Kneeling down, I opened the flaps and caught myself before I could fall off balance. There, inside the box, were the journals Cassidy had asked me to keep. I’d completely forgotten about them. Between our night in the tower and her going on tour, I’d forgotten my promise to keep the journals safe.
She couldn’t take them on tour, and with her mother’s house cleaned out, there was nowhere for them to go.
“She must’ve left them here the other day,” I mused aloud, picking up the box before walking it over to one of the sofas and sitting down.
She’d gone up into the tower one last time before she left, but I always thought it was because of something she forgot, not because of something she wanted to leave behind.
Looking at the journals now and knowing who they were from, my fingers ached to touch their spines, to open up to the front cover and trace the words, words I was never supposed to read.
“It wouldn’t be right,” I told myself, but not even my heart agreed.
The journals were just one more connection to her, a way to ease my mind during Cassidy’s absence. But she didn’t write them. It didn’t matter. She was the subject of most of the entries. She’d said so herself.
So why was I hesitating?
Taking a breath, I fisted my hands to keep them from shaking. This isn’t right, a small voice said in the back of my head.
I should’ve been downstairs doing my job. Instead, I was in the tower, balancing on the edge of respecting a dead woman’s privacy and breaking all the rules just to read more about her.
About Cassidy.
“She left those journals,” I texted Bridget, bouncing my knee as I waited for her response.
“The ones from before?”
“Yeah. I kind of agreed to look after them while she’s
gone.”
“But you want to read them.”
“Yeah…” I winced at the admission.
“You respected her privacy before, so why not do the same
thing now?”
“That was before I knew who they belonged to.” Before I knew they were hers.
“I’m going to go against what I said before. Leave them
alone. Put them somewhere safe and
then forget about them.
Besides, we have a bigger problem. Look.”
A second later, she sent me another text, one linking to a big news site. Knowing I’d regret it, I clicked on the link anyway, my heart dropping into my stomach once I did.
CASSIDY BLAKE, SINGER, SONGWRITER, AND…
DATING?
I picked up the phone and called my sister as I read over the first paragraph, my eyes fixed on a photo of Cassidy and a man I didn’t know.
“It isn’t true,” I said, my voice wavering a bit.
“I know that, but what about everyone else? We need to get ahead of this.”