Page 34 of Snapshot

Pound, pound.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” I mutter, making my way to the front door. I peek through the peephole. The shiny police badge is the absolute last thing I want to see at the moment.

“Um, hello, Officer,” I say as I open the door.

He doesn’t smile. His neatly trimmed stubble is speckled with gray. Mid-forties maybe? Brown eyes, brown hair, medium height. His most prominent feature, however, is his thorough agitation. “Are you Grace Reeds?” he grunts out.

“No.”

He holds up a thick legal envelope. “Are you at least eighteen years of age?”

I narrow my eyes. “Yes.”

He hands over the envelope. “I’ve no choice but to leave this with you. This is a lockout order. Grace has twenty-four hours to collect her belongings before the locks are changed.”

My jaw drops. “I’m sorry.Excuse me?”

He squints at me. “Are you a friend of hers? She’s missed several court hearings.”

There is a flurry of questions going through my mind and I try to mentally organize them as fast as I can. “Court hearings? Are we being evicted?”

“We?” the officer asks. My eyes drop to his belt, and the severity of the situation hits me at once. That’s a real beating stick. A real taser. Real cuffs. This is not a sick joke. “Are you a tenant here?”

Oh, shit.Technically, I’m not on the lease. I thought our landlord was cool, turning a blind eye to it. I wasn’t qualified as a lessee when I first moved in. It’s an issue with my credit due to a couple of credit cards and a loan I took out to help my dad years back. One my mom still doesn’t know about. I’ve missed so many minimum payments. I don’t know if you can have a negative credit score, but if you can, I do. I try not to look anymore. It makes my stomach sick. Grace really saved my ass, letting me live with her under the radar. I thought she was kind of my savior, until right now.

“I am a tenant.”Sort of.

“Then why aren’t you on the lawsuit? Apparently, you haven’t been paying rent.”

“Lawsuit?That’s incorrect. I’ve been paying my portion of the rent. Every month. It’s put into a PayPal account Grace and I pay into, then the apartment drafts it from there. This has been happening with no problems fortwo years.Suddenly, there’s an issue now? Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding. Let me call PayPal.”

“It’s not a misunderstanding.” The officer exhales and shakes his head. “Let me guess, Grace has access to this PayPal account?”

My stomach drops a dozen floors as I realize that for the past few months, I’ve technically been buying my own Cokes and candy bars. “Fuck. She’s been draining the accounts and lying to me, hasn’t she?” Her name is on everything. How hard would it be to keep all the notices and documentation from me?

The officer’s expression softens slightly, a look of pity overcoming him. “Can I tell you something off the record?”

I nod.

“Eviction is just the tip of the iceberg. Grace”—he makes air quotes at the mention of her name—“isn’t who you think she is. The feds are very interested in her and if she has any sense, she’s already on the move. If she turns up again, you could try to sue her for fraud and theft, but it’d take a while, and I doubt you’d ever recover your money.” He points into my apartment. “But if you could come up with a deposit and about four months of missing rent, I bet the landlord would let you stay. I could get a message out to her today.”

I raise my brows at him and clench the thick envelope in my fist. “Come up with almost half a year’s worth of rent in one go?”

He nods solemnly.

I scoff. “Yeah, I’ll go pack my shit.”

I was able to cram most of my crap in my car, but I need Finn—and Finn’s truck—to haul my lumpy, queen-sized mattress out of my apartment. I did a lot of work all by myself for the past five hours, but now I need help. After an entire afternoon of Finn and Avery not answering their phones, I ended up on their doorstep pounding away.

I’m standing on their front door mat, cursing their existence under my breath, when it dawns on me that they aren’t home.That’s right.Finn told me a few days ago… They’re in Scottsdale. With Finn’s mom and her new husband at that mountain resort with next to no service.Goddammit.I could call my mom, I suppose. But that’d be opening up a huge can of worms…like why I was living with a potential drug dealer…and couldn’t rent an apartment myself…because my credit is shot…because Ihelped my dad cover the mortgage and car payments for a home and vehicles that we ended up losing anyway.

Calling Mom needs to be Plan Z. I can come up with something better than that first.

There’s always Alan, but that feels a little selfish. Of course, he’d come help me, but that’s not my right anymore.

I’ve been in panic-mode for so long, I didn’t notice the sky go from bright to dusk. Right on cue, the neighborhood streetlamp planted between Dex and Finn’s front yards switches on, illuminating the sides of both houses. It’s only then that I noticefor onceDex’s interior lights are on.

Holy shit. He’s home.The bastard is actually home.And you know what? He drives a jeep. I bet it’s big enough to strap my mattress on top. He’d probably let me store my stuff in his garage until Finn and Avery get home.

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