The Lion's Den(97)

I froze, my breath caught in my throat. Well, there it was, then. She was capable of it after all. As soon as I could speak again, the questions came. “How? Why? Does anybody else know you’re alive?”

“No. When I got your message, I went out to the park to meet you. I saw your car in the lot, but when I got to the lookout point, Summer was there.”

“What message?” I asked, confused. “The only one I sent you was the evening you disappeared, asking you what was going on with Summer. And then a bunch in the days afterward, wondering what had happened to you.”

He wrinkled his brow, processing. “Of course. I’m so stupid. It must have been her. I got a message from you early the morning after Summer and I fought, saying that you needed to talk to me about something important but that no one could know, so to meet you at this lookout point at a park in Ventura.…”

I grabbed my phone and opened our message thread, showing him there was no such message. “Not me,” I said.

“Could she have gotten into your account?” he asked. “She could have deleted the message on your end after she sent it, leaving it on my end.”

“Yeah.” I smacked myself in the forehead. “She knows my passcode. I spent the night with her in Malibu last Friday and left my phone downstairs when I went to bed. Do you have your phone?”

He shook his head. “You back up messages to the cloud?”

“I don’t know.”

I handed him my phone, and he thumbed through a few screens. “Here we go.”

He hit the button to restore my messages. Luckily, there weren’t many, so we had to wait only a few excruciating seconds while they loaded. When the screen refreshed, sure enough, there was a message from me to Eric, sent at 5:42 a.m. on July 22, begging him to meet me at a park in Ventura. And his reply, agreeing.

“Jesus.” I stared at the screen.

“She must’ve banked on the fact that you wouldn’t check your deleted messages.”

“Or she didn’t care if I knew.” I tried to put myself in her shoes. “And she’d want them to still be traceable by police if necessary.” I knew at this point I shouldn’t be surprised by her duplicity, but the betrayal still stung. My best friend had tried to frame me for murder. It was incomprehensible. A flame of anger flickered to life inside of me. “What happened when you got there?” I asked.

“It was foggy, and your car was the only other one in the lot. I didn’t run into anyone on the trail. When I got to the lookout point, Summer was there waiting for me. I asked her where you were, and she started yelling at me, accusing me of cheating on her with you. She demanded to see my phone, so I unlocked it and handed it to her. She went over to the edge with it and was saying all this shit about how I wouldn’t care if she just jumped. She was freaking me out, so I went to her, and when I got to her, she attacked me. We were tussling—I thought she might try to jump, so I was holding her as tight as I could, and then she kneed me in the balls and pushed me over the edge. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a tree at the bottom of the cliff.”

“Oh my God.”

“I got unbelievably lucky I landed in that tree,” he said. “I know how to fall from rock climbing, but no one survives a fall from that height.”

“She tried to murder you.”

He nodded. “I should have left when I saw it was her waiting for me instead of you, but…I underestimated her.”

“We have to go to the cops.”

“No,” he refused. “No one can know where I am.”

“Why?” I asked.

“My father.”

“What does Summer trying to kill you have to do with your dad?” Then, remembering, “We have to call your brother—”

“No!” He grabbed my wrist, his grip gentle but firm.

“My brother cannot know I’m alive. Do you understand?”

“But he—”

“He’s working for our dad. I can’t trust him.”

I would’ve been exasperated if he didn’t look so dreadful. “What does any of this have to do with your dad?”

“You don’t know,” he said, realizing.

“Know what?”

“But how would you? I have my mother’s last name, and Dylan uses his middle name instead of his last.”

“What are you talking about?”

His eyes met mine. “John,” he said. “John Lyons—is our father.”

I stared at him slack-jawed, my mind unable to knit the two worlds together. “What?”

“The man Summer’s dating is—”

“I heard you. But—how?” It was too big of a coincidence. The world just didn’t work that way. “Does Summer know?”

“Yes. It’s why she went after him. I didn’t find out until recently.”

“Wait—” I had so many questions, I didn’t know where to begin. “So, does John know about the two of you?”

“He knows we dated a while ago—he has to; he does his due diligence on anyone in his orbit and he has eyes everywhere—it’s probably one of the reasons he chose her, to spite me—but there’s no way he knows we’d seen each other since the two of them got together. If he did, he would have dumped her—or worse. But that wasn’t—”