Page 3 of Find Me
For the dining room, I might have gone a little overboard and splurged on a six-seater, turquoise-painted wood table. My mom had used to say the kitchen table was the heart of the home. Some of my best memories from growing up were of dinner time, with my parents and sister sitting around the table laughing while talking about anything and everything. Staring at my new table with its six empty chairs made my chest tighten. My mom had been wrong. It wasn’t the table that was the heart. It was the people who sat at it.
The rest of what I’d ordered filled my bedroom and the spare bedroom that Logan was using. I hadn’t ordered anything for the third bedroom. Logan was converting it into a panic room of sorts, with a rolling metal shutter on the window and a steel-reinforced door. It wouldn’t be a completely impenetrable panic room, but it would hopefully hold up until the police arrived. He was also setting up an impressive security system with panic buttons and cameras, which he was currently drilling into the walls outside the house. To anyone else, a panic room, cameras, and security system might have been excessive. After what I’d been through, it still didn’t feel like enough. Not with Mr. X still out there looking for me.
Now that my furniture was here, I needed to go shopping for everything else I would need, like linens and coffee mugs. Not to mention there wasn’t any food in the house.
Dressed in ripped, light blue jeans, a long-sleeved white shirt, and boots that had a knife tucked into the left one, I grabbed my purse and headed toward the front door. The delivery men were about to leave, and I was following them out. I had my long lilac hair pulled up into a high ponytail because it was hotter than Hades out. Sweat was already sliding down the back of my neck.
Outside, I could smell grills cooking, hear cicadas buzzing and rock music playing from my neighbor’s house to the right. I glanced in that direction. A few cars were parked in the street in front of their house and a group of guys were working on an old classic car in the driveway. I briefly scanned over them, counting six, some just standing around drinking beer and talking while a few actually hovered over the engine of the old car. They all appeared to be friends hanging out, carefree and having fun.Must be nice.
“Miss Pierce, I need you to sign here, confirming that everything was delivered.” One of the delivery guys held out a clipboard and pen.
Hearing my new last name instead of my real last name, McConnell, was going to take some getting used to. Standing in the middle of my lawn on the stone pathway leading to my car in the driveway, I read over the receipt, verifying I had indeed received everythingI’dordered. After I signed, I was handed a copy of the receipt and the delivery guys drove their truck away from my curb.
The sound of a drill made me glance back at the house. Logan was standing on a ladder in front of my bedroom window, drilling holes to install a camera.
“Logan, I’m running to the store!” I shouted as I made my way over to my car. The group of guys hanging out at my neighbor’s stopped talking and I got that feeling of being watched. My car and a short wall made up of oleander bushes that separated their property from mine was all that was standing between us.
Logan stopped drilling and looked over at me. “What’d you say, Shi?”
“I’m going to the store,” I said, opening my car door.
“Do you have your phone and…everything?” His gaze flicked to my neighbors behind me before pointedly looking back at me. He’d noticed we had an audience and didn’t want to ask if I was armed in front of them.
“Yup. Do you want me to pick anything up for you?”
He glanced at his watch on his wrist, taking note of the time. “No, I’m good. Check in every hour,” he ordered and returned to his drilling. I rolled my eyes as I climbed behind the wheel. How was he going to handle leaving me here to fly to North Carolina if he couldn’t handle me going to flipping Target ten minutes away?
I put my black Toyota 4Runner in reverse and when I went to look out the rearview window to back out, I caught two of the guys next door watching me. They both had the same shade of pale golden blond hair. One of them had it styled in a faux hawk where the other had that messy, I-just-rolled-out-of-bed style. Their eyes were the same color of light blue or aquamarine. I couldn’t tell from how far away I was.
They were both really attractive. If my life wasn’t messed up, I’d be crushing hard. But my life was an actual nightmare and that was why I didn’t just see two gorgeous guys when I stared at them. I only saw twins.
I looked away with a clenched jaw and backed out of the driveway.
* * *
By the time I returned home it was dark outside. Whoever said retail therapy could make you feel better was a liar. After hours of shopping and filling my car to the max, I still felt a heavy sense of dread. Friday would be here before I knew it and then I’d be alone.
Turning off the car, I sat in the darkness, staring at my new house. This wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I should have been moving into a tiny dorm room and scrambling to find my classes on a big college campus. A tear escaped my eye and I quickly wiped it away.
“So much for being brave, Shi,” I grumbled to myself. Who was I kidding? Buying brightly colored furniture didn’t make me brave. At the end of the day, I was still me.
I sighed heavily. I needed to stop beating myself up. Change and moving on took time.
But how did I move on whenhewas still out there?
I opened one of the bags I had on the passenger’s seat and pulled out a new pack of cigarettes and a bottle of Jack. I’d been using Shayla’s fake ID to buy booze to drown my sorrows. It was a perk of being a twin that I’d been definitely taking advantage of over the past year.
I stared at the bottle of Jack as temptation to open it gnawed at me. Sitting there, I thought back to a time I’d used to look down my nose at Shayla when she’d first told me that one of her bad-influence friends had made her the ID. She’d laugh at me now if she could see the hypocrite I’d become with how I had smoked like a chimney and drunk like a fish this past year.
I made no excuses for how I’d chosen to cope. I knew it had been bad. At the time I hadn’t cared. Therapy hadn’t been working as fast as I’d wanted it to, and I’d been desperate to numb the pain. At first Logan hadn’t said anything when he’d caught me smoking or smelled liquor on my breath. As long as I’d continued my therapy and hadn’t slacked off in self-defense training, he’d turned a blind eye. That was, until he’d found fourteen empty liquor bottles hidden under my bed. Logan had dished out some tough love then. He’d told me that my vices were just a band-aid and if I ever wanted to move on, I needed to do it the right way. He was right. I was working on quitting smoking and it’d been a while since I’d had a drink. Running helped the urge. It was a healthier outlet when thingsbecome too much to handle. Nicotine, however, was a tough drug to kick. I was slowly winning the battle, though. I was down to one cigarette a day.
I was very proud at how far I had come since I’d lost my family. But then days like today happened. With the news of Logan leaving in less than a week…I was struggling.
I broke my unblinking gaze from the bottle of Jack and set it on the passenger’s seat. It wasn’t that I had an addiction. I just needed to stop using it as a crutch.
Pulling my lighter from my purse, I got out of the car. In a lazy attempt to hide from Logan, I walked around to the back of my 4Runner and perched my butt on the bumper. I put a cigarette between my lips, set the new carton on the bumper next to me, and cupped my hand around the end of my white cancer stick as I lit it. That first drag of nicotine had me closing my eyes, dropping my head back against the rear window of my vehicle before blowing it out slowly through my lips. Without opening my eyes, I took another drag, basking in the euphoric feeling.
“Smoking kills, you know,” a masculine voice said, startling me. My eyes snapped open and I whipped my head in the direction of the source. Standing on the other side of the oleander bush was one of the twins I’d seen earlier today— the one with the messy bed-head hairstyle. I watched as his eyes roamed over me from my lilac ponytail to my boots.
