Lies I Told(42)

I sent him a quick text and pushed my worry aside. He was probably working whatever angle my dad had him on at Allied. He’d be home when I got there.

Selena and I added two orders of cheese fries and two Cokes to the check, and we spent the next hour and a half talking and laughing with the group, arguing over which eighties songs to play from the kitschy jukeboxes at every table. I was filled with an unfamiliar brand of contentment. Surrounded by Logan and the others in the cocoon that was Mike’s, the rest of the world was far away. It almost seemed possible to continue being friends with Harper and Olivia, with Raj and Liam and David. Continue getting closer to Logan, the con some far-off end in the distance, a little blurry and a lot less real than what was right in front of me.

By the time I got home, it was after eleven. I was surprised to find my dad sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of what looked like his favorite Scotch in front of him.

He looked up when I came in. “Hey. How was it?”

I put my bag down and sat across from him. “Fine. Selena and I took a walk and then we met up with the others at Mike’s.”

There were questions in his eyes, but I knew he wouldn’t ask them outside the War Room. He glanced behind me.

“Where’s Parker?”

My stomach lurched. “I thought he was here.”

“Haven’t seen him all night.” He took a drink from his glass. “Maybe he’s out with Rachel Mercer.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Yeah, maybe.” Standing, I leaned down and kissed his cheek. “I’m going to bed. Good night.”

“Night, Gracie.”

I trudged up the stairs and got ready for bed. Then I turned out the light and slid between the sheets, my mind churning. Parker wasn’t with Rachel, he wasn’t with the guys, and he hadn’t taken the Saab. If he’d been working on Allied, my dad would have known about it.

So where was he? Panic bubbled up inside me. Could he have left? Abandoned our parents—and me—like he’d been planning?

I shook my head in the dark. Parker wouldn’t do that. Whatever had happened between us, however tense things were, he wouldn’t leave me behind. I knew it. Knew him.

Then I thought about the words sung by the man next door:



They said someday you’ll find

All who love are blind.



And suddenly I wondered how well I really knew Parker. How well any of us knew one another.





Thirty-Two


I was on my way out of the house the next morning when I spotted Parker through the crack in his bedroom door. He was sprawled facedown across his bed, still dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. It was after ten. Usually he would be up, sitting at the kitchen table and reading the business section. He must have been out late.

I nudged the door open a little more with my foot and peered around the room, eager for clues about his whereabouts the night before. His jacket was tossed haphazardly on the chair near the bed, the carpet covered in muddy boot prints. They led to his boots, which looked like they’d been pulled off in a hurry, tossed so that they landed a few feet apart, half under the bed.

I hesitated, torn between wanting answers and wanting to put off another confrontation. The idea wasn’t appealing, especially since Rachel had texted early this morning asking if I was up for working on our AP Euro project. The thought of spending time alone with her tied my stomach in knots, but the saying “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” was a cornerstone of every con. Besides, if Rachel had picked up the ID in AP Euro, she would have confronted me with it. And even if she hadn’t, the ID wasn’t proof of anything. We could have been in Arizona before San Francisco. People moved all the time.

I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down, and pulled Parker’s door closed.

Rachel lived a couple of miles away, farther up the peninsula on a bluff overlooking the sea. Her house was bigger than Logan’s. Unlike the aged bronze of Logan’s gate, the one outside Rachel’s property was buffed silver. The house was newer, too, although I’d guess a lot of money had gone into making it look like the houses that were original to the peninsula, most of them built in the 1960s and 1970s.

Rachel buzzed me in at the gate, and I continued up the driveway. The house stood in the middle of a gigantic stretch of lawn. Other than a few well-placed palm trees, there was no foliage. Nothing to create shadow or mystery. It was a diamond, glittering under the showroom lights, carefully positioned to look as shiny as possible.

I parked the car and made my way to the door. The bell echoed throughout the house in a long series of rings. A few seconds later, footsteps sounded on the other side of the door just before it was opened by a youngish woman with dark luminous skin and deep brown eyes.

“Miss Fontaine?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

She opened the door wider. “Please, come in. Miss Mercer is waiting for you in the kitchen. I’ll show you the way.”

Miss Fontaine? Miss Mercer? Did Rachel’s family seriously have a maid? It was hard to tell. The woman wore plain black pants and a white shirt, and while it wasn’t everyday wear for most of the people on the peninsula, it wasn’t exactly traditional maid attire either.

I followed her down a hallway lined with terra-cotta tile to the back of the house. Like most of the houses I’d seen in Playa Hermosa, the kitchen looked out onto a backyard with a pool and enough patio furniture to outfit an entire living room. At the doorway, the woman turned to me with a smile.