Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
What if Dionne was lying?
His vision narrowed. The gymnasium, the disco balls, the scattered light, all of it compressed into a single point: the spot on the dance floor where Katy had been standing when she’d turned and her face had opened with grief.
“Excuse me,” he said.
He turned from the punch table and scanned the room. The dance floor. The photo booth. The cluster of sequined girls, the wrestling-hold boys, the fog machine pumping its chemical sweetness into the heavy air. The green dress. The red hair.
She wasn’t there.
He moved through the crowd. Past the DJ, past the chaperone station, past Dionne, who called his name and he didn’t stop. Through the gymnasium, corner to corner, table to table. The hallway. The lobby. The parking lot door.
The parking lot was half-empty. A minivan. A pickup truck. A space where a car had been, recently, the asphalt still warm from the engine.
She was gone.
Reid Jamieson was leaning against a pillar near the gymnasium entrance when Julian came back inside. The senator’s grandson assessed him with an expression that was polite on the surface and iron underneath.
“She left,” Reid confirmed.
“Where?”
“Somewhere you’re not.” Reid straightened. He wasn’t hostile. He was simply a wall. Calm, immovable, backed by connections that could make a person vanish into the infrastructure of a political family and never surface again. “She’s had a rough night, and I don’t think she needs more of whatever put that expression on her face.”
“You don’t know what—”
“I know enough.” Reid’s voice was quiet. Final. “I know she walked into this gym alone with her chin up and a twelve-dollar dress and more courage than anyone in this room, and then you walked in with her sister and she crumbled. I don’t need the details to know which side of this I’m on.”
Julian stood in the gymnasium doorway while the bass thumped and the disco balls scattered their cold light and the fog machine did its mindless work, and he contemplated the space where Katy Gates had been, and for the first time since the garden, since the grove, since the terrace where he’d called her love a fixation and let her walk away with her head high and her heart in ruins, he felt the full weight of what he’d done settle onto his chest.
Katy was...gone.
He stood there. The gymnasium throbbed around him. Dionne appeared at his elbow, saying words, and he didn’t hear them. He was taking in the empty dance floor and the scattered disco-ball light and the paper stars hanging from fishing line, and he was thinking about a girl in a green dress who had come to her own prom alone because the man she loved had told her she was nothing, and then that man had walked in with her sister, and she had still held her chin up, she had still not crumbled, she