Page 90 of Liars and Liaisons

“Your sisterlivedhere?”

Micah nods. “For a little while. When she entered her mentorship with Grayson, I think she stayed here because of his super-strict schedule. It was only a couple of weeks, but… no one’s been in to clean the room out since.”

She hands me another picture, this one snatched from the dresser’s attached vanity mirror. This one is of the same blonde woman, though her arm is wrapped around a stone-faced Grayson. They stand on a red carpet—her in a backless black gown and him in an expensive fitted suit.

A cramp forms in my stomach at their closeness. He doesn’t touch her, but the way she tilts her head in his direction makes me see a little green.

Jealous of a dead girl, Violet?I can almost hear Cora judging me, but the knowledge of it being a ludicrous notion doesn’t make it less prominent in my chest.

“She was a voice major, but shereallywanted to play in NEAA’s student orchestra. Our parents encouraged her to go for singing and songwriting, but her passion was playing. Grayson was the conductor when she entered the annual competition held for composition majors, and she just… blew him away, I guess, with her performance.” Micah gazes down at the photograph. “They normally wouldn’t let a non-comp student enter, but she’d forged a couple of things, and the rest is history.”

I swallow, and she hands me another picture. Grayson’s off to the side while Nate stands with his arms around Sydney, now wearing a short baby-blue dress and grinning up at my ex-boyfriend. She holds a flute in one hand and a glass trophy in the other.

A part of me feels a little concerned with the fact that Nate’s there, clinging to her with a drunken smile plastered on his face. But my focus slides to the man off-center, watching the pair with a look that promises nothing good.

It’s half-admiration, which I suspect he reserved for her, and half-vengeance. Even before she died, Grayson was intent on destroying his family. Long before he met me and made me a part of his plan.

I can’t help wondering what sort of hold this woman had over him and Nate to ruin a family so thoroughly with her absence.

Jealousy percolates in my stomach, a low simmer I try to ignore.

I hand the photos back, and Micah slides them back into the mirror’s frame. She pauses, staring at them silently.

“She was all I had,” she says softly. Tears well up in those beautiful blue eyes, and she sniffles. “When she came here to work, my parents were against it. They didn’t trust the James family and didn’t want her to squander everything she’d worked for by associating with them. But she didn’t listen. That was her thing—no matter what, Sydney Scott did whatever she wanted. And that mentorship meant the world to her.”

My eyes find the photos again. I study the soft lines of Sydney’s face, the carefree spirit she emanated. “What happened to her?”

I half-expect the same answer as before. A simple, “She died,” because I don’t really deserve more than that.

Instead, Micah wipes her nose on the back of her wrist and shrugs. “Grayson’s family got to her. And like most who exist wholly in this dark, terrible reality, they destroyed her.”

31

I’m waitingfor Violet in her bathtub when she finally deigns to come looking for me.

Irritation heats my bones, or maybe that’s the scalding water I’m soaking in. I can’t quite tell where my anger stops and starts at the moment.

When she waltzes in, she doesn’t even notice me at first. She immediately walks to the bed, fishing her phone from the pocket of her baggy, ripped jeans, and dials a number.

“Dad,” she says after a moment, and I almost roll my eyes at the excitement in her tone. How terribly forgiving she is, if she’s willing to speak to that man still.

My eyes remain on her though, unmoving. Because I want her forgiveness for myself.

More than anything else even if I am irate with her at the moment.

He must say something on the other line because she falls silent. Her head tilts as she listens intently, and then she turns, craning her neck to take in the length of her bed.

The entire mattress is covered in decapitated sunflowers. One thousand six hundred eighty of them, to be precise—for each hour I’ve spent trying unsuccessfully to rid my thoughts of her existence. They’re piled a foot high and spill over onto the floor on the other side of the bed—a symbolic sea of the sort of suffering I’m willing to endure just to see a smile light her face.

My fingers are still split open and scabbed over, aching from snipping each flower from its stalk. Took me the better part of the last three days, and even with that amount, more than half the field outside remains.

She stares at the bed, then tentatively reaches out and pinches a yellow petal between two fingers. Then, and only then, does that sweet, spellbinding smile stretch out, igniting a fire inside me that I’ve only ever felt when playing piano.

Clearing her throat, she seems to shake herself out of the trance, speaking into her cell again. “No, I sent you the check a few days ago… well, Ihopeyou got it because it was a lot of freaking money.”

A pause. My chest tightens with the realization that she’s still sending him everything I pay her.

“Yeah, sure. I know. I wasn’t trying to—” She cuts off, running a hand down the side of her face. “Hey, can I ask you something? It’s about Kal. I was thinking of maybe reaching out…”

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