“Don’t be rude or I’ll leave you where you are,” I threatened.
An audible gasp. “Noah!”
“Oh, come on, now. You gotta hear me up here sweating my ass off trying to get you out.”
“All I hear is your big feet stomping around. If you crush me, I swear to god, I will haunt you.”
I shook my head, chuckling in relief, the sound borderline hysterical, because what the fuck? How was she alive? There must have been an autopsy. Embalming. Some sort of process that should have led to someone discovering the fact thatshe wasn’t actually dead.
“How did I get here?” she called, echoing my thoughts.
“I can answer all your questions when you get out,” I told her. “Just focus on staying as calm as you can while I work.”
“Can you ... talk to me?” she asked, voice cracking. “It’s too quiet in here, and I’m so scared.”
I started digging faster. “Of course I can. It’s nighttime up here, middle of February. I only have half a foot of soil to go, and then you’ll be out, and I’ll call nine-one-one.”
“No!” she screamed.
“You need to get looked at.”
“No,Noah! Promise me.”
“I can’t do that. You’ve been through a lot.”
I didn’t say more, didn’t know how much she remembered. Yeah, she’d “died” two days ago, but before that, she’d been in a coma for another three. Apparently, she’d tripped going down their stairs, and Beau didn’t find her until he got home from work. She’d sustained a head wound and slipped into a coma. When it was discovered she was brain dead, Beau decided to pull the plug, against her family’s wishes. And now here she was, alive and screaming, traumatizing me in a way that was absolutely going to require therapy.
“Is the sheriff still Beau’s brother?” she called.
“Yes.”
“Thenno. We can’t call nine-one-one, because then Beau will find out I’m alive and try to finish me off.”
I froze, my shovel stabbed into the dirt, a frisson of unease slipping down my spine. Nothing about the past week had sat right with me, and I’d had my suspicions about Beau, but did Emma just imply he’d tried to kill her?
I blew out a breath and chucked the shovel load of dirt over my shoulder. “Okay. We won’t call nine-one-one.”
“Thank you,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Please, keep talking.”
“It’s nice out tonight. Warm.” For the next twenty minutes, I spoke to her, making the most inane small talk of my life, saying way more than I usually did. Every so often, I paused to check in, to make sure she was still breathing, my heart stuttering to a stop if her response wasn’t immediate. The entire time, in the back of my mind, I was cursing out Beau. If he’d really tried to kill her ...
My shovel pinged off something hard.
“Oh, thank god,” Emma sobbed.
I quickly cleared the rest of the soil. “Close your mouth and cover your face,” I told her. “I’m going to open the lid, and dirt will fall in.”
“Okay!”
“Ready?”
“Ready!”
I threw the top open, still half convinced this was some kind of fever dream, but there she was, as stunning as ever, her curves clad in a white sundress, blond hair fanned across the pillow, dirt caving in all around her, still very much alive.
She pulled her hands away and tried to scramble up, but slipped on the silk liner. I grabbed her without thinking, hauling her close, and she threw her arms around my neck.
“Thank you,” she sobbed into my shoulder, her body racked with shudders.
