—MR PAGE
I suddenly feel like I’m in the deep sea, the pressure building as I decode the message. This is it. The final showdown.
Tomorrow. Noon.
I look to Grant uneasily, but he remains frowning at the screen.
“That’s a real quote from that book,” he says, his voice in a thick fog, as if trying to decipher some ancient text.
The opening of the front door pulls my attention away, and my heart drops at the thought of adding this to Lissa’s plate right now. But when she enters the room, her eyes pink-rimmed and puffy, she already looks troubled in a way that surpasses grief.
“I’ve just spoken to the investigators,” she says through a haze, limply lifting the phone in her hand. She swallows hard. “There were no human remains found at the Fake House.”
It sets off a warning in my head, a low whine like an air raid siren—this statement that, under any other circumstance, should be excellent news.
“Alistair?”
She shakes her head.
“He wasn’t there.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I’m convinced that if any crime novels have ever depicted the protagonists sleeping peacefully on the eve of the big showdown, they were lying. Grant and I have spent all night brainstorming and strategizing, agonizing over every tiny detail and moment of the past two weeks, and it still doesn’t feel like enough. We’ve turned his room into a museum of Post-its, suspects and tropes and clues and red herrings adhered to every available surface. Now I’m staring at a wall of theories, too worn out to think anymore but too on edge to sleep. Grant comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my shoulders.
“What if we’re wrong?” I ask him, tucking my hands over his forearms.
“Then I guess Anna will have written us into a corner and she’ll have to invent some miracle to get us out,” he says.
“No pressure.”
“Right. No pressure.”
I lean back against him, closing my eyes, and his chin drops to rest on my head. After a moment, he lifts it and takes a breath.
“I just have to say something,” he says. “It’s possible that I don’t make it to the end of the book.”
I turn to face him, feeling like someone has traced an icy finger up my spine. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth,” he says. “Protagonists usually make it out alive. Love interests … not always.”
“Yes, always. A romance novel promises a happy ending.”
“This isn’tstrictlya romance, though,” he says. “In a mash-up like this, we may not be able to count on genre conventions. For all we know, she could kill me off as the setup for a revenge-fueled sequel.”
“That’s not happening. I won’t do this without you.”
He gives me a look like he’s trying to memorize me. I feel it in every cell of my body. “What I’m trying to say, while I have the chance, is … no matter how this ends, it was worth it to me. I just want you to know that.”
A sick feeling passes through me, prickling my skin. I want him to take it back, to promise to stay with me until the end. But I can’t fight him, because I feel the same way. It was worth it. Whatever happens.
So for once, I don’t fight. I don’t run away, and I don’t panic. I just sit with him in the quiet—my hand in his, even as heartbreak looms. I just stay, while I still can.
• • •
THE SEASON FINALEof a competition show calls for all-out drama: confetti-strewn stages, flame-lit studios, windswept private islands that the losers have to be helicoptered away from in tears. I’d have preferred any of those to the abandoned Tube station Mr. Page has chosen, but to each their own.
I also would have loved more time to prepare—mentally and emotionally, if not logistically—but we’re doing this the Lesley and Anna Matthews way: with eighteen hours of planning, and nothing but zip ties and phones in our pockets. It will be enough, because it has to be.
