by Fiona Keane
“Or your friends,” he continued, reaching within the cabinet that contained a bounty of manila folders filled with documents, then pulling out another file and handing both to me.
My hands barely grasped the folders as I watched him continue to sift through the drawer. Thomas was so focused, determined on a mission he had yet to communicate with me. Maybe he didn’t know yet. Perhaps we were creating our own mission, like criminals. God. This is insane.
I looked down at the folders in my hands, entirely aware that the burning sensation deep within my brain was nothing but rage. Pure rage.
Olivia.
He had folders for Olivia and Soph. The folder for Olivia was dense; at least two inches thick with papers, photographs, and…her birth certificate?
“Why does he worry about Olivia Hart?” I questioned aloud, not even expecting a response from Thomas. “Thomas? Look at this file.”
With a heavy sigh, as though my existence was not on Thomas’s list of things to dislike, he stepped away from the cabinet and joined me. He took Olivia’s file from my hands and perused the paperwork.
“A birth certificate…there’s so much in here. Academic history, recent exam grades, transcripts, her college application…he was stalking her.”
I felt sick, filling my throat with the bile of disdain toward Simon. The sick bastard had a file on Soph and her best friend, a girl who had always been kind to me, always sweet and gentle. Olivia was one of the first people to welcome me to Bradenton. Olivia and I studied together. We talked after school. She was friendly, never asking questions about my past and never probing for her own curiosity. I could trust Olivia not to inquire, but I couldn’t trust anyone to truly know my story until Soph.
“Thomas, think about it. Olivia was my first friend when I came here.”
“If this has something to do with you, why aren’t your other friends in these files?”
“I don’t know…what’s the difference between Olivia and Luke or Owen?”
Thomas’s brows met, eyeing me suspiciously. “What is the difference between Olivia and them, Jameson? Clearly. This all makes sense. You and Olivia were like siblings once you calmed down enough to let anyone in. Think about what that might have looked like to someone on the outside, someone like Simon.”
“We weren’t that close.”
“You were whenever our families would get together and Bellini happened to be there,” Thomas groaned. “He probably thought you were dating or had the potential to do so. The fool actually thought you’d be so stupid as to date while keeping your secret.”
My eyes could have killed, tossing burning daggers into Thomas’s skull. I am stupid enough to date, but my secret is out and kept hidden, safely tucked away in Soph’s heart.
“Which brings me to the next folder.” Thomas cleared his throat, nodding toward the file about my sweet Sophia Reid.
Images of her during the storm passed through my mind. She was so strong, so frightened, yet still so capable—endearing, troubled, and beautiful.
“I still don’t get it though, Thomas. Why would me dating either Olivia or Sophia warrant him having a file on them? That’s so…illegal and just wrong. It’s wrong. She was living in his girlfriend’s house, Olivia is Soph’s best friend, and…to stalk them like this…”
“Criminals,” Thomas scoffed. “It’s the same. I’ve seen this before a hundred times. We need to call the police.”
“Then I’ll need to leave.”
I watched his eyes twitch, the reality and depth of this mess clicking within the mechanics of his brain. “I don’t want to have to decide between you and confronting Simon about this, Jameson. Both are necessary…”
“It wasn’t Soph’s fault.” I turned away from him, dropping the files on Simon’s desk.
It was covered with sand, insulation, and debris from his home. The crisp file looked wrong, entirely out of place, and sinful lying against the heap of rubbish on his desk.
“It wasn’t,” he agreed. He finally agreed with me.
The bastard knew it. He knew it would have happened regardless of Soph. It could have been Olivia. It could have even been Luke or Owen, but the fact that Simon was collecting information on people I cared about, especially Soph, drove me to a new level of instability. She had been violated. Her privacy, her own reasons for coming here; everything was desecrated and tarnished when it should have been safe for her.
“We’ll run,” I muttered.
“You can’t ask that of her.”
“She’ll follow.”
Thomas’s hand was resting on my shoulder, a grand gesture that he had only spared for me a handful of times since accepting me as his nephew.
