A Harmless Little Game (Harmless #1)(18)

I snort. “Yeah, I’ve noticed. You back away from doing lots of things.”

And with that, I wrench my arm out of his grasp and storm off to the garage, where I should be able to find a driver to take me into town for my coffee date.

Unless that’s changed, too.





Chapter 15





The Toast has remodeled its way into the twenty-first century. I have the driver go past it three times before he finally explains this is the only coffee shop in the seaside town where I grew up.

“Ms. Bosworth, this is it.” My driver’s name is Silas. Silas Gentian. He’s about my age, maybe a little older, with dark hair and bright blue eyes. They’re the kind of eyes that make you do a double take, so blue they’re almost washed out. He has impossibly long eyelashes and he looks terribly stupid wearing a chauffeur’s hat.

In a different time, I’d have found him hot and would flirt. Tease him about the hat.

Not now. Probably not ever.

Gone are the giant green vines from plants older than me, wrapped around wooden support beams.

Gone are the giant, silk tie-dye banners draped all over the sunny, light-filled coffee house.

Gone are the posters from Woodstock and The Grateful Dead and other bands from my dad’s era.

In its place is sleek stainless steel, mosaic walls, mood lighting in lampshades made from earth tones, and coffee that’s twice as expensive.

And, I must admit, as I take a sip of my latte—twice as good.

Jane is late. It’s two twenty and I’m starting to get nervous, wondering if I’m being stood up. Every cell of my skin feels like it’s humming, and I’m about as self-conscious as you can be. I have a prescription bottle of tranquilizers I can take if I ever get so anxious I feel like I’ll pass out. They’re in my purse, which I clutch against my hip like it’s a life preserver.

As I scan the coffee shop for the thousandth time, searching for Jane, I realize Silas is in a chair in the corner, sipping a coffee.

He’s scanning the room, too.

Chauffeur? How could I be so naive.

He’s my security detail.

I’m about to stand up, walk over to him, and ream him out when Jane bursts through the front door, looking frantic and disheveled. She whirls around and catches my eye, her expression morphing into a surprised joy.

“Lindsay!” she whispers, rushing to me, grabbing me in a hug that reeks of desperate relief.

Tears fill my eyes. Where do they come from? The bridge of my nose stings with the surprise of emotion, and our hug is genuine. My first year on the island, when I wasn’t heavily drugged, I begged to be allowed to talk to Jane. They told me it would be too traumatic for me. I was allowed to write letters, though. Jane wrote back. The letters were always short and perfunctory. Once, a sentence was blacked out.

See? Prison.

Jane never wrote another letter after that one. And I understood why, after I figured out how to decipher what the staff had hidden from me.

I have so, so many questions for Jane.

“You look great!” she gushes, her mouth next to my ear.

“How do you know? You can’t even see me. I don’t exist.”

We laugh wryly and hug each other even harder. I haven’t had anyone treat me like this in four years.

You know.

Like a normal human being you want to spend time with.

We pull away and I see she’s crying. She uses the pads of her fingers to wipe away the tears and preserve her make up.

She sniffs. Jane looks a lot like a younger version of Anya, only with long, wavy, brown hair that curls at the ends, right below her waist. She has an ethereal look to her, and is willow-thin, unlike me. I’m athletic and muscular, with a short waist and long legs. We’re a study in contrasts with my blonde, straight hair and brown eyes.

Plus, she hasn’t been penned up in a psychiatric institution for the past four years.

Details, details...

“Let me get a coffee and I’ll be right back!” she says, dashing off to the counter, waving her hands in front of her face to dry her tears as she orders a plain black coffee. In less than a minute, she’s back at the table with me, and she reaches for my hand, her eyes combing over my face, taking me in.

“You look so good,” she says, her voice catching. Something about the way she’s cataloging me puts me on alert.

“You, too. I love the way you did your eyes.” Jane uses a makeup technique like the singer Adele, to give her eyes a beautiful, bold look. She fits in perfectly here in this coffeehouse, a strange quasi-industrial throwback that looks like it fits in Seattle more than in this fake little elite town, with corrugated steel ceilings and distressed walls, stucco and concrete unpainted and slapped on seams with just enough haphazard precision to be a specific design. Long cords hang from the ceiling, large gears from factories woven in with lightbulbs.

She laughs. “I ruined it with my crying!” Her eyebrows turn in and she stares at me. “I just can’t believe—” Quickly, like a wet dog, she shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

She waves her hand. “It’s not—”

I grab her wrist, maybe with a little too much urgency. Jane cringes and gives me a side glance that makes it clear I should let go.