Page 28 of The Thinnest Air
I’ve never been more grateful for my immunity to pompous, Rolex-wearing douchebags with bleached smiles and fast cars.
She lifts the lid of her MacBook, tapping in a password and clicking on an icon when the screen lights.
“I have some e-mails to go over with you when you get a second,” she says, her eyes lifting to mine when she feels the weight of my stare. “They’re not work related. Your inbox has been blowing up with offers from talk shows and radio shows. Everybody wants to talk to you about Meredith.”
Andrew levels his posture, pinching the bridge of his nose. He can act like this annoys him all he wants, but this man loves the attention he’s getting. Andrew lives for this shit. He’s an attention whore. I knew it from the moment he plucked my beautiful sister out of obscurity and pinned her to his lapel like a prom boutonniere.
“You’ve also been receiving some, um, inappropriate e-mails,” she says, biting her lip. “I’m deleting them, just so you know.”
“Inappropriate?” my clueless mother asks. “Like threats? Mean things?”
“Fan mail–type letters ... offers ...,” Britt adds. “From women ...”
“Oh, good God.” Mom throws her hands in the air, muttering under her breath. Within seconds, she leaves the table, heading back to the kitchen and plundering the wine cabinet, bottles plinking as she rifles.
Good to see some things haven’t changed.
Without saying a word, I exit this circus stage right and head to my room. I can’t remember the last time I showered. Or ate a decent meal. Or checked in with Harris. This entire week so far has been a blur, a foggy nightmare where everything feels real and fake all at the same time.
Locking my door, I grab my phone and call my ex.
He answers almost immediately, like he’s been on standby. “Greer. Hey.”
It’s so good to hear his voice, but I don’t tell him that.
“How’re you holding up? I’m refreshing CNN like crazy, just waiting for some kind of breaking development or something. The whole world’s watching right now, you know that? It’s crazy. Everyone is looking for her.”
“I didn’t know that.” I yawn, stretching across the foot of the bed, eyelids heavy. “Been trying to stay away from the media. There’s nothing they know that I don’t already know, and their headlines will just upset me.”
“Wise.” I hear him walking around in the background, pots and pans clinking like he’s just fixed himself dinner. I’ll bet he worked late tonight. “You’re better off anyway.”
Rolling to my side, I reach for a downy pillow and tuck it under my head, wrapping my free arm around it and wishing more than ever that Harris were here. I could use someone warm and something real to cling to. A true sounding board who’s not caught up in frivolous emotions. Harris never lets his feelings cloud his judgment, and that’s something I’ve always admired about him.
Ten years ago, I was the girl who was angry at the world, tattooing her resentment on her body and fucking any man who looked like he was a bad idea because it was the only thing that distracted me from the pain of a dysfunctional adolescence.
Then Harris showed up—a cool drink of water to quell the raging inferno inside. What he saw in me I’ll never know, but meeting him changed everything. He showed me what it felt like to be loved by a man—a foreign concept to me up to that point. And he showed me that, contrary to my hardened beliefs, I did have a softer side.
It was just buried beneath all the hard.
“You’re hanging in there, though?” he asks. “I’m worried about you.”
He doesn’t elaborate.
He doesn’t need to.
He’s known from the beginning how protective I am of my little sister. How I’ve always felt she was my responsibility. When we first met, he told me I had boundary issues and that I wasn’t Meredith’s mother. I told him he’d never grown up with Brenda Ambrose.
“Don’t worry about me,” I say, neglecting to tell him how happy it makes me to hear that he’s thinking of me and my well-being. He might be the only person I have who gives a rat’s ass.
“You want me to come out there? To Utah?” he asks. “I feel so helpless over here. Feels wrong sitting back and doing nothing.”
I wish I could reach through the phone, wrap my arms around his shoulders, breathe in his coffee-and-faded-cologne scent, and never let him go.
“You want to help? Stay in the city,” I say. “You need to keep the business running so I can afford to be here looking for my sister.”
Now that my sister’s whereabouts are unknown, I’ve got no business banking on a good faith loan from her trust to keep us going these next few months.
“Fair enough.”
