It was her phone.
They froze, listening until it finally fell silent, only to begin again a moment later. He wanted to tell her to ignore it, but he could see the concern on her face now, as if playing out the emergency that might be waiting on the other end.
“I should get that,” she whispered.
“I’ll wait,” he murmured.
She slid out of his grasp to walk to her bag on the counter. Meanwhile, he gripped its surface, trying to get ahold of himself.
“Hey, Jane,” Lizzy answered, a weary smile on her lips. But as she listened, it slowly dissolved. “What?”
The color drained from her face as her eyebrows knitted together.
Something was wrong.
“Okay… Yes… Wait… I know… Okay… I’m leaving now. Tell everyone not to doanythinguntil I get there,” she said, and hung up.
“What is it?” he asked.
She didn’t move. It was like she was in a trance, staring at the wall.
“Lizzy,” he said, his voice a bit louder. That caught her attention. “What’s wrong? Is it your dad?”
“No. He’s fine. It’s my sister. She’s in trouble.”
“Jane?”
“No.” She turned and stared up at him for a moment, her eyes so wide and lost that it almost broke his heart. “Mary.”
CHAPTER 30
When Lizzy finally walked into Bennet Bakery at noon, it was chaos. The bell above the door heralded her arrival, but no one seemed to notice. Lydia was behind the counter talking over Kitty, who was glued to her cell phone as she paced the length of the glass display case in her most sensible slacks. Jane was in the doorway to the kitchen attempting to calm her two sisters down, while also trying to placate their mother, whose wailing echoed from the back.
It had taken fifteen minutes to quiet everyone—their mother was still crying on the phone but had at least shut the office door—and another ten minutes for Jane to lay out exactly what had happened. Even then, Lizzy wasn’t sure the details made any sense.
She leaned across the bakery’s glass counter and closed her eyes, taking a deep, calming breath before saying, “Okay. Explain this to me one more time.”
Jane stood across from her, biting her bottom lip. Her expression was grave, which alone would have been enough to make Lizzy panic, but right now she was too focused on trying to unravel theknot in her belly, to make sense of the insanity and ensure it wasn’t as bad as she thought.
“Mary was arrested last night for crashing Tristan’s party in the city and destroying a really expensive piece of art.”
Never mind. It was as bad as she thought.
Lizzy looked back down at Jane’s phone in her hand and pressed play again.
The video was a blur of color and light, a crowd of people in a sprawling apartment, moving in time with the blaring music. Suddenly, shouting erupted as a figure dressed in black stepped into frame, a can of spray paint in hand. Their face was covered, so Lizzy couldn’t decipher who it was until they began to yell.
“This is for Gretna Island! Our home won’t be exploited for profit!” Mary’s distinct voice bellowed. Then she took the can of red spray paint and wrote GREEN JUSTICE FOR ALL across a huge modern art piece on the wall.
The video ended in chaos, people running and screaming as the image blurred, only to start again from the beginning, this time with an odd array of hearts flying up over the footage.
Oh God.
Lizzy handed the phone back to Jane. “Who posted this?”
“Who didn’t,” Lydia murmured.
“Everyone at the party recorded it,” Kitty clarified. “There’s like a dozen different videos from a dozen different angles.”
