Never Never: Part Three (Never Never #3)(4)

Shit.

I don’t want to leave her alone with him. I hesitate, but Charlie places a reassuring hand on my arm. “It’s fine. Wait outside,” she says. I look at her closely, but she seems confident. I stand up a little too forcefully and the chair makes an awful screeching sound as it scoots backward. I don’t look at the officer again. I walk out, close his door behind me, and begin pacing the empty lobby.

Charlie emerges a few minutes later with a backpack slung over her shoulder and a smug grin on her face. I smile back at her, knowing I never should have doubted that her nerves would get the best of her. This is the fourth time she’s started from scratch, and she seems to have made it through the first few times okay. This time shouldn’t be any different.

She doesn’t sit in the front seat this time. When we approach the car, she says, “Let’s both sit in the back so we can go through all this stuff.”

Landon is already annoyed that he thinks we’ve carried out what he thinks is a prank for so long, and now we’re forcing him to chauffer us around.

“Where to now?” Landon asks.

“Just drive us around until we figure out where we want to go next,” I say.

Charlie unzips the backpack and begins rifling through it. “I think we should go to the prison,” she says. “My father might have some sort of explanation.”

“Again?” Landon asks. “Silas and I tried that yesterday. They wouldn’t let us speak to him.”

“But I’m his daughter,” she says. She glances over at me as if she’s silently asking for my approval.

“I agree with Charlie,” I say. “Let’s go see her father.”

Landon sighs heavily. “I can’t wait until this is over,” he says, making a sharp right out of the driveway of the police station. “Ridiculous,” he mutters. He reaches for the radio and turns up the volume, drowning us out.

We begin pulling items out of the backpack. There are two separate stacks I remember making a couple of days ago when I first began going through these items. One of them is useful to us, one is not. I hand Charlie the journals and I begin sorting through letters, hoping she doesn’t notice I’m skipping some of the ones I know I’ve already read.

“All these journals are full,” she says, flipping through them. “If I wrote this much and this often, wouldn’t I have one that’s current? I can’t find one from this year.”

She makes a good point. When I was in her attic taking all of this stuff, I didn’t notice anything that looked like she was actively using it. I shrug. “Maybe we missed it when we grabbed all of these.”

She leans forward and talks over the music. “I want to go to my house,” she says to Landon. She falls back against the seat, clutching the backpack to her chest. She doesn’t continue going through the letters or journals. She just quietly stares out the window while we approach her neighborhood.

When we arrive at her house, she hesitates before opening the car door. “This is where I live?” she asks.

I’m sure she wasn’t expecting this, yet I can’t reassure her or warn her about what she’ll find inside because she still believes I lost my memories, too.

“Do you want me to go inside with you?”

She shakes her head. “That’s probably not a good idea. Our notes said you should stay away from my mother.”

“True,” I say. “Well, the notes said we found all this stuff in your attic. Maybe check your bedroom this time. If you had a journal you actively wrote in, it’s probably near where you sleep.”

She nods and then exits the car and begins walking toward her house. I watch until she disappears inside.

I can see Landon watching me suspiciously in the rearview mirror. I avoid eye contact with him. I know he already doesn’t believe us, but if he finds out I have any memory of the last forty-eight hours, he’ll definitely think I’m lying. And then he’ll stop helping us.

I find a letter I haven’t read yet and begin to open it when the back door opens. Charlie tosses a box inside the car and I’m relieved to see she found more stuff, including another journal. She slides into the car when the front door opens. I glance in the front seat to see Janette joining the party.

Charlie leans over until our shoulders are touching. “I think she’s my sister,” she whispers. “She doesn’t seem to like me very much.”

Janette’s car door slams shut and she immediately turns around in her seat and glares at me. “Thanks for letting me know my sister is alive, *.” She faces the front again and I catch Charlie suppressing a laugh.

“Are you serious?” Landon says, staring across the front seat at Janette. He doesn’t seem at all pleased that Janette is tagging along.

She rolls her head and groans. “Oh, come on,” she says to Landon. “It’s been a year since we broke up. It’s not going to kill you to sit in the same car with me. Besides, I’m not staying home all day with Loco Laura.”

“Holy shit,” Charlie mutters. She leans forward. “You two used to date?”

Landon nods. “Yeah. But it was a loooong time ago. And it lasted like a week.” He throws the car in reverse and begins backing out.

“Two weeks,” Janette specifies.

Charlie looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “And the plot thickens…” she says.