“You can’t ask that of us.”
I turned around, studying the blue eyes that examined my dark face. “I wasn’t asking.”
Could I really take Soph from here? From her aunt? From her fresh start? If she was now at risk, like me living in a limbo state of paranoia simply by falling for me, then I had to.
Brakes hissed outside, causing my posture to stiffen and my ears to ring. Thomas looked behind me through the shattered remains of a window, his face tightening.
“He’s here.” Thomas stepped back, reaching for the files I held. “We need to put these away. Now, Jameson.”
“Jules said he would be gone for hours.” My voice shook. I swallowed the nerves twisting in my throat, struggling to steadily hand Thomas the files from the sandy desk. His head was shaking, disappointed and anxious just like me.
“I doubt that’s the first lie he’s told them to get them out of his hair,” Thomas growled.
We began running toward the back of Simon’s house, crawling over displaced furniture and debris. Thomas was several leaps ahead of me, already standing between Simon’s living room and the patio door. I couldn’t leave that file here. I couldn’t leave that piece of Sophia here.
“Thomas, I need that file.”
“No,” he snapped. “If you want everything to fall apart…if you go back in there, you’re hurting Sophia.”
Her name was all it took for me to turn back to Thomas and follow his lead out of the house, but we were too late. My knuckles burned as I tightly clenched my fingers within my palms, feeling the bones protruding through my skin. Hearing Simon’s entrance made my heart pound through my ears. I could kill him.
CHAPTER TEN
SOPHIA
The lavender didn’t stand a chance. The front porch couldn’t have contained it from the violent storm that tore the walls from the front of our home.
Twice now my home had been destroyed; taken from beneath my feet and taunted before my eyes.
I could barely hear the muffled sobs behind me as I stepped ahead of Jules to the remnants of our existence. In only the month I had lived there, her house had become my sanctuary. It smelled like lavender and crepes. One home by fire, one home by water.
“Oh,” Jules’s voice quivered as her hand lifted against her gaping mouth. “Oh…”
“It’s a relief you were at Simon’s.” Elizabeth placed a hand on Jules’s shoulder, attempting to comfort her. “I hate to imagine what might have happened if you weren’t with him.”
I glanced at Elizabeth, watching the disappointment in her eyes as she praised Simon’s existence while knowing he wasn’t who he said he was.
It was gone. The lavender. The porch. The front half of our roof. All gone. After watching the way Elizabeth hid her disdain for Simon, I snuck away from her and Jules to enter the house, never once thinking it could’ve collapsed on me. I guess I didn’t care.
The door had been thrown across the yard, somewhere I couldn’t see, and left the house open to looters, vandals, and gators. I found myself missing the security of Jameson’s clothes, having changed back into my outfit from the previous night. I needed the cloak of his sweatshirt, infused with the intoxicant of his cologne, something to shield me from that place.
I shouldn’t be here.
There was
standing water in the living room. I was asking to be electrocuted. It was as though the beach was now contained within our home, like a snow globe but for the Gulf.
The narrow hallway toward my bedroom was angled, the wall on my right now leaning over in aching suspension. I ducked, creeping along the path toward what remained of my bedroom. My window was still broken, pulling my attention back to the memory of spending the night in there with Olivia and Owen. My heart stung, aching deeply within my core at the memory that attached itself to that night. Jameson left. Again.
My mattress was saturated. The covers were ruined, pooled with a diorama of the Gulf—sand, water, seaweed. I wanted to crash against it, my head beginning to throb at the memory of the night Jameson came back just to stab my heart once more. But he explained it all to me. There was a purpose. There was a reason for his absence, a reason for his cruelty.
The pounding increased, my brain swelling within my skull at the memory…the anxious, hurtful memory. I knew it was over. I understood the why, but despite that, my panic overwhelmed my mind and body. I was kneeling in a puddle of standing water, barely feeling the clammy temperature soaking through my leggings, the same leggings I wore when I went to Jameson’s during the storm. Oh, my god.
