Page 73 of Under the Lies

“Uh-uh.” I wave my finger in the air. “That’s two questions.”

“So pick one and answer it.”

“My, my, someone is feisty tonight.” I eye the bottle of wine. “How much did you drink before I came home?”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “Is that your question? Because if it is, you’re cheating.”

Oh, if she only knew how much of life I did cheat…

With my eyes locked on hers, I lean over to grab the wine and take a healthy sip. Her eyes harden.

“Your clothes are in hiding. My turn.” I put the bottle back down. “Why’d you come home?”

She startles, not expecting that question. Her eyes go wide, and she looks away briefly.

I can’t help but wonder if anyone has asked her that since she got here. Has no one else questioned how she was gone for six years and then randomly decided to transfer to Haven Harbor University in her last semester?

Pregnant silence pulls between us to the point where I don’t think she’s going to answer and I’m about to nudge the bottle in her direction when she whispers in a choked up voice, “My granddad.”

I freeze, my steady heart misses a beat. Broken. She sounds so broken that even the blackness inside me aches for her. She won’t meet my gaze and I know if she did her eyes would be shiny with unshed tears.

Her granddad was her best friend, the only person related to Sayer to love her the way family was intended to.

“My granddad is the reason I came back,” she says it again, more to herself than me.

I shift against the couch until my knees practically touch the coffee table, compelled with the desire to comfort her but my hands hang uselessly at my sides. If I was ever made for comfort, it was taken from me in the plane crash that took my family.

I have no right to comfort Sayer. Not about this.

But the way she stares at me when her eyes finally lift from the floor makes me wish I was a different man. A better man.

“It’s stupid, isn’t it?” she asks. “To move back for someone who is no longer here.”

I shake my head. If I don’t know how to comfort with my arms, I sure as shit don’t know how to with my words but for reasons that only accompany me when it comes to Sayer, I want to try.

“It’s not stupid,” I tell her. My voice has as much emotion as a robot. I clear my throat to try again when my phone goes off. I almost ignore it, but it could be Thea with an update on who left the note in Sayer’s apartment.

The text is from Thea, but it’s not about the note.

Got a hit on Harlow. Want the coordinates?

If Haven Harbor is my prison, Noah’s penthouse apartment is the cell that keeps me contained with its floor to ceiling windows that open up to the skyline of the city, showing me all that I don’t feel a part of.

Beautiful and distant. Matching the man I’m now living with but haven’t seen since my first night here.

That was three days ago.

Three days.

Three days where he got a text that had him storming out of his apartment, leaving me alone to stew in my loneliness and anger.

And oh, I’m a firework waiting to go off. Especially when I know he’s been home. Home and avoiding me.

His beautiful black and gray chessboard with the white and red pieces says as much. It sits on his industrial glass coffee table and remained untouched the night I was moved in, but by the next morning, when I came down the sleek, metal floating staircase, I noticed that a red pawn had been moved.

I stared at it for what felt like hours, knowing exactly what it was. An invitation. One I readily accepted. Now I’m locked in a chess game that’s moving at a snail pace, not that I mind the speed. It’s been years since I played the game, so my rusty talent is thankful I’m able to ease back into it.

Rusty or not, I’ve never lost a game of chess and I’m not about to let Noah beat me.

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