Sweet Water(103)

“Okay, I’ll tell you. My mother loved those roses. And she loved that house. Then your greedy husband offered my equally greedy father twice its estimated value. Over two million in 2000. My father couldn’t say no.”

I drop my mouth open and let it hang there. “I had no idea.” I saw the receipt for the house but hadn’t known Martin had paid way over market value for it to seal the deal.

“Seems to be a running theme with you. What must you have thought when he surprised you with that house?” he asks, but it’s his subliminal secret message, and what he’s really asking is, “What must you have thought when he surprised you with my house?”

Sick, I want to tell him. I felt sick. “It was a moment of mixed emotions,” I answer and look out the window.

I cried in the bathroom and thought of you.

I fought flashes of our naked bodies tangled in the downstairs pool and every outside area of the house.

I thought of you playing your guitar out back and couldn’t even sit there without hearing your tortured melody in my head, growing melancholy as I did, even in the middle of a summer party.

I couldn’t tell him any of that because then he’d wonder why I accepted the gift.

Josh says, “I’m sure. It was a moment of mixed emotions for me too when I found out who the new owner was. My parents’ marriage didn’t survive the sale of that house, Sarah.”

“What?” I ask, but I think I understand. The house has its own pulse, spellbinding those who reside in it, or, in Yazmin’s case, the pulse was strong enough for her to despise it like a mortal enemy.

“My dad made the decision to sell the house without her, wowed by the money. He bought her a new, beautiful house in the Heights, but she never liked it as much. She talked about the old one all the time, and it was the beginning of the end for them.”

“That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”

“He eventually left her for someone else, someone younger, because that’s what greedy men do, and then she got sick, and I was the only one to take care of her. We grew a lot closer toward the end.”

He sounds so solemn, and I’ll be forever upset I didn’t do more to reach out to him.

The clock flashes on the dash like a warning bell—9:11. I may have given myself the briefest reprieve from my horrid situation, and maybe Josh granted it to me because I basically begged, but the urgency to find my boys is back.

“Josh, what does all this mean for Finn? Yazmin and the journal and the drugs? I know he’s in trouble.”

“I don’t know. Hopefully, Cash made that joint for himself and screwed up the distribution . . . but . . .”

“You don’t think so, do you?” I ask. I’m clenching the journal in my hand. It’s so hard to read it, because every word slices me deeper, this girl and all she’s suffered. How she was manipulated by her own brother to do things she thought would ultimately help her family but lose the only boy she’d ever really cared about in the process.

“No, I have a really bad feeling,” Josh admits.

Just then, a text comes in from my father:

Sarah, I called the cops. Someone’s in your house. It’s just a kid but not one of yours. He ran from me and is hiding upstairs and I don’t think he’s alone. Stay away until you hear from me.





CHAPTER 27

Cash is at the house. That’s where he has my boys. I imagine them bound and gagged. Death is all around me.

“Josh, drive to the house!” I don’t need to tell him which one. “Please drive fast—Cash is there.”

We’re almost home.

Martin picks up on the first ring. “Sarah, where’re you? We’ve been waiting at my mother’s. My father would like to—”

“Shut up, Martin. There is an intruder at our house. My dad is there. He’s called the cops. Where’re the boys?”

“What? Are you sure? I don’t know. I’ll call Mr. Coulson and see if he knows.” Chances are good that if the boys are out together, they’re with Matty and Joel, but I never did ask them where they were going tonight or when they were coming home.

“Good idea. Dad told me to stay away, but I’m going home. Meet me there.”

“Do not go there alone, Sarah!” I hear the terror in Martin’s voice, the car keys jangling from his fingers as he hurries out of his parents’ house.

He does love me.

He just doesn’t love me the right way.

I didn’t know there was such a thing until this week. I always thought as long as we loved each other, that would be enough. But it’s not.

“I’m not alone, Martin.”

Josh is pulling onto Blackburn Road.

“Who’s with you?” he asks.

There’s no time to explain that right now. “See you there, Martin. Please text if you hear from the boys.” I hit the “End” button on my phone.

When we pull farther down the road, I see the streak of orange before I see anything else.

A frisson of horror floods my body. It can’t be. No. God, no.

Then I see the billow of smoke, and I know what it means. I drop Yazmin’s journal on the floor of the car. My heart cracks open along with it.

Stonehenge is on fire.

Before Josh can shift the car into “Park,” I’ve tossed off my heels, opened the door, and am sprinting up the driveway.