Lolafelt good.
But nowCharlottewas back in control, Jekyll or Hyde, Brighton wasn’t sure which, and all Brighton wanted to do was flip that switch again, have her Lola back in her arms and—
You still love her.
Adele’s voice echoed in her ears.
No. Brightondidn’t.
She couldn’t.
She squeezed her eyes closed, felt the chill in her bones, the snow on her cheeks, let winter shock her back into reality.
Because Lola was gone. Or else she was so hidden, so covered in that armor again, that even Brighton—who could always make Lola laugh or cry or whatever she needed to do—didn’t know how to break through. At least not in any lasting way. The woman in front of her was cold, unaffected by what had just happened between them.Charlottewas calling the shots—she’d made that very clear.
It was time Brighton accepted it.
She took a deep breath, buttoned up her coat, ignored the ghost of Lola’s fingers skating up her bare back. Then she looked around, studied her surroundings for clues. She’d always been observant, good with tiny details and elements in a scene. Her mother said it was the artist in her, looking at the world closely, creating an interpretation wholly new and unique.
You’re a storyteller.
That’s what her mother had told her when she was young, when she’d first started playing guitar at eleven years old, teaching herself from the internet and taking to it like a baby bird to the spring air on their first flight. Guitar just made sense to her, the rhythm and strings, the progression from one chord to the next, and songwriting paired perfectly, the poems she’d scribbled down since she could write sliding effortlessly into a medium that fit, that made her words sound likesomething.
Like a story.
Now, in the middle of the woods in Colorado, her stomach swooped with memory, with seventeen years of music and writing and performing.
Dammit, Brighton, this isn’tyou.
She shoved Adele’s voice out of her head for the second time and focused. Because she could dothisat least. She could get Lola—Charlotte—out of the fucking forest.
“Okay,” she said, shoving her freezing hands into her coat pockets, then looking at the sky. “Where’s the sun?”
Charlotte huffed again. “It’s already set. And it’s cloudy.”
Brighton said nothing, breathing in patience as she scanned the sky through the trees for any hint. Charlotte was right—the sun had set before they’d even embarked on this little adventure, and it was nearly dark.
“This is how horror movies start,” Charlotte said, clutching her stomach. “Or end. The girl in the woods. Everyone knows she’s a goner.”
“She’s only a goner because the writers make her out to be an idiot. We’re not idiots.”
“Okay, thrillers, then. Women just vanish, disappear, and they’re not idiots. Women’s bodies arenotokay in thrillers.”
“Lo—Charlotte.”
“Bad things happen all the time to non-idiots, and this is the setting. This is where it all goes down.” She spun in a circle, her breathing coming even faster now. “Then again, I did take off into the woods without my phone, and then I ki—”
Charlotte cut herself off, shaking her head. She couldn’t even say it, but she wiped at her face, as though a tear had dared to escape.
Brighton fought the urge to comfort her again. Charlotte would never accept it now anyway, so Brighton kept scanning the trees, ignoring the fact that she’d displayed plenty of idiocy in the last hour, including leaving her phone on Adele’s bed. The sky that had been a white-purple when she ran out the door after Charlotte was now more of an inky eggplant, which made finding any sort of glow from the western-setting sun impossible.
She walked forward a little, then back, then to the side, spanning the perimeter of the area they were in, searching for something, anything. Her chest felt tight, panic rising, but not from being lost. She felt oddly calm about that detail—she just wanted todothis. Wanted to do something right.
Tears were clouding into her throat, a sense of complete hopelessness and loneliness washing over her when she saw it.
A knot on a tree, right at her eye level, that looked a bit like a star, gnarled and swirling like something in a van Gogh painting. It was unique enough that her eye had snagged on it before as she chased her ex deeper into the woods, her brain registering it but then immediately forgetting it when Charlotte stopped and cursed at her.
“Here,” she said, putting her hand on the trunk and feeling the knot, which had an odd, five-pointed shape. “I remember this.”
