Page 53 of The Getaway

Juliet staggered back a few steps, almost knocking into Gemma’s back. At some point, Gemma had sat down on the couch, facing away from them, and she barely flinched when Juliet collided with the furniture.

“It’s not what you think!” Juliet said. “He came up to talk about . . . about my note. And we shared a blunt. It was no big deal. That’s what you saw us arguing about at the party, Marley.” Juliet looked at her, desperate for support. “He said he couldn’t talk to me then, but he’d come by after. And I don’t know how he ended up with one of my necklaces. They were on my bedside table last time I saw them. Maybe he took one to fiddle with it while he was smoking? He does that tactile thing when he gets high, right?”

Marley waited for the guys to answer. She didn’t smoke, so they would know better than she did.

“That’s true,” Sean said. “He always needs something to play with. It’s usually his watch. Clasping and unclasping it.”

This small detail made Marley crushingly sad. Something she never knew about Lincoln that made him all the more human.

“And then he said there was something he had to take care of and bailed,” Juliet told them. “I was pissed because we weren’t done talking yet and he said he’d come back, but he never did.” She swallowed and brought her thumb to her mouth to gnaw on. “I assumed he was just blowing me off.”

But he was already dead. The unspoken words hung in the air all around them. Marley looked around at the faces of the people she was trapped here with. Someone in this room had murdered Lincoln and Trevor. She wished they would just confess already. She didn’t know how much of this she could take.

“Sorry, can we take a step back?” Marshall said to Daisy. “How did you even end up at the party? Did Lincoln invite you?”

Daisy laughed, and it sounded so much like Lily’s laugh it made Marley’s heart catch. “Um, no. Me and some of the other girls from my team are out here for a photo shoot. I met Cole at a bar in town yesterday, and he said he and his friends had scored invites because they were with Coco P.’s label. He asked me to come.”

They all looked over at Cole, and he gave an awkward wave.

“Okay, I might have forced him to bring me with him, but I’d heard there was construction going on, and I wanted to see what Lincoln and this one had done to my sister’s house.”

She tilted her head in Hazel’s direction. Hazel blew out a loud, impatient breath, which Daisy ignored.

“So much for ‘I’m here by myself, I swear,’” Grant said to Cole.

“Sorry, man.” Cole raised both palms. “She swore me to secrecy. Said the lady of the house would kill her if she found out she was here.”

“She’s not wrong,” Hazel said with a sneer.

“I don’t really think we should be joking about murder right now,” Marley said.

There was a long, drawn-out moment of silence, punctured only by rumbles of thunder and the screeching of the wind.

“Anyway, I wanted to talk to Lincoln,” Daisy continued, “but it was pretty clear during the party that it wasn’t going to be possible, so I waited until after everyone else left.” She spotted the coffee carafe, still out on the table, and went over to help herself to a cup.

“You squatted in my house, you mean,” Hazel said.

Daisy looked at Marley. “Can you please tell that person to not talk to me?”

“I . . .” Marley felt suddenly exhausted. “I can’t. It is her house now.”

Daisy lifted one shoulder, her blue eyes sparkling. “We’ll see.”

What the heck did that mean?

“What did you talk to Lincoln about? How did he seem?” Marshall asked.

“Was anyone else there?” Sean put in.

“No,” Daisy said to Sean. “And he seemed fine. Stoned, but fine. Until I told him what I came here to tell him. Then he was pissed.”

Marley swallowed hard. “What did you come here to tell him?”

“I told him to stay away from my sister,” Daisy said, crossing her slim, strong arms over her chest. “They talked practically every day, and it wasn’t fair to her. She was never going to move on if he kept calling her all the time, making her his confidant. It was pathetic, really. Like, he made his bed. Now he has to lie in it.”

“I can’t listen to this shit anymore,” Hazel said, storming across the room and into the kitchen.

They all stood there for a moment, listening to Hazel open and slam cabinets against the backdrop of the rushing wind.