Page 83 of The Getaway

The girls looked at one another.

No, Gemma thought. She couldn’t take another death.

“We don’t know,” Florence told her. “She must’ve been thrown from the car or something.”

“Sean was looking for her, but nothing yet,” Lily said.

Then Vienna’s face lit up. “There she is!”

Wintour came running over from the bushes at the side of the road and licked Gemma’s face. Gemma laughed as the dog’s tail wagged manically.

“She was just doing her business, weren’t you, Wintour?” Florence said, lifting the little dog into her arms.

The ambulance doors slammed, and tears leaked from Gemma’s eyes. They were all alive. They were all breathing. Whatever happened next, the girls at least had a future.

“Mom, if Dad goes to jail, can we get a dog?” Vienna asked.

Gemma wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

45

Suzy

Pacing the length of the great room over and over again had started to make Suzy feel human once more, though her heart still pounded an erratic beat between her collarbones. As if it had thought about jumping out her throat but decided to pause somewhere between there and its natural home.

Wintour was gone. Those infuriating twins had taken her. Taken her in a car with a psychotic murderer. What was she going to do if something happened to her dog? After everything else, she honestly wasn’t sure she could survive it. She kept shaking her hands in front of her, unsure of what to do with them. Petting Wintour was what she was supposed to be doing. They hadn’t just dognapped her best friend, but they’d taken her stress-coping mechanism.

Marley was still out cold. And Sean had fired a gun! Even with Marshall still sweating and panting on the floor, she couldn’t wrap her brain around the fact.

Sirens wailed in the distance, as they had been for the last thirty minutes. Had they stopped Grant and Gemma? Were they on their way here? Was Sean okay? Was Lily? Was Wintour?

She touched the scratches on her arm, hyperaware of the fact that she was the last person Juliet would ever touch. Were the police going to arrest her?

“How is she?” Suzy asked Daisy, who was kneeling on the floor next to the couch where they’d laid Marley. At first there had been an argument about whether it was wise to move her, but it was decided that she shouldn’t be left on the floor of the dark room where she’d been attacked. Suzy wasn’t sure whether they’d made the right call, but there was no going back now.

“Still breathing. Still not awake,” Daisy said. “But her color looks good.”

As a professional surfer, Daisy had been around some head trauma, so Suzy trusted her judgment on this one.

“You guys, check it out,” Cole said, nodding his head toward the sliders.

Those of them who were left—Suzy, Hazel, Magdelena, Daisy, and Candice, who had joined them in her pajamas not long ago—all turned to look and saw sunlight streaming through a crack in the clouds.

“Storm’s over,” Magdelena said.

“Where the heck are Sean and Lily?” Suzy asked, glancing down at her phone. Nothing. Not a single text since they’d left to chase after Gemma and Grant. She wondered if Gemma and the girls were okay. If she were ever able to set aside the fact that Gemma had delivered the notes and lied to them for the first twenty-four hours she’d known them, Suzy would have to admit she kind of liked her. She hoped she hadn’t been in on it with Grant. Whatever it was. Everything was still so unclear.

And those freaking girls better be protecting her Wintour.

“Hey . . .”

“Marley?” Suzy rushed around the couch at the sound of her friend’s voice.

Marley was blinking her eyes. Daisy crouched down next to her as she turned her head and winced.

“Don’t move,” Daisy instructed. “You were whacked on the back of the head pretty bad.”

Marley tried to sit up anyway, then fell right back to the pillow. “Where’s Marshall? Is he okay?”