Until the Day I Die(68)

I run to the living room, where Dele and Rhys are standing. She pushes something into my hands. “It was under the guest bedroom rug, under the bed.”

A coffee-colored leather book. When I turn it over, I see the gold-stamped letters. March. My hands immediately start shaking, so hard I almost drop the thing.

He really took it.

Ben stole Dad’s journal.

“I can’t believe we found it,” she says.

“I don’t get why he didn’t just incinerate the thing,” Rhys says.

I close my eyes. I feel like I may topple over. The man I’ve known since I was a baby, who taught me to skateboard, to play lacrosse, to recite all the lines to Monty Python’s Holy Grail before I was even allowed to watch it. Where is that man right now? What is he doing—laughing, eating, talking on the phone?—while I’m standing in his house, my whole world crashing down around me?

Ben Fleming is a liar, and I’m holding incontrovertible proof of it. He betrayed my mother and my dead father. And me. Ben has betrayed me, because Jax—not just the company, but the friendship it stood for—was the only thing I had left of my father. The thing that I got up in the morning for. And now that’s gone.

I want to ruin him. Take the evil son of a bitch down. I will.

“Was there anything in it? Like stuck inside?” I’m trying to keep my voice steady, but I’m sure Dele isn’t fooled.

“Sorry, Shorie,” Dele says. “No letter.”

My fingers lightly brush the cover. “I’m going to go look in the master bedroom. Just in case you missed something.”

“You okay?” Dele asks.

“Yeah.” But I turn away, my eyes burning. I need to be alone. Right now.

As I head down the narrow hallway, I hear Dele in the living room.

“Oh my God, a joint. Aren’t old people so cute?”

“Do not smoke that!” I yell back at them.

“Check!” Rhys yells. Dele bursts into laughter.

I slip into the last room on the right. I’ve been in Sabine and Ben’s bedroom before, but it was when I was much younger and wasn’t really paying attention. This time I am. The curtains are green, the bedspread is eggplant and pink, and their room is painted a strange shade of blue. Yale blue, I think, picturing Arch’s tie. The ancient sweatshirt he wore every winter.

Ben’s side of the room is neat, but Sabine’s looks like a very expensive flea market exploded. Her jewelry hangs from every available knob and handle and mirror corner. Hats adorn the bedpost, and a collection of strange art covers the walls from ceiling to baseboard.

A picture stuck in the corner of her dresser mirror catches my attention. I pluck it out. It’s faded, taken a long time ago, when she was young. High school Sabine, with a boy’s short haircut, dressed in her school’s green-and-white track uniform. Tanned legs for days. And oh my God, the angle and the light . . . what the photographer did with the lens or whatever makes her look like a fairy princess.

I turn it over. Just a date, 1989, and one word, Hermes.

Sabine was a senior in ?89. I know because so were Ben and my dad. They were all seniors at Mountain Brook High School. Best friends, and they also ran track. I don’t know if any of them were any good. Obviously Sabine would win for Most Like a Greek Goddess.

Stupid Ben. Stupid, horrible, selfish Ben’s ruined all of it . . .

I hear the front door open, the scrabbly scraping of dog claws, and the clink of keys on a table. My heart throbs in panic. I peer around the doorway and down the hall, just in time to see a huge dog with a curly honey-colored coat bound through the entryway, toward the back of the house.

“Tiger!” yells a woman. “Oh shit.”

I shrink back from the open door and listen, my fingers prickling with adrenaline. Is she following the dog back to the living room? What should I do, just saunter in after her like I was back here using the bathroom?

But then I hear the keys jingle and the front door open again. I hold my breath. She’s going back out; she must have forgotten something in her car. I jam the photo back into the corner of the mirror and hurry down the hall and into the living room. Tiger, a frowsy goldendoodle, leaps on me, covering me in slobbery kisses, then does the same to Dele and Rhys.

“Guys!” I whisper. “Guys! It’s Sabine! She’s here!”

Rhys and Dele straighten, putting on their most innocent faces, and seconds later Sabine appears in the room, a neon-pink leash looped in her hands.

“Oh, hi there, Shorie.” She cocks her head at Rhys and Dele. “Hello.”

“Hey, Sabine,” I say.

She doesn’t look all that surprised to see me. For that matter, she doesn’t seem perturbed to see a couple of kids she’s never met sitting on her sofa right next to a saucer full of weed ash and a half-smoked joint.

I suddenly see young Sabine from the photo. The glowing, perfect goddess with the perfect legs and cap of golden hair from the picture in her bedroom. She’s older now, a lot older, but she’s still fabulously pretty, and I wonder how Ben could be cheating on her. But what do I know? Maybe when it comes to love, looks aren’t everything.

She smiles her trademark Zen smile and tosses the leash onto a chair. But I notice her eyes are full of concern.

“Shorie?” she says. “Is there something wrong?”