Page 59 of Ghost Girl

‘Dakota, dear. Are you okay?’ she asked again. ‘Can you come out?’

‘Why is she under there in the first place?’ Calvin snapped. ‘She’s behaving like a child.’

‘If you’re not going to help, Cal, then get out. Something must have happened, and you’re not helping things by snapping at her like that.’

He huffed, but he made no noise. He wasn’t speaking, and he wasn’t walking away, which meant he was listening to his wife. Also odd.

My eyes cracked open as confusion took over, my body aching from being curled up on a cold, hard, lumpy surface for who knew how long, but I couldn’t remember how I got here. I stretched out my limbs to shake out the ache, only to find them blocked by something on top of me. When my head cleared enough to process what I was seeing, I realised I was under a cot. My cot, from my tent, which I shared with Blake.

Who wasn’t here.

My gaze darted to the note that was still on the floor, crumpled and dirty and stuck beneath Mallory’s shoe, and it all came rushing back.

Waking up without Blake. Kali. Chance, and his ghost hunting gear going off like crazy to prove the presence of an entity. Blake’s note.

Fucking hell…

‘Blake’s gone,’ was all I said when I met Mallory’s concerned, surprisingly soft eyes. I watched as they widened, shock and then panic replacing the worry for a beat before she locked those emotions down. When she extended her hand to me beneath the cot, I glanced between it and her face.

‘Come on out, sweetheart, and you can explain to me what’s happened.’

I didn’t think much about it when I placed my palm in hers and let her pull me out from beneath the cot. Her nose wrinkled when she saw me properly for the first time since she’d foundme, but she quickly smoothed her expression out again as she guided me to sit on the very cot she’d just pulled me out from.

‘Now,’ she said, taking a seat beside me and raising her hands to my hair. She smoothed it down, running her hands through the messy strands to untangle the knots. I was thankful for the short style, because there wasn’t much that needed to be done to fix it. ‘What happened?’

I released a shaky, breathy laugh that was more manic than anything, causing her brows to pull together in a frown. ‘I don’t think you’ll believe me if I told you.’

She pursed her lips together, thinning them into a white line, clearly not liking my attempt at deflection, but her words shocked me. ‘Try me.’

My head shook like I was physically denying what had occurred, what I’d discovered. My mind didn’t want to acknowledge it as truth, but I knew what I saw. I wasn’t crazy. Ithadhappened, and Chance, fuck, even Rhodes could back me up.

When I looked into Mallory’s eyes, I saw a determination there, a strength that I had never seen from her before, and I decided to take the risk by being honest. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ I admitted.

‘From the start, sweetheart,’ she prompted.

I released a heavy sigh, but started talking. I told her about Rhodes and the description he gave of the mystery girl on his property. I told her how Blake had taken the news and kept disappearing. I told her how I’d woken up this morning to find him still gone, then the cot moving on its own. How I saw Kali in the mirror and discovered she was a ghost, which led me to Chance at Rhodes’ house and the events that happened there, before coming home to find the note, which I gestured to on the floor.

Her expression remained closed off as she listened, and she didn’t even blink when Calvin scoffed and stalked from the room. When I motioned to the note, she bent down and picked it up, smoothing it out to read its contents.

Then, she folded it up neatly and tucked it into the shallow pocket in her cardigan. ‘I think I need to speak with my son.’

I sniffed, suddenly realising that I was crying. When had that happened? ‘Which one?’ I asked her.

‘Both, preferably, but since Blake isn’t here, I shall start with my eldest.’

She stood, brushed off the lint from her skirt, from the blanket she’d been sitting on, and left the tent, leaving me on my own again. That seemed to be a common theme lately, and I was fucking done with it, so I leapt up to follow her, only to stop in my tracks at the piece of paper that floated through the flap of the tent, falling at my feet.

I stared at it for a beat before slowly bending down to pick it up. My fingers were trembling so hard that I couldn’t grasp it properly in my first few attempts, but I eventually managed to get a hold of it. It was no longer folded, but the words written in my husband’s familiar script were the same ones I had read earlier. The same ones that had driven me into a panic.

I breathed in deeply through my nose, shoving down the chill that tried to rise. It was just the wind. Mallory must have dropped it. Her pocket was pretty shallow, and her lightweight cardigan wasn’t exactly sturdy enough to hold anything. Its pockets were merely for decoration, so it was no wonder that it hadn’t stayed put.

I tossed it onto the table, turning my back on it as I moved to follow Mallory again, then changed my mind at the last minute to check my phone. I dug it out of the recesses of my handbag, clicking it on to check if I had received any messages from Blake, but of course, there was nothing but a blank screen.The picture of us from our wedding day smiled up at me, almost tauntingly, especially beneath the time and date. It was morning. I had slept through the night. No wonder I was sore if I’d been curled up on the floor like that all night.

I moved to put the phone back in my bag, but a flash of white caught my eye.

In the mirror.

Like yesterday on repeat, I swivelled around to see who was there, despite already knowing I would see nothing. Trembling, I slowly turned my head to the mirror, and there she was. Kali was standing beside the table where I had tossed the note, a look of severe concentration on her face as she scratched against it with a single fingernail.

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