Once outside, her phone vibrated in her hand. She didn’t recognize the number but answered it anyway.
“Hello?”
“Hi…” the voice on the other line replied. “I’m looking for Willow Hammond.”
“This is Willow Hammond.”
“Oh good. Ms. Hammond, I’m calling from Mobile One, your cell phone provider. You came in several weeks ago asking about retrieving texts from an old number?”
“Yes…” she replied hesitantly, a faint glimmer of hope rising in her chest.
“Sorry for the delay,” he continued. “Your number is in use by another customer and has been for some time, so it took a bit of untangling, especially since it involved retrieving texts from a blocked number. Lucky for you, your old phone’s backup was still on our server.”
“And the texts?” she asked.
The man on the other end of the line read Ash’sold number back to her, double-checking that the company had, in fact, researched the correct number.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “That’s correct.”
The Mobile One man sighed. “I’m sorry, Ms. Hammond. But there were no undelivered texts from that number. Would you like us to send a record of the texts from the dates preceding the number getting blocked?”
Willow’s heart sank. “No,” she told him. “That won’t be necessary. Thank you for your time.” She ended the call.
A few minutes later, Colt’s truck pulled up in front of the guesthouse. He climbed out and grabbed her suitcase, tossing it in the bed. Then he opened her door and helped her in before returning to the driver’s seat.
“Where did you tell him you were going?” Colt asked.
“My bus.” She stared at him with watery eyes. “You and Jenna are the only ones who know I’ll be at your place?”
He nodded.
“Okay,” Willow told him. “I just need to lay low until the festival and do some damage control with my label. You guys sure you’ll be okay not having anyone over to the house until then?”
Colt squeezed her hand. “Whatever you need, Wills. But…if I see him, do I get to go all bigbrother on him now that he did what we all knew he would do?”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. No matter what role Ash played in this mess, he was hurting too. “Just let it go, Colt, okay? There’s nothing else to do.”
“Okay,” he agreed. Then he turned the car around and slowly rolled off the Murphy property.
Willow watched over her shoulder as the guesthouse receded in the distance, ignoring the figure of a man standing on the front porch, watching her drive away.
Chapter 28
On the fourth day of no contact, Eli broke the unwritten rule of knocking before entering. Ash heard the metal grind of the key entering the hole, heard thethunkof the tumbler releasing, and simply sat where he’d been sitting for the past ninety-six hours, give or take a time or two to get up and pee.
“Shit,” Eli hissed. “It smells like a goddamn locker room in here.”
“Ha!” Boone replied.
Great. There were two of them.
“I’d say a locker room smells like a meadow compared to what our boy Ash has going on in here,” the middle Murphy brother continued.
Ash heard their boots on the hard floor as they approached but didn’t bother to turn around.
Boone went straight for the back door and threw it open, the cool afternoon breeze mingling with the stagnant living room air.
“What the hell is this?” Eli asked, standing next to the television in the corner of the room at which Ash had been staring for hours on end.
