One of Those Faces (91)

“Yeah, I don’t mind. It was nice.” I couldn’t ask the questions I wanted to. How did she look? How were her parents? What kind of sick questions were those?

He came out in a black sweatshirt and jeans. “You should’ve been there,” he said, sitting beside me on the bed.

I shook my head. “I couldn’t.” I shivered and pulled my legs into my chest.

“Are you going to be okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” If I kept saying it, eventually it would be true. “I went to Waukegan.”

“What?”

“That’s where she was in rehab.”

Danny’s eyes were intent upon me. “Why did you go there?”

Because of my nightmares. “I needed to be sure.”

His brow furrowed. “Sure of what?”

Sure that I hadn’t hurt her. “I needed . . . closure.” Closure. What a stupid word.

“Funerals and memorials are for closure,” he said. “But you didn’t want to go to either of those. What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing. I wasn’t thinking.” I sighed. “I need to go back to my place.”

He frowned. “Come on, Harper.”

“I need to get my life back together,” I said. The crappy little existence I had somehow managed to build had been slowly unraveling for so long that I hadn’t realized exactly how lost I was. But losing Erin was a reminder of how close I was to falling off the edge. “I’m going to find a new apartment.” I held his gaze. “This week.”

He sighed and tapped my knee with his finger. “Where is this coming from all of a sudden? Do I snore?”

I smiled. “No, I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me. But this isn’t fair for you. You’re paying god knows how much for rent, and you’re sleeping on the floor and dealing with all of my baggage.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but the buzz of my phone stopped him. We both glanced at it between us on the bed.

I quickly grabbed it and flipped it over, but he had already seen the name.

His body tensed. “Why is he calling?”

I scratched my fingernails against the fabric of my jeans. “We’ve been talking. I called him.”

Danny stood up. “Are you getting back together with him?”

I uncrossed my legs on the bed. “I don’t know.” We’d parted that afternoon with nothing resolved. He hadn’t asked, and I hadn’t offered anything.

He shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Harper! What about what you said? About living in someone else’s shadow? That suddenly doesn’t matter anymore? What about what I told you? That doesn’t matter?”

“It does,” I said, quietly. “But he didn’t do anything wrong. He kept this one thing to himself when I’ve kept so much from him.”

“Don’t you think it means something that you haven’t told him about all your shit?” he shot back.

It had been nice to pretend. To imagine I could exist without everything bad in my life coming to the surface. “I don’t think it does.”

“How many times are you going to let other people use you like this?”

The words stung.

His cheeks were red. “He’s using you. You know it, and you’re willingly going to walk back into that?”

“He’s not using me. What could he possibly gain?” I had nothing to offer him. Maybe I looked like Alayna. But I believed him when he’d said he loved me. He wouldn’t have stuck around if he didn’t.

“What can you possibly gain from that relationship?” he countered. “You don’t know what you thought you knew about him, and he clearly has no idea who you really are. So why? Why bother going back to that?”

“I love him.” The words fell out with such force that they made my lips quiver.

Danny clenched his jaw and turned away from me, then grabbed his coat and slammed the door behind him.





CHAPTER FORTY-SIX


“Okay, so I’ll need pay stubs from the last two weeks.”

I stopped writing. I knew it had been too easy. “I’m a freelancer.”

The man’s smile was unflinching. “That’s fine. You can bring a printout of last month’s bank statement.”

I dropped the pen completely. “I don’t have a bank account.”

The smile disappeared. “How do you get paid?”

“Cash and check,” I said reluctantly.

He glanced over his shoulder into the glass office at the older woman typing away at her computer. “I’ll tell you what,” he started, wriggling his graying mustache. “If you can pay the first six months’ rent up front, then we won’t need income verification.”

“And that would be?”

“Six thousand, six hundred and fifty dollars,” he said cheerily. “That includes the security deposit as well.”

I sighed. Right. This was how I had ended up at Bug’s upstairs apartment. I slid the application back over the table toward him. “Okay, thank you.”

He looked down at the paper. “You can take this with you and fill it out. That way once you come back, we can get you in that unit right away!”