****
Anita decided to avoid the elevator and headed instead for the stairs. She didn’t have the time for any distractions.
As she ran down the hallway toward their adjoining rooms, she clutched the phone so tightly her nails dug into her palms.
He had to be there, he just had to be there.
She fumbled with the key card for the electric lock, but it finally blinked green.
“Patrick!”
But the word died in her throat.
He wasn’t there.
Tousled bedsheets, a lingering hint of his aftershave mingling with her body lotion, but not him.
Suitcase. He must have taken his suitcase if he was leaving the competition.
She dashed into his room, but no. There it was, splayed open on the bed, his clothes all neatly folded inside its leather walls. His toiletries were still on the shelf in the bathroom. But no Patrick.
Patrick was gone. Tears burned in her eyes, and she didn’t care if it smeared every single ounce of makeup. Patrick was gone, and it was all her fault because she had lied to him when he deserved—
He deserved to know that she loved him.
The shock wave of the realization nearly toppled her backward onto his bed. She was in love with Patrick. Wildly, madly, passionately in love with her best friend, and she neededto stop lying to herself and to him. She needed to take a chance. She could not run from this, could not shove it down or lock it away.
Where was he?
Her phone buzzed in her hand, and her heart fluttered and crashed when she saw it was from John.
—Is Kim Smith there?—
Kim?Ooooooooh.
Anita sank onto Patrick’s bed. She had missed it. She had gotten so distracted she had forgotten about the danger. Ridiculous, stupid error.
Now Patrick was radio silent.
An image came to her, a quick meeting of the eyes as Anita had pushed her way out of the ballroom last night during the fight.
She texted back.
—Yes.—
Three dots.
—Calling Harrisburg PD. Don’t worry.—
Anita threw her phone across the room.Don’t worry?What a ridiculous platitude. Men.As if she were some damsel who needed them to come to the rescue.
Patrick was missing. She was in love with him and would never have the opportunity to say anything, because he had been kidnapped by Kim, apparently a psychotic internet stalker/bird killer/poisoner and—and bad hair-dyer person, and Anita was not proficient enough in sleuthing to figure out their location.
Internet. A person could do an internet search on anything, right?
She knelt and searched wildly for her phone. There it was. It had somehow nestled itself into one of Patrick’s well-worn T-shirts, one sporting the logo for a cat café in Tokyo.
She shifted her weight back on her heels, holding the phone in one hand and the T-shirt in the other. Tokyo. Patrick had drunk way too much sake and left his phone at that cat café. She and a very wobbly Patrick (who would not stop screaming “Ssssssake!” with progressively more slurring of the S) roaming the streets of the city until they had found it. Of course he had to buy a T-shirt. Never again, Anita had vowed. Not never to roaming streets with a drunken Patrick, because she had never laughed harder than she had that night. Never to losing his phone. They had just needed a faster strategy to track it down. So they had added his phone to her GPS tracking app.
