Cade: Get back home. Now. This isn’t fucking funny, Roe.
Lucky: Hey, honey boo boo, come home please. I’m scared Cade will shoot me. Also I’m worried about you, little sis.
Evie: Steg here, don’t have a darned cell phone and don’t get this texting shit. But we love you, girl. Don’t hesitate to call home if you need backup. Though know you’re strong enough to figure it out alone. Just remember, you don’t have to. You have a big family with bigger guns at your back.
Luke: I’m looking for you. I’m not stopping. I fucked up, letting you leave. I’ll go to the ends of the earth to find you. And I won’t let you go this time.
Each and every single one of those messages hit me somewhere in my soul, leaving it in little more than tatters when I read what I missing out on, what I was causing. It was physical, my yearning for all of them. Which I’d been ignoring, blocking.
Luke’s message hit me square in the chest. Simple. Not saying much but saying everything at the same time.
There were dozens more of the same as I scrolled through. I decided to move to the flashing icon of my voice mail. There were a lot of those too, but I was already torturing myself, and it didn’t look like I was going to stop until I hit bone.
I may have craved Luke with a fierceness that I could barely survive, but that wasn’t the only kind of love that held me together. My family was everything to me; therefore, their absence in my life had a yawning chasm where my heart was supposed to be. And my girlfriends? Not having them? It was almost as bad as not having Luke. Because they were my true soul mates. So hearing Lucy’s voice was like phantom pain in a missing limb.
“Rosie, this is my twelve hundred and fifty-fourth message,” she joked, her voice saturated with a false lightness. “And I’ll leave twelve hundred and fifty-four more until you call me back.” I smiled a little, her words echoing the text she’d sent. “Tell me where you are. I’ll come and pick you up from the Dominican Republic, Australia, even Wisconsin.” I choked out a little laugh at that. “Just let me know my best friend is okay, please. I need you.” My laugh was stolen by the single tear that rolled down my cheek hearing the hurt in her voice. A loud sigh followed. “Just call me, okay? I—”
Instead of whatever threat she was going to make if I didn’t call her back, I heard a swift and bone-chilling intake of breath. Even through a shitty connection, thousands of miles away, I could hear the fear in my best friend’s gasp. I could taste it, because her fear was my own.
“Lucy,” I yelled, forgetting momentarily that this was a message, that whatever was happening had already happened. I could only listen, a spectator in the past.
“Please be okay. Please,” I begged as crashes echoed through the phone.
“Now don’t do anything stupid like run, darlin’. I’d hate to have to kill you before we get to play with you.”
Then the line went dead. Nothing more. I yanked it from my ear, looked at in in horror, and then slammed it down on the table.
“No!” I screamed as bottles and glasses shattered to the ground.
No one around me even looked up from their drinks.
I stood, snatching my phone with the screen I’d shattered, my chair scuttling to the ground as I pushed it back.
I prayed it would still work to book me a flight back home and to my best friend. I prayed even harder that she was okay.
But God had never listened to me before. Why should He start now?
Chapter Five
Rosie
Age Twenty-One
When you’re young and stupid—and old and stupid, for that matter—you ruin your life when you’re drunk.
Which was precisely what I did on the night of my twenty-first birthday. I’d partied a heck of a lot before that, so it wasn’t as wild as you would’ve thought. There was a big party, of course, but I mainly just sat with Bull and Laurie and watched their happiness. Not with jealously exactly, but seeing how different they were, how much they shouldn’t fit and how perfect that made them, it made me drunkenly decide that if they could do it, we could.
So after I’d been dropped home by the designated sober prospect, I got into the car and drove to the station. Yes, drinking and driving was supremely stupid, but what happened afterward was arguably more dangerous.
I parked crookedly outside the station. It was the middle of the night and everyone else was gone.
Luke wasn’t.
I’d known that because we’d driven past on the way home and seen the light shimmering from the shadowy building. No one but Luke was that dedicated to their job as a small-town police officer.