Jake let out a sharp breath. “Yes, please. You guys get paid so much better than I do.”
We shared hushed laughter as the tension began to ease.
His expression softened, though I could tell how much he was masking the heartbreak. I knew that feeling all too well. “Are we good?”
“Yeah,” I said as I pulled him into a hug. “We will be. But I might need you to pay my bail when I kill Jude for coming out here.”
Jake squeezed my shoulders a little tighter than he usually did. “Text me when you’re done, and I’ll help you hide the body.”
I waited until the taillights of Jake’s car faded into the distance before scanning the parking lot, but nothing stuck out to me.
I headed up to my apartment and paused when I noticed the whisper of sawdust at the base of the door.
Huh.
I studied the frame but didn’t see a thing. The moment I unlocked and opened the door, I spotted it. A tiny hole by the doorknob plate. Small enough to hide a wire.
It was Jude’s own fault he had made me so observant.
From the outset, nothing in my apartment had been tampered with, but I could feel his presence. He hadn’t just been lingering outside my door. He had been inside.
It took me all of forty-five seconds to find the first camera in the kitchen. The one I found in the living room was well-hidden, but not after watching how he operated for weeks.
I stood in front of my baseball collection and stared at my signed Ortiz ball that was in a protective case. The lens was the size of the tip of a pencil, but it glinted in the light through the red stitching of the ball. How he had gotten the camerainsidethe baseball was beyond me.
“I know you’re nearby, so get your ass in here. And you owe me a new baseball,” I barked before storming to the kitchen cabinets. My appetite still hadn’t come back, but I knew I’d need fuel for this fight.
Three minutes later, I had finished downing a granola bar when there was a knock at the door.
I looked straight at the cabinet knob that had been replaced with one that held a camera. “I don’t know why you’re knocking since you had no problem breaking and entering once today.”
The door opened as Jude let himself in with a professional-looking black backpack on his shoulder.
I locked it behind me after I came in from talking to Jake.
“Key,” I snapped as I held my hand out.
Jude relented and dropped the spare in my palm.
“Do I even want to know how you got a key to my apartment?”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his dress pants and shrugged. “Most people don’t use their spare key enough to know when it goes missing. I took it before I broke in the first time at the beginning of the summer, made a copy of it, and put the original back. It was gone from the top of your doorframe for less than thirty minutes, and the hardware store down the street has great customer service.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You are on my last fucking nerve. Get the cameras out of my house—and whatever else you hid around here. And Icannotbelieve you ruined my autographed ball to spy on me.”
“It wasn’t real,” Jude said.
“Of course it was real. He signed it in front of me. I have a picture of it.”
Jude pointed to the shelf of knickknacks. “Joel sold the one that you got signed in front of you two months before I showed up here to have a conversation with him.”
“When you put him in the hospital,” I corrected as bile began to churn in my gut.
“He replaced it with one he signed himself. Ask me how I know.”
I didn’t think I wanted to know the answer, but I asked anyway in a soft, hesitant voice. “How do you know that?”
Jude unzipped his bag and pulled out a signed baseball. “Because I’m the one who bought the real one from him. I was going to put it back for you, but I never got the chance because we went on the run.”
