The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(80)

I walk out the door and he doesn’t try to stop me. I wait until I reach the elevator before I burst into tears—it went exactly as I planned…I just can’t believe it’s all over with that quickly.

I pull it together and drive out to Silver Lake, to see the friends I haven’t laid eyes on since Graham first showed up at my apartment. They’re going to dinner and a club. I already know I won’t be joining them for the second part of the night, but I’ve got to pass the time until Paul calls to say Graham’s out of the apartment. If he’s not gone when dinner’s done, I’ll crash on someone’s couch—which is exactly the sort of thing Graham would expect of me, isn’t it?

My friends are all assembled by the time I reach the restaurant, and I’m welcomed back with open arms, though that might have to do with how drunk they already are.

They all saw my video. More than one of them comments on how gross it must have been. Then they talk about how their tents blew away at some festival and they wound up with sunstroke. They tell me about another wild weekend in which they got a guy we know really drunk and dropped him off over the border with no identification. As a joke.

I want to be the old Keeley, who laughed at everything, but maybe that ship has sailed. Or maybe I just need to become a different version of me once I give birth: Less Fun Keeley who drinks but does so responsibly and excuses herself when her friends decide to strand someone in a foreign country.

They start chanting “blue meanie” for some reason, annoying most of the diners surrounding us. Aaron pushes away from the table and knocks into a waitress with a whole tray full of drinks, which go flying. There’s glass everywhere, the people at the table beside us are covered in red wine, and my friends are laughing like it was a victimless crime.

“Erik,” Aaron shouts, “tell Keeley what you did!”

Erik laughs. “Nah, bro, you tell it better.”

I already suspect I won’t like it.

“So Erik and I have all this LSD, right, and we’re on this playground,” Aaron begins. Yep, I won’t like it. “Right in the middle of the fucking day. And Erik’s talking to this little kid and then he’s like, ‘we’re already dead. I’m dead and you’re dead’ and this kid starts crying and runs for his mom.”

Everyone roars with laughter. And I don’t want to think about Graham now, but I do. I wonder what he’d say if he was listening. I wonder what he’d have done if this guy came up to our daughter and told her she was “already dead”. I guarantee fists would have been involved, and I don’t want to approve of anything Graham says or does right now, but I’d approve of that.

I’d probably help.

“You can’t say that to a kid, Erik.”

Erik laughs. “Well, obviously. That’s why it’s so funny.”

“It’s not funny. It’s fucked up.” I throw some cash down on the table. “I’m out, guys. Good seeing you.”

They boo. “Pregnancy turned you into an old lady, Keeley!” Leila shouts.

No, it turned me into a fucking adult. I just wish I was a happy one.





I’m about to get a hotel room for the night when Paul calls to say Graham is gone. I wait for him to add something that will give me a little hope, somehow, but he doesn’t.

“Did he say anything?” I finally prod. It’s pathetic, me needing this reassurance.

“Nah,” Paul says. “Just thanked me for letting him borrow the hand truck. Sounds like he had a lot of files to pack or something?”

Jesus. He did this to me and all he was worried about were his fucking files.

I go to my apartment and look around me, staring at the kitchen where he cooked and the couch where he’d cover my feet and it hits me that we really must have been nothing.

All the times he seemed to look at me a moment too long, all the times he laughed and let me hope I’d made him happy—perhaps not a single one of them was even real.

I search the counter but there’s no note, no apology.

I guess I thought he’d at least say, “I know you better now. I know you would never have gone along with it.” But he just walked out of here more concerned with his fucking files than me, so he probably doesn’t know it at all.





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42





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GRAHAM





I refuse to tell Ben where I’m staying until he threatens to stop giving me updates on Keeley.

He shows up at the executive apartment I’m renting twenty minutes later. A week in, it’s a little worse for wear: the trash is overflowing, the desk is covered in files, boxes are stacked up to the walls.

“So this is how you’re living, huh?”

When Gemma broke up with him and he couldn’t get on the next flight to DC to see her, he chartered a private plane, so I’m not going to be lectured by him.

“How quickly you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be dumped.”

“What I remember about being dumped is how quickly I tried to fix it,” he replies, sitting on the couch. “From what I’ve heard, you’ve made no such effort.”

I go to my desk and turn on my computer. “You can save the speech, Ben. It is what it is and I don’t need your help.”