Pieces of Summer (A stand-alone novel)(76)

Time to accept the truth and live with it. I’m no exception. That’s just life.



Whit whistles low as something crunches under her foot, and I bandage up my bloody hands.

“What the hell happened here?” she asks, inching around more damage that used to be my coffee table.

“Unless you’ve figured out where Mika is, you should go. I’m not exactly in the mood for visitors.” I finish up the bandaging, and grab my keys. No way am I finding my belt in this mess.

“I told you the last I saw her was about the bowling alley. Are you okay? This looks like someone broke in.”

“I just needed to hit something,” I say while turning around. My house looks like a tornado blew through, but I don’t give a damn right now. I also don’t like the pity oozing from Whit’s eyes.

“Have you heard from Aidan or Hunter? I can’t reach them,” she says while looking around at the mess.

“On my way there now,” I say while brushing by her.

“Chase!”

I turn around as Whit struggles with whatever is on her mind.

“Never mind. Just let me know how they’re doing. Okay?”

I don’t say anything. Instead, I climb into my truck and resist the urge to stop for a bottle of liquor that could drown out the world. Getting lost at the bottom of a bottle never worked before. Getting wasted led to a lot of bad decisions, and none of it changed a thing. It all made it worse.

I pull up to Mika’s house, and the disappointment hits me hard when her car still isn’t in the open garage. For some reason, I keep expecting it to magically appear. Fifteen minutes… We’ve gone everywhere you can go from one to twenty minutes in varying speeds. Fifteen minutes is an acceptable number for her to use, since it’s a limit and not a time.

The door is unlocked, so I push through it. As though he’s echoing my thoughts, I hear Aidan shouting.

“She can’t just leave! She can’t even drive longer than fifteen minutes. There’s no way she just vanishes into thin f*cking air without help. Find out where she is!” Aidan yells through the phone at whoever he’s talking to this time. He’s been making phone calls since she went missing.

Mika withdrew a large sum of cash, but no one knows where it went. However, it was definitely enough to buy a small home.

Hunter is hunched over with his head in his hands. I’ve already destroyed all the shit in my house, throwing my own version of a tantrum, and there’s nothing even wrong with my head. Nothing besides Mika missing.

I’ve spent a lot of time asking everyone if they’ve seen her, practically hounding everyone I’ve seen in town. Everyone gives me a look like I’ve done something to her to make her run. I’m a James, after all.

“Whit said she’s been trying to reach you guys,” I tell Hunter.

“Unless she knows where Mika is, I’m not in the mood to talk to her,” Aidan growls. “Or anyone else for that matter.”

“Whit really doesn’t know anything?” Hunter asks me, looking up with pained eyes.

“She said Mika got with her about a bowling alley issue while she was in the hospital, but nothing more than that,” I say through clenched teeth.

Aidan looks like he’s on the verge of destroying something or someone as he tosses his phone down to a table, and runs his hands through his hair.

Blake is already here, sitting by as the chaos unfolds. He looks just as exhausted as we all feel.

“I was stupid to think she’d drop it. I just thought if I didn’t help her, then she had no one else help her disappear,” Hunter says like a scolded kid.

“Dr. Stein won’t tell me shit,” Aidan groans. “Nothing other than Mika is fine and in contact with her. Fucking confidentiality policies. Mika can’t pay electric bills or anything else. She can’t do that without help. And she can’t just trust anyone with her account numbers. It has to be Dr. Stein helping her. There’s no way around it.”

“At least we know she’s fine,” Blake says, then immediately flinches when three murderous glares turn his way. “I’ll go see if I can find anyone who might have seen her leave town. Small towns talk.”

Maybe they’ll actually tell him something.

He walks out while I drop to Mika’s couch and try to think of anyone else who might have taken her out of town. Whit doesn’t know. Chuck doesn’t know. Half the other employees never even knew Mika. Three f*cking days she’s been missing, and no one seems to know anything.

A man can fart in a store downtown, and everyone knows about it within the hour. But Mika can go missing, and no one f*cking knows a damn thing.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out, reading the message from Chuck in disbelief.

“What?” Aidan asks me.

Shaking my head, I peer up at him and blow out a breath. “I’m supposed to go meet with Mika’s lawyer. Apparently she signed over the bowling alley to me at some point.”

“The f*ck?!” Aidan roars, kicking a basket across the room.

Mika doesn’t plan on coming back. It’s like getting punched and broken all over again.

“I want to see Dr. Stein,” I tell them, hearing it go eerily silent.

I look up to see both of them staring at me, as Aidan pants for air, still half crazed.