Thinking of everything that happened to me within the last four days was too much. Too much chaos, darkness, confusion. My arms bound around my head, pulling it down into my body. My nose was within inches of the water. I could taste the salt in the air.
I realized the weight of my isolation in the silence that swelled around my bedroom. I couldn’t hear Jules or Elizabeth. The sailboat masts and seagulls were still. My breathing quickened and my nerves were tingling throughout my skin, coursing electricity throughout my body.
“Sophia! Get out of there! There are live wires!” Elizabeth stormed into the room, breaking through my shell.
I couldn’t comply. My frozen head simply looked at her without an expression, without a response.
“Sophia!” she yelled again, this time stepping into the bedroom, anxiously leaping into my pool. I felt her hand on my shoulder, a graceful tickle like my mother’s own hand.
“Sweetheart,” she screamed, taking my face into her palms and squishing it until I looked like a panicked fish. “Are you having a panic attack right now?”
Yes, you moron. Let go of me. But she didn’t, just like her stubborn nephew. Vagrant. Roamer. Adopted kid. Wanderer. Foundling. What was he?
“S-o-ph-ia,” her tone was mono, pulling me back, “Look at me. Look at me. There. Better. Now, can you stand? Good. I’m going to take your arm and we’re going to walk out of your room.”
I wasn’t a child. She didn’t need to speak to me like this. I was following her. We were in the hallway. Let go of me, Elizabeth.
“Ma chère,” Jules cried when she saw Elizabeth practically carrying me from my room, which had suddenly become a deathtrap. I needed to see Olivia.
“I’m fine.” I wiggled away from Elizabeth, dragging my soaking legs toward the kitchen.
The room was surprisingly clean, saved from the storm but for the broken kitchen table destroyed by a fallen light fixture. Ah, more live wires.
Looking at the fridge and sink full of my soiled dishes, my stomach began rumbling violently. I was tempted to check if anything lasted through the power outage, but I wasn’t about to die from food poisoning or the toxic odor that was sure to propel itself from the fridge and swallow me whole.
“Something tells me you’re not…” Elizabeth’s voice whispered in my periphery, “…fine.”
“With all due respect,” I said while reaching through the cupboards, searching for anything to eat, “I don’t need to hear that from you.”
Granola…soggy granola. I tossed the damp box on the ground and turned to Elizabeth, embarrassed.
“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t look her in the eyes while I spoke. I didn’t want to.
With the exception of breaking through the most enormous wall with Jameson, I didn’t want to admit the last week even happened. I broke it. I broke the biggest wall. We broke it. Just like this house, destroyed by the hurricane, our wall and his secret were destroyed by us. I was his hurricane and he was my shelter.
“I’ve noticed a trend,” Elizabeth broke my daze.
It felt incredibly awkward to be standing in the swamp of my house with Jameson’s aunt—whoever. Jules rescued my nerves, entering the room while mumbling soft cries in French. I could hardly make out what she was saying…something about the water, the beach, Simon, me, the lavender, the leaning walls…but then I heard something that pierced my mind. She was sobbing, her head shaking in disbelief as she scanned the kitchen, and my mother’s name trickled from her lips. It snapped my attention almost instantly, pulling my mind from Elizabeth and her perception of me, tearing me away from the idea of soggy granola, and right into the violent memory of my mother.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Jules mumbled to herself while her hands returned to her chest, almost clenching her lungs for validation that she was alive. “Sophia, ma chère, this was our life.”
“It was your life, Jules,” I muttered, my brain burning at the thought of my mom.
“We’ll have to stay with Simon.”
I looked up, watching Jules lift displaced items from the iron rack in her kitchen. She picked up a few teacups, slowly emptying the sand and water that remained inside, almost painstakingly slowly.
“No,” Elizabeth interrupted. “I…I think it best if Sophia stays with us.” She looked at me meaningfully. “Think about it, honey.” Elizabeth began walking toward Jules, almost as though she were approaching a hungry lion within the bounds of a cage. “Our house is fine, but for some issues with the kitchen and living room. Sophia and Jameson are going to college in two months anyway. They will be so busy with their friends, having their last hoorahs. They’ll probably never even see each other. We’ll probably never see either of them.”
