he’d seen, what I’d seen reflected back in the soft green of his eyes.

  Me. Long, white-blond hair whipping against the soft lines of my face. My eyes, sparkling—determined. My mouth, curved into a smile, tentative at first, guarded, then wider. Stronger.

  Unguarded.

  Me.

  “Don’t go back.”

  My mouth opened.

  “Don’t go back to before.”

  I looked up.

  Everything slowed, turned dreamlike as he once again lifted a hand to my face, gently sliding the hair from my cheek.

  My throat was tight, but somehow, I found voice. “I don’t want to.”

  Chapter 7

  Closer, was all I could think. Step closer. Give me more warmth. I wanted to feel it—feel him. And then he did. Eyes locked on mine, he leaned in, leaned down, and I felt myself going up on my toes, reaching for him, wanting—

  The kiss was soft, gentle, like a door opening, opening really slow, teasing, tempting— And it was like something inside of me just broke, restraint, caution, denial, maybe everything. Because then it wasn’t slow anymore. His arms closed around me and I opened to him, threading my fingers through his hair and holding on, aware in some corner of my mind that I was drowning, drowning in the feel of his mouth slanting against mine, of his hands cradling my face, of his body, so big and strong against mine, drowning in the heat surging through me, drowning, falling, gasping—

  The cold sliced in hard and fast, and then I was ripping away, ripping away without warning and spinning, spinning away from him and toward the trees—

  And saw him.

  “Zoe—”

  He stood without moving, as still as the pine surrounding us. But I knew. I knew the difference between a tree and a man.

  Hands then, on my shoulders. “In jail,” Austin gritted out. “Baby, he’s in jail—”

  “There,” I whispered. “Someone’s there—watching us—”

  Austin spun and took off at a dead run, but before I could even breathe, he was back and pulling me into his arms.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” he murmured, holding me tight. “You don’t need to be afraid anymore.”

  And that’s when I saw what he must have seen, the wall of pine rising up around us, tall and still against the fading blue of late afternoon.

  But no man.

  Only shadows.

  Of trees.

  He followed me back to Emily’s. He walked me to the door. He lifted a hand to the dragonfly inked against my neck, and gently kissed me goodbye. On the cheek.

  I went inside and found Emily and Josh out back by the pool. The evening wore on. We swam. My mom blew up my phone wanting to know when I was coming home. I told her I wasn’t. Austin texted to tell me good night. It was all so normal. But as I slipped into the guest room to go to bed, I found myself staring at the window. And when I slipped closer, I saw a car parked across the street—and a man in a hoodie walking slowly along the sidewalk.

  Normal, I told myself again. Completely normal, everyday stuff. I was only being paranoid, letting my imagination play tricks on me again. But even as I made myself turn and climb into the big sleigh bed, there was no denying the truth.

  It was still happening.

  The text was waiting when I woke up.

  I want to show you something.

  Bring your pictures.

  Still in bed, I stared at my phone until the glow of the address he’d provided blurred. I knew the street, but had never been to that part of town, where the doctors and lawyers lived, people like Lexi who drove Mercedes and Porches, and vacationed in Europe.

  Questions slipped closer, possibilities I’d never let myself consider, and with them came the quickest sliver of embarrassment. I’d told him everything. I’d told him about my mother, her drug use. I’d told him about growing up with nothing.

  Never once had I considered he’d grown up with everything.

  With a hard squeeze of my heart, I tapped out a quick response.

  I’m sorry. I can’t.

  A man sat alone at the table nearest the rail separating the patio from the crowded sidewalk. Mirrored aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He had a glass of water he hadn’t touched. Two guys—frat boys based upon the way they were dressed—hung out by the door to the restaurant, making no move to go inside, or leave. Just…looking around. Another man stood across the street, leaning against a storefront. All the tables around me were occupied, a few by families, one by a group of older woman, the rest by college kids.

  I tried not to fidget. I concentrated on deep breaths. I took long, slow sips of my mango tea, and longer, slower breaths. These were only people, exactly like the people I interacted with daily at the coffee shop. I couldn’t break out in a cold sweat every time someone I didn’t know looked at me.

  But the tightness in my chest wouldn’t go away.

  “I had another nightmare,” I told Dr. Rivers, pretending this was any other session, and that we sat within the familiar, comfortable confines of his mid-century modern office, rather than the crowded, outdoor patio of one of the most popular hangouts at The Hill.

  “I thought those stopped.”

  “They did,” I said into my phone, glad for the moment that he was late and I couldn’t see his face. Sometimes it was easier to say the hard things without seeing someone’s reaction—his reaction—and I knew he wouldn’t be happy about what I was saying. He wanted the dreams—nightmares—gone as badly I did. I’d thought about not telling him. But I’d learned shoving the bad stuff in a closet didn’t make it go away.

