I burst into tears. Again. I tried to breathe and wiped my eyes. “Thank you.”
“Oh sweetheart. ” She held me. “I know how it is to be sold like cattle by family. Like we’re nothing. I am so sorry this is your story, too.”
“Dad, what happens when she is eighteen?” Jules’ eyes were haunted. I could even see this through the blurred vision from my tears. “They’ll hunt her.”
Kit nodded. “If I haven’t buried them yet and sent them to prison, or the poor house, then at 12:01 p.m. on her eighteenth birthday, her real eighteenth birthday, she’s going to make a will making sure they don’t get the money. I’ll let them know at 12:02 about it, and I can’t see any reason they’d kill her then. But we’ll keep her safe regardless.”
Why did it seem like I was always walking from one pain to another?
A thought dawned on me. “There were twenty girls with me. From twelve to seventeen. All of them were set to die? What’s going to happen to them now? We sent them home to people who put them someplace to die.”
Kit winced. Had he not thought about that? I couldn’t get upset. He was thinking about me. I had been his sole focus; hisfamily was always that way. How could it be otherwise? But they had been my friends.
Panic settled in my stomach. I didn’t have contact information for any of them. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t warn them. They might just be sent off to other places to die. Nausea hit me, and I dashed to the bathroom, which fortunately was located around the corner in the hallway. I puked up all the dry steak.
A knock sounded on the door. It was Jeremy with a ginger ale that he handed me. “Sip.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to live with this.”
Phoenix appeared in the doorframe. “I’m going to hack into that school’s computer system tonight. It’s closed, but I can get in. I hope. I’ll get the name of every girl who went there, and you can contact them. Okay? We can do that. And they either believe you or they don’t, but you’ll have tried.”
“Like reporting herpes.”
I looked up at Jer. “What?”
“They showed us a PSA once in school of how you have to call and tell everyone you’ve been with if you have herpes. You have to call and report that their parents want to kill them.”
I banged him in the shin and he oomphed. “Too far.”
“Got it.” He kissed my head. “Phoenix will do it.”
There were twenty other girls whose parents hated them so much that they wanted them dead at eighteen? Why? Did they have trust fund issues too? I shook my head. I might not ever know the answers. But I had learned before and continued to learn that the very rich were scary bastards. Most of them anyway. They just were. No wonder my mother had run.
The smaller housewas equally beautiful, only slightly understated. The polished wood floors gleamed softly as I hung onto the knitted cap like it was a lifeline. Light from the tall windows beside the door would usually spill into the entryway, illuminating the staircase that curved gently upward. A rustic wooden console table stood against the wall, its drawers filled with woven baskets. The round mirror above it caught the golden glow of the lamp beside it—that was the only reason we could see at all.
Outside, past the door, the lake stretched out into the distance, though I couldn’t see it now. Tall pines framed the shoreline, standing like silent sentinels that would keep tonight’s secrets.
Julian motioned. “Come upstairs. Oh, and the house has an alarm system. We don’t have the doormen, so we have the alarm. It’ll call for help if we need it. Code is 1842. Come.” I followed him up the stairs. There were doorways up and down a long hallway.
He opened the center one. “This one is yours.”
Mine? I stepped inside.
The room was illuminated in the same soft glow as the rest of the house, the same lamp casting gentle light across the neutral-toned space. Two king- sized beds stood against the far wall; they had white linens and beige headboards. It was like an expensive hotel room. I had never been in one, but I watched a lot of television, and YouTube was full of them. Between the beds, a nightstand held the lamp and on the wall hung a framed painting that I would need to learn about if I was going to stay in this room.
The other side had dressers and a closet. But it was the far wall that caught my attention. Sliding glass doors. When it was daytime, I could open them and see outside to that lake that already seemed so serene.
“This okay?” Jules took my hand.
“Is it okay? Whose room is it?” It was hard for me to imagine any of them in this room. They weren’t really white- curtained guys.
“Yours.” He stared at me. “I just said that.”
“Yes, but how?”
He held up five fingers. “Five bedrooms. We all have a different one. Hardly ever here, but it worked out that way. Anyway, it seemed like it was meant to be yours. The idea is that this is your room. We would all like to stay in it with you but this is where your stuff is. The door to the bathroom is there. You have to share it with Barrett. Only Jer’s room has a solo. Not sure how that happened. Anyway, yeah, you can tell us no not tonight, leave me alone. It’s your room. You aren’t sharing it.”
I blinked. “Thank you. But… I… I’m not sure what to say. I’m overwhelmed.” It had never been permanently viable for me to live in Barrett’s room in NYC, but that had left with it a certain impermanence that I understood. I was always being shuffled around. But this was mine? What was I supposed to do with that? No one had ever given me a room like this.