“What do you want, Sophia?” Jules turned to look at me, a weak smile breaking through her distraught face.
I walked over to her, placing my arms around her as though she were my mother. And she was; she was the closest thing I had to my mother’s memory. She was family. It wasn’t me. I didn’t hug. But Jules was lost, standing in the chaos of her perfect cottage on the beach. Her clothes smelled of Simon’s house, a scent that seared my sinuses as it moved throughout my body.
“I’d like to eat.” I laughed, my head pressed against her shoulder. “Please.”
I also need to get out of here. I need to be away from this destruction, away from this trauma. I wanted Jameson. After crumbling our walls, storming through like the winds of the last few days, I felt a raw, emotional nakedness without his presence. He was my protector.
“We could go into town,” Elizabeth suggested. “We could see what’s left?”
“May I use your phone to call Olivia?”
Jules’s brows met. “Where is your phone?”
I looked at Elizabeth, whose almond eyes were pressed with worry.
“That’s what you’re worried about?” I tried to smile at Jules, hoping to calm her angst.
I wrapped my left arm around her shoulders and guided her through the leaning hall and out the damaged remnants of the front of our house. Approaching Elizabeth’s BMW, which shockingly only had hail damage, I turned around to glance at Jules’s home. The small cottage, weathered by the beach winds, was hanging by a thread. It was clinging to the past, just like me.
The panorama of destruction as we slowly navigated the streets in search of something to eat was all it took to deplete my appetite. I had yet to call Olivia and was nervously flipping Jules’s phone in my lap while I studied the world outside of the safe confines of Elizabeth’s fancy car.
“How are Jameson and Thomas?” Jules asked Elizabeth from the passenger seat. “Are they okay?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth’s eyes flitted to mine in the rearview. “Both are fine. In
one piece at least.”
“Where are they?”
“Hmm…I think they’re at home. Any thoughts, Sophia?”
“No clue.” I was dialing Olivia’s phone number, hoping she would answer.
It went straight to voicemail and, even though Thomas said she was fine, my heart was dizzy with worry. I hadn’t heard anything about Michelle, Luke, Owen, Derek…my mind drifted and I felt my hands flop lifelessly into my lap while I remained mute in the backseat. I could hear Jules’s cries in muffled French as we drove by demolished homes and buildings, but I couldn’t look. I wasn’t in a place to accept trauma or tragedy. My mind was swollen, overflowing.
“Is coffee okay?” Elizabeth’s question broke my haze.
Moron. Coffee is always okay.
“Sure,” Jules sighed, stepping from the stopped car.
My head snapped up, noticing we were parked along the curb and they were waiting for me on the sidewalk. I climbed from the SUV and joined them, feeling like a fool in my clothes, which reeked of the stagnant water from my bedroom.
The small downtown looked almost the same as when I had last studied with Olivia and Derek. The sidewalks were covered with debris and rubbish, but most of the buildings were entirely accessible. It was as though the storm simply rained here, nothing more. The door chimed, announcing our entry.
“I studied here with Olivia,” I whispered to Jules, “just a week ago.”
“Things change quickly, don’t they, my darling?” Her frail arm looped around mine, connecting us at the elbows.
Elizabeth glided before us through the coffee shop and ordered something for herself before waving for us to join her.
“I need to talk to you, Jules,” I mumbled into her ear. Her face lifted to mine, trying to read my mind.
“If it’s about college, your room, your things…we have plenty of time to discuss all of that, ma chère.” She pulled away and joined Elizabeth.
I had to tell her about Simon. No. I can’t. Telling her about Simon means I would need to tell her about Jameson. I cannot. I was torn, entirely split between old and new, family and…family. I reluctantly approached the counter, prepared to order something hot and vanilla, when a pair of arms wrapped around me from behind.