  That’s when the festering started.

  “It’s happening all over again,” I said. “It’s like I close my eyes and someone’s there, waiting for me.”

  “Who?”

  The whisper of awareness slipped closer, cold and feather-soft along the back of my neck, exactly like so many times before.

  “It’s dark,” I told him, trying to keep my voice as emotion-free as possible. He was phenomenal at picking up the slightest variation. “But I know they’re there. Watching…. Waiting.”

  Imagination, I reminded myself.

  Paranoia.

  Shadows.

  That was all.

  I looked anyway, looked at the guy at the far table, beneath the happy red umbrella, and the one standing across the street, the frat boys by the door.

  None of them looked back.

  But my heart rate kicked up all the same.

  That’s when I realized Dr. Rivers hadn’t said anything. That he was silent—waiting. Which meant I was supposed to continue.
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  And again I was glad he wasn’t there to see me, because he’d realize I wasn’t as good at separating dream from reality as I pretended.

  And that wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted your shrink to know.

  Because then he’d want to know why.

  “Zoe?” he finally asked, more sharply than usual, and I realized I’d let the silence lapse too long. “Are you still there?”

  I made myself swallow. “Yes.”

  “In the dream…how do you know someone is there?”

  From somewhere on the patio, a girl laughed. Then another. I turned to look at them, watched them pose for a group selfie as I answered. “Sometimes I hear breathing,” I said as they made sexy, pouty faces. “Sometimes it’s crying.”

  “Whose crying—yours?”

  I looked away—and saw another guy. By himself. Tall, good looking. Blond hair down to his shoulders with tragic poet’s eyes, a fedora tilted on his head.

  Our eyes met.

  He smiled.

  My breath caught—I wasn’t sure why. Just a feeling, an…awareness I couldn’t categorize. I looked away, looked away fast, back across the street, where the man no longer stood. “I-I don’t know. I don’t think so. Sometimes…”

  “Sometimes what?” he pressed.

  Buzzing. It was low and inside of me. I made myself look back, toward the chalkboard menu sign, where the guy with the hat stood.

  He was gone.

  “Sometimes what?” Dr. Rivers asked again.

  I swallowed, made myself answer. “Sometimes it’s Hannah.”

  “Hannah?”

  His voice was so quiet I barely heard it over the low roar inside me. But I could see him, see him even though he wasn’t there, the ghost in his eyes, the shadow that always descended when someone brought up the patient he’d been unable to save.

  “We’ll be there in the mountains again,” I said, and suddenly I was shaking, shaking even though I’d purposefully chosen a table in bright sunlight. “…taking pictures, and everything’s perfect, and beautiful…” Exactly like that brilliant April day, when an unusually quiet Hannah took me to her special place in the mountains. Only in hindsight had I realized there was more going on than a random invitation to take pictures. “But then I turn around and it’s dark and she’s gone and there’s just the sound of someone breathing…”

  Like his, slow and uneven, coming through the phone. “Go on.”

  For the first few days after the attack, there’d been this vacuum of nothingness, like I was there but not dialed into the world around me, just going through the motions. I hadn’t felt anything.

  I’m pretty sure there’d been some sedation involved.

  Then Hannah was found dead in her car, a hypodermic needle still in her arm, and it was like a switch flipped, and I felt everything. The stab of grief. The flood of horror. The relentless twist of guilt…the dark press of fear. That’s when the dreams started, over and over and over, blasting through the darkness every time I closed my eyes, like a movie that wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t end, on a giant screen that wouldn’t stop playing.

  That’s when I started seeing Dr. Rivers.

  To make the images go away, the dreams go dark.

  To find the silence again.

  “I…I think I hear her crying, but the breathing is too loud, the pounding of my own heart. So I start running. And I run, and run…”

  “But you never find her,” Dr. Rivers said quietly.

  “No.”

  “You know why, don’t you?”

  I stared down at the ice in my glass of tea.

  “Because she didn’t want you to,” he said. “Because she knew what you would do.”

  “What do you mean…what I would do?”

  “You would have tried to save her, just like you try to save your mother.”

  Slowly I looked up, back toward the far table where the lone man no longer sat.

  “But not everyone can be saved,” Dr. Rivers said, his voice still so, so quiet. “Not everyone wants to be.”

  My mother.

  Hannah.

  Both drug addicts. Both lost souls. But until that moment, I’d never drawn a circle around the two.

  “And if you keep trying, all you end up doing is hurting yourself in the process.”

  “She was my friend,” I whispered, wrapping my arms around myself. “She was my friend, but I never saw how broken she was. Even that last day together, in the mountains, I was so caught up taking pictures of everything else, I never saw….her.”

  “Yes, you did. You saw what she let you see. What she wanted you to see.”

  Masks, he always said. Everyone wore them. Just like lies, he said. Everyone told them. “I-I keep thinking about all the questions I didn’t ask her—questions I should have asked her.”

  “What questions?”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Your questions—what do you want? What are you afraid of? What do you dream?”

  “You really think she would have answered you? Told you the truth?” he asked as movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. “Would your mom?”

  I glanced to my right and saw the frat-looking guys grinning down at their phones.

  “You have to let it go,” he said as one of them suddenly looked up, and caught me watching them. “Let it all go, or the nightmares will never stop.”

  The guy smiled. He was tall, broad-shouldered with closely-cropped, jet black hair and dark, smoky eyes. And he smiled. Directly at me.

  And somehow I knew. I knew before he said or did anything. I knew that he knew who I was.

  Through the phone Dr. Rivers was still talking: “Look, if you’re having trouble sleeping, I can help—”

  “No,” I said, cutting him off as the second guy looked up from his phone, the same recognition gleaming in his eyes.

  “I understand your reluctance, but sleep deprivation isn’t doing you any good.”

  “I don’t need to take anything.”

  And then they were walking over, walking across the crowded, sun-dappled patio all slow and sure, with self-satisfied smiles and confident steps, like they couldn’t believe their luck.

  “Hey,” the tall, dark-haired guy with the deep-set eyes said. “I know you.”

  Everything inside me went very, very still.

  His friend, shorter and with lighter hair, but equally dark eyes, grinned. “And I want to.”

  The tall guy nudged him. “I saw her first.”

  Breathe, I reminded myself. Just breathe. It was no big deal if two guys recognized me.

  “You take Econ 101?” the tall guy asked.

  The breath rushed out of me. “Not yet,” I said.

  He frowned. “History—”

  My hair was loose, falling into my face. I made no move to slide it back. “I don’t go to school here.”

  “Told ya,” the shorter one said. “She’s probably still in high school—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” his buddy said, his eyes never leaving mine. “You can still come party with us tonight. No one has to know how old you are. Just come to the house—”

  I angled my chin. “Thanks but I have plans.” Looking the taller one straight in the eye, I lingered, deliberately.

  “Maybe another time—”

  “Or not,” I said.

  He hesitated, then shrugged, and then they were gone, scurrying almost, shrinking back toward the front of the restaurant with none of the swagger of only moments before…and Dr. Rivers was standing there, his eyes glinting like steel. “Nicely done.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  He grabbed one of the dainty iron chairs and spun it around, straddling it and bracing his arms against the curved back. “Long enough.”

  And from one breath to the next, I knew. “You’ve been watching me this whole time,” I half said/half accused, feeling more than a little like a lab rat in some unannounced experiment.

  “I have.”

 
; “Why?”

  He had such a casual way about him, sometimes it was easy to forget he was a doctor. I was pretty sure he did that on purpose, to put his patients at ease. But in that moment, his stern expression drew lines between us, lines that weren’t usually there. “Because my office isn’t real. It’s a safe place. And I wanted to see if you’ve come as far as I thought you had.”

  “You were testing me.”

  Finally he smiled—but the division between us remained. “Always so suspicious. Watching you, Zoe. I was watching you—there’s no pass or fail involved.”

  Seeing how I handled myself, I realized, and for a heartbeat, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of the scene on the patio he’d orchestrated, for the sole purpose of watching me.

  “But why?” I asked as the waitress came over with a glass of water for him. “If there’s no pass or fail…”

  He smiled graciously, waiting for the server to leave before answering. “There’s next, Zoe. That’s what this is about. We’ve talked about what you want to do next, where you go from here—your dreams—and I’ve been waiting for the right time to share something with you. Now that you’ve moved out of your mom’s house, I thought the time might finally be right.”

  “Right for what?”

  He reached for his glass, his eyes steady on mine as he took a long, slow sip.

  “For what?” I asked again. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

  He put down the glass, and frowned. “Because I’m not sure.”

  “Sure about what?”

  “That you’re ready. The nightmares…the dreams about Hannah… How often is this happening?”

  The wind kept blowing, sending hair against my suddenly dry mouth. “Once, maybe twice a week.”

  “And why didn’t you tell me?”

  Mistake, I realized. I never should have said anything, nothing at all. Not to him—

  “Zoe?

  “Because I knew what you would say.”

  He laughed. “Am I that easy to predict?”

  “You’d say I can’t keep living in the past. That I can’t change anything there. That if I want to make changes, I need to face forward.”