Midnight Lily(51)

The moment my heart had dropped into my feet and I'd felt like I might sink to the floor right in front of him. The picture of the man on the cover of the magazine, a stranger I didn't know, but labeled "Holden Scott." I hadn't understood exactly, but I'd known he wasn't lying to me by the look on his face. He believed himself to be Holden Scott. He didn't know who he was. And suddenly his confusion—his sadness—had made some sort of sense. And what was I to do? I had already fallen in love with him. I still loved him. "Boy Scout," I murmured, wondering if the smile on his face in the photograph was real, wondering if he was truly happy.

Wondering if he still thought about me.





CHAPTER NINETEEN


Ryan



I threw my jacket on the couch and kicked off my shoes. I'd taken Jenna out to dinner and had a good time. She'd told me all about her trip, making me laugh with funny stories about the co-worker she'd gotten stuck sharing a hotel room with after her room reservation had been mistakenly cancelled and they'd had no other rooms available.

I collapsed into a chair. I liked her and enjoyed spending time with her, but it also felt strange. And the intensity I'd felt when I'd first spent time with Lily wasn't there. But should it be? I'd been half out of my head when I'd fallen for Lily, when I'd kissed her, when I'd made love to her. That whole time seemed almost like a dream now—as if none of it had really happened at all. As if I'd never even flown to Brandon's lodge in Colorado. As if my life had stopped the moment Holden's hand slipped from mine and only just recently resumed. And yet, inside, I still felt half asleep—as if a part of me remained missing, incomplete.

I looked around my apartment. Everything was neat and tidy. Growing up, my house had always been trashed, had always smelled like garbage, rot, and dog shit. I hadn't thought about it too much until I'd started hanging out at Holden's house. I hadn’t known that some homes smelled like baked goods and fresh laundry. I hadn’t known that some parents lit seasonal candles that smelled like vanilla or spiced apple or lavender fields. It'd made me intensely aware of the stench of my own house. It'd made me wonder if I smelled as foul as my home to people at school. Even though I tried my best to keep my clothes clean, washing them in the bathtub with bar soap when my dad wasn't home if I had to, surely stink like that soaked into a person's skin after a while.

It was why I was so fastidious now. I vacuumed and dusted regularly, changed my sheets once a week, and made sure dirty dishes weren't left in the sink. I would never live like an animal again. I'd never smell like an animal again.

Walking back to my bedroom, I undressed and tossed my dirty clothes in the empty hamper in my closet. My gaze caught on the duffle bag I'd thrown in the corner and still hadn't unpacked. I wasn't sure why I grabbed it now. I set it on my bed and pulled on a T-shirt and boxers and then went and stood in front of it. A strange feeling of loss moved through me. No, that trip had been all too real.

The trip at least . . . Lily, I still . . . I raked my hands through my hair and then unzipped the bag. I rummaged through it, but there was nothing except clothes—dirty clothes that were long overdue for a wash. Gathering them up, I walked to my small laundry room and tossed them in the washing machine. A pair of jeans fell out of my hands onto the floor. Sighing, I picked them up and went to toss them in the machine, too, when I stopped, holding them up and then reaching inside one pocket. Why I did that, I wasn't sure. The pocket was empty. I switched hands and reached inside the other pocket, pausing when my fingers came upon something hard and smooth. I grasped it and pulled it out and stood for several long moments just staring down at it: the white arrowhead Lily had given me. It looks so delicate, and yet it could take down a large animal or even a man. Her words echoed through my head and I sucked in a breath. "Lily," I whispered. I held the arrowhead up to the overhead light and then grasped it in my hand. It was solid. It was real. I clenched my eyes shut. Was she?

Was it possible I'd been running through the forest alone, an entire make-believe scenario going on as I collected actual objects and drew stick figures on rocks to support the fiction of my own life? Jesus, had I been that f*cking nutty? I cringed. Walking back into my bedroom, I set the arrowhead down on the top of my dresser and took a deep breath. Crazy people rarely question their own sanity.

I took a quick shower and then, still unable to get that arrowhead off my mind, went into the living room and opened my laptop. I googled Whittington and got the same results as the first time. I scrolled through the site I'd originally looked at. Sitting back, I chewed on my bottom lip, thinking about everything I hadn't considered yet. Lily had told me about two escapes. I searched for any information on either one of the two but didn't find anything. It could be that Lily had actually read the stories in old newspaper articles she'd found inside the hospital and the stories just weren't put online for some reason, or it could be that I made the whole thing up. Back to square one.

After a brief pause where I stared at the screen of my laptop, I did a search for the owners of Whittington. I thought I'd remembered reading that it had been a privately owned hospital. It took me about five minutes of clicking to find the information: Whittington and its surrounding property was owned by Augustine Corsella, a real estate mogul from Colorado who had made the purchase in 2008. He was deceased, but it appeared it was still owned by the Corsella family. I scrolled through, looking for more information on him, but there wasn't anything I was interested in. Yawning, I closed the laptop and put it aside, disappointed in my fruitless online search. But what had I really been looking for anyway? Something. Anything.