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I am all-too aware that I am currently sprinting away from my fears rather than facing them head-on. I’m doing dirty the man who did so much for me this week. Yet even knowing this, even seeing Leandra’s disappointment, even thinking about Ben waking up and realizing I’m gone doesn’t make me want to stay. If anything, I’m itching to put some distance between me and this yacht.
I wait for a lecture. For a rebuke. For Leandra to tell me I’m making a mistake—which, I probably am. I know she’ll be Team Ben in this situation. Even if she didn’t have an established loyalty to him. I’m the person sneaking away without so much as a thank you.
Instead, Leandra’s eyes soften, and she strides over, wrapping me in a hug. I don’t move for a second, my arms pinned to my body and my brain shocked into nonaction. Then, I manage to wiggle my arms loose so I can hug her back.
I need a hug, even if I probably don’t deserve one. Leandra smells homey, like maple syrup and sunshine, and somehow, this only makes me sadder. She smells and feels like a mom, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve felt like Ineededa mother.
“Go easy on him,” Leandra says. As tears prick my eyes, she adds, “And go easy on yourself, too.”
Unfortunately, I suspect it’s a little too late for both.
With a last squeeze, she quickly lets me go and strides away, disappearing down the stairs. This isalmostenough to make me change my mind. To drop my bags on the deck and sprint back down to Ben’s room.
But what would I say?
What can I promise?
What, exactly, do I want?
I have no idea. Which is why I pick up my bags, force back my tears, and walk onto the dock, German and Daniels trailing behind without a word.
The factthat I have a snuggly raccoon sitting on my lap eating Fruit Loops with his tiny hands does nothing to soften the matching menacing glares my sisters are giving me.
“You justleftBen?” Eloise asks. “Without even saying goodbye?”
“He wassleeping,” I say.
It’s been less than twenty hours since I snuck off of Ben’s boat and walked myself over to the inn. (Seventeen and a half, actually. But who’s counting?) Every new hour, guilt wormed its way just a little deeper inside me. Pretending it’s not there hasn’t lessened the squirmy feeling, but for now, I just keep ignoring. There are plenty of other things on my mind.
When I stepped into Gran’s house, Eloise ushered me into the kitchen, where she presented me with a mug of coffee, a new iPhone—apparently someone let her know I’d been missing mine—and a hug I didn’t know I needed until I collapsed into my sister’s arms. I’m usually not much of a hugger, and that’s two in one day that made me teary.
It took twenty minutes for German to fully debrief me with Eloise fluttering nervously around the kitchen like a mother hen and Daniels being his usual, silent self. Merritt appeared halfway through his explanation, piercing me with a dark glare, clearly unhappy I hadn’t been more forthcoming with the two of them about why I fled to Oakley. And why I had government agents shadowing meandthem.
The good news is that the man whom I had outed as a first-class criminal with my apparently not-so-surreptitious digging has been apprehended. Along with his known associates I identified through my hacking. He is no longer a threat to my safety or to the countless people he harmed before.
Despite Merritt’s glares and Lo’s obvious worry, I still don’t regret my choices.
Unless I think about how my choices led me to Ben. And I don’t regret that, not exactly. I feel … I don’t know. I can’t pinpoint or identify one singular feeling. They’re more like a tangled ball of yarn, and I’m afraid if I try to tug on one strand, the whole thing will tighten and knot into something far messier than what it already is.
“So, that’s it, then?” I asked German in the kitchen this morning. “Time for you to thank me and say goodbye?”
German did not thank me. Nor, as it turns out, did he say goodbye.
Instead, he told me, “When you lift a rock and all the bugs start squirming and trying to hide—that’s where we’re at now.”
Gross analogy. But I got what he was saying: they want to be totallysurebefore they leave me. Probably more for insurance purposes than anything else.
I can’t argue with extra safety. Especially now that my sisters know exactly what kind of trouble I’m in. I didn’t miss the way Eloise’s hands shook until she stuffed them in the pockets of her blue dress patterned with pink flamingos.
Maybe German didn’t thank me for unearthing the information that led to the arrests, but his lip curled up the tiniest bit when he spoke. And I’m interpreting that to meanYou’re a genius, Sadie. Thanks so much for sharing your brain and saving the world from the lowest of lowlife scum.
When German and Daniels left the kitchen to take posts outside, that’s when I faced the Inquisition. After listening to both sisters yell at me for several minutes, talking right over each other about my stupidity, I held up a hand and said, “I need a nap and a shower. Not necessarily in that order.”
Merritt shuttled me off to her house, which is where I managed to hide all afternoon, feigning sleep and actually sleeping, until my sisters forcibly dragged me from my bed—okay, more like lured me with promises of food and raccoon cuddles.
Which quickly soured as it turned into the Inquisition, part two.
“I can’t decide which is stupider: what you did for your job or what you did with Ben,” Merritt says.
