The Lion's Den(78)

But she’d already hung up.

The next day, Wendy and I were waiting in the shade of a cabana by her deserted rooftop pool when Summer arrived. She was wearing big sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, and I could tell immediately that her energy was off. She started to undo the ties that held the curtains on the pool side of the cabana open, muttering something about wanting privacy.

“Come on, it’s hot. We need the breeze,” Wendy protested. “And anyway, we’re the only people crazy enough to be up here in this heat wave.”

Summer looked over her shoulder, sighed, and sat on the edge of my lounger. “Can I get a sip of your water?”

I noticed she was shaking as I handed her the bottle, her normally manicured nails ragged. “What is going on?”

She took a long swill of water. “It’s Eric.”

“What happened?” Wendy asked.

“He was acting crazy, so I just told him I needed time to think and went to my mom’s and turned off my phone.” Her words came out too quickly, tumbling over one another. “Then, when I turn it back on this morning, I get this email he’d sent day before yesterday, saying goodbye.”

Wendy furrowed her brow. “Goodbye?”

Summer picked at her cuticles intently. “That if he can’t be with me, life isn’t worth living.”

“Wait, what?” I gasped.

Unable to sit still, she pushed herself to standing and paced back and forth, cracking her knuckles. “Like, he was gonna kill himself.” Her voice shook. “And now I can’t get in touch with him. His phone goes straight to voice mail, and the text messages are going through green instead of blue—like his phone is turned off or he’s out of range.”

No. This couldn’t be real. Eric wouldn’t kill himself. And certainly not over Summer. I knew he wouldn’t.

Or did I? He’d done a lot of things I couldn’t necessarily explain. But this?

“Oh my God,” Wendy said.

“Have you called the authorities?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, I did a couple of hours ago, but it’s not a missing persons case until twenty-four hours.”

“Can they track his phone or something?” I asked. I was desperate to call him again myself, but of course I couldn’t do that in front of Summer.

“It doesn’t seem like his phone’s on,” she said, continuing to pace.

The pressure was building in my chest, constricting my lungs and making it hard to breathe.

“And of course John is flying in from Dubai this weekend just to see me, and I have to act like everything is fine!” She choked back a sob, collapsing onto a lounger with her arm over her face. “This is so bad.”

My brain simply couldn’t accept the idea of Eric committing suicide. It didn’t make sense. Unless…unless he was the one who had been lying this whole time, and Summer was telling the truth about his protestations of love. “You don’t think he really killed himself? I mean, he never struck me as suicidal. He seems too egotistical to kill himself.”

Summer sat up. “Are you kidding? Killing yourself is pretty much the most egotistical thing you can do.”

No, it couldn’t be. A flash of memory—his lips on mine. With a herculean effort, I blinked away my tears and turned my attention to Summer, praying she wouldn’t read how upset I was.

“Are you okay?” My voice cracked. “Sorry, I know you’re not. This is really upsetting.”

Summer wrung her hands. “I feel sick.”

“Breathe.” My instruction was directed at Summer, but clearly I needed it as badly as she did. “Just breathe. I should call Dylan.”

“Have you talked to him recently?” Summer asked.

I shook my head. “We’ve emailed some. He reached out last time he was in town, but I was in Georgia visiting my parents.”

She handed me my phone. “Can you do it now?”

I balked at the phone, watching as my hand reached out to take it from her. My heart was in my throat as I found Dylan’s number and pressed call. I heard the double ring of a foreign line and secretly hoped he wouldn’t answer so that I could prepare myself better before talking to him. But no such luck.

“Belle.” There was a smile in his voice. My stomach tied itself in knots. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I replied robotically. I reached for words, falling back on social custom. “How are you?”

“I’m in France for the next few months, working. I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you last time I was in town.”

“Me too.”

Summer signed for me to get to the point.

“Um, listen.” I swallowed. “Have you heard from your brother?”

“We talked last week.”

“Did he seem okay?”

“We were fighting.” He sighed. “As usual. Ever since I took this job, all we do is fight. But I guess you know that. Why? What’s going on?”

“It’s just, Summer got a disturbing email from him a few days ago, and now she can’t reach him.”

“What was it?” he asked.

“I’ll let her tell you,” I said, afraid my emotions would betray me.

I switched the phone to speaker, and Summer sat next to me and relayed the sequence of events. I peered over her shoulder as she read from the email Eric sent her on July 22 at 2:04 p.m. The messages he’d sent me were almost poetic—all lowercase and full of line breaks and ellipses—but this one was oddly formal, capitalized and punctuated like a term paper. Strange. When she finished, Dylan was silent.