Page 136 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“Oh, I’m aware.” He rests his cheek on my thigh and looks up at me. “When she’s out of her mind with worry over the possibility that you’re dead, she’s willing to put that aside. She loves you so much.”

He swallows convulsively, his eyes falling shut.

“I went there with no idea what I would find, and the lights were on upstairs. The fucking lights. I knew what that meant for you.”

“You went to Overton’s?”

“I didn’t know how to save you. If you were trapped. If you’d escaped. If you were already⁠—”

He presses his face into my lap again, and I rest my hands on his shoulders where his muscles bunch in hard knots.

“I was trapped,” I tell him. “I didn’t get out in time.” His body tenses even more, but I want him to know. “The cops were in the house, and I was starting to think about who my call from jail would be. But there was an argument downstairs. I couldn’t hear the words, just the voices. And there was something about the cadence…”

Those muscles start to relax as I rub gentle circles across his back.

“It snapped me out of it. I realized if there was even a tiny chance of seeing you again, I’d risk anything. Falling, dying, getting shot in the back in the middle of Ray Overton’s yard.”

A shudder rolls through his body. “Don’t make me picture it.”

“It was the only thing I could think of,” I admit. “But I held my breath, crawled out the window, and let myself fall.” I give him a gentle shake. “And I really, really hate heights, Hugo.”

He kisses the top of my leg, then stays there, breathing. Just breathing.

“It was me,” he eventually says. “I went full Dr. Mohr on them hoping to buy you time. I’m lucky I didn’t get shot.”

I’m shocked anything can make it through my confused, exhausted state, but this does.

“That was you?” I whisper. But of course it was. The voice that got me to my feet. The voice that called me here.

We both fall silent, letting Cosmo’s wheezy snores fill the room for several moments until I look down.

“I’m really sorry about your bed.”

He gives a laugh that’s part sob, or maybe a sob that’s half laugh as his eyes travel past me to take in the full extent of the linen massacre I’ve committed.

“How much of this blood is yours?” His expression darkens, and now I see furious Hugo.

“Almost none,” I assure him.

“What the fuck did he do to you?” he demands, running a full diagnostic on me as I stroke Cosmo’s ears. I didn’t even glance at myself in the rearview mirror on the drive here, too out of it from fear and adrenaline to consider how I might look. But I see it reflected in Hugo’s face now as he brushes his fingers over my cheek where Overton clipped me, then my painful neck—sides only, not the larynx, which is a tiny blessing because it means my voice is fine.

His brow furrows as he lifts my left eyelid, then my right one.

“Any petechiae?” I ask, aware that I’m cycling through emotional states. So long, exhaustion and anxiety. Time to move into investigative mode.

“No,” he says, and my shoulders ease. I didn’t think there would be since I stayed conscious despite Overton’s best efforts, but it’s good to have it confirmed. Broken capillaries would’ve been hard to explain at work on Monday.

“So that motherfucker punched you, strangled you,” he says roughly.

“Threw a marble vase at me.” I pull down the neck of my shirt, stiff with Overton’s blood, to show him the impact mark on my collarbone. “In his defense, I was trying to kill him.”

My joke might be funnier if I wasn’t already starting to bruise all over.

Sure enough, Hugo doesn’t laugh. “What else?”

I sigh. “My feet and knees are fucked from lowering myself out the window and dropping onto the concrete, and I probably sprained my ankle running like hell off the property. You were really there?”

“Trying not to lose my mind in front of two police officers.”