Page 34 of Watch Me Burn

Her eyes were lit up like fireworks, an intensity so hot I wanted to dive right into that storm and let loose all the pent-up feelings I’d been hauling around. For weeks, the memory of her cries as I drove into her had been my insomnia buddy, keeping me up at night rock hard with the echoes of her heat and how snugly I fit into her. But if I was banking on her leaning over and laying one on me, I was out of luck. She pulled back, dropping her gaze like she was kind of embarrassed by the whole thing.

And she probably was.

Sure, ex-con here was itching for a good roll in the hay with the woman who’d been starring in my dreams, especially after a dry spell of fifteen years. But Anna, she’d had her fill of romance. Maybe our intimacy was like paying off a debt or something.

Shit.

“I’m sorry for seducing you when I first got here,” I blurted out of nowhere. “I can tell I put a lot on your plate, confusing everything when we were just adjusting to meeting each other after so many years. I’ll be more careful about my actions next time.”

Anna stared at me, confused, and almost looked hurt there for a moment. Then she chuckled. “It’s all good, Ethan!” Somehow, I detected a sad glint to her voice, like she was disappointed to hear this or something. “I’m a grown woman, and we can just put this aside and be friends. Not my first one-night stand. We can just pretend it never happened.”

Jealousy almost burned me alive, thinking some other guy had her for a night. But then I got a grip, reminding myself that it’s the twenty-first century and she was a free woman. She had every right to pick other guys over me—and yeah, even hit the sheets with them if she wanted to.

Her words echoed through my mind.

We can just pretend it never happened.

Clearly, I was the one who was stumped. I cleared my throat, forcing a smile to say, “Yeah, totally!” Not like suggesting that crushed my heart into a million pieces. We both chuckled nervously for a while, glancing around at different parts of the room.

“Mr. Lautner,” I said, changing the conversation before my eyes went to her full lips one more god damn time. “Does this mean we can finally meet with him?”

Anna sprang from the couch. “That reminds me! I brought something to help us when we do get to questioning him. Thinking about you all the time . . . I totally forgot about the pages!”

I raised an eyebrow, watching as Anna disappeared into her room. When she got back to the living room, a scraggly bunch of papers were in her hands.

“These,” she breathed, spreading the papers across the couch’s cushions, “are entries from my dad’s journal.”

My eyes shot open in surprise. “How were you able to get that?”

“It’s despicable, but I took them from my mom’s closet. Ripped them right out. But I feel like they are more use to us like this than just sitting in a closet.” She raised one sheet of paper to the ceiling. “Tabs on where he was supposed to be, which I’ll line up with chat logs on where he said he’d be in my own diary. If anything doesn’t match up, we might be onto something.”

“You used to keep a journal?” I playfully jibed. “Wonder how I never got my hands on that.”

Anna stuck out her tongue, dashing back to her room to bring another assortment of journals to the couch.

“These are all you’ll need to see. Sometimes I’d bring up my dad in my entries when we had plans arranged and he’d cancel, or if I was bored enough to comment on something that was going on in the house.”

As she droned on, my mind roamed to what she might’ve written the day of my conviction. What did she write about me in general?

It didn’t matter.

“So basically, we’re going to bring these to Mr. Lautner and expect him to corroborate every single outing that’s been pinned in these journals?”

Biting her lip, Anna shook her head. “No, that’d be impossible. Even if they were best friends, we can’t expect him to know every single pub or coworker he’s dabbled with.”

Falling back onto the floor, she hugged her knees to her chest, cradling her body in thought. “We need to narrow our search strategically, focus on the big events he’d have to know about.”

“Well, what are we waiting for? We’d better send a message to that guy for another meeting before he claims his eyes are too strained for him to operate the send button on Facebook Messenger.”

Anna let out a chuckle. “Yeah, we should get to that.”

My body moved like it was as light as a feather. It felt good to have things be this way. No more friction, no more guessing games. We were on the same wavelength, and the mystery to her father’s death was a step closer to being unraveled.

We passed the evening at Anna’s kitchen island, going over what we’d say the next day—which, thankfully, we’d managed to convince Mr. Lautner into booking out a day for our meetup. Who knew how candid he’d be about what transpired on that fateful afternoon. It was just as possible that he was a scorned member of the school faculty who had some reason to wish poorly against John, Anna’s father, even if records said they were the best of buddies. He could lie directly to our faces or reveal something we could’ve never imagined.

My fingers tapped the table worriedly. Somehow, a tingle of dread twisted inside of me.

Whatever awaited us at the other side of tomorrow’s meeting, I had a feeling it’d confront everything we thought we knew of Anna’s father’s death thus far.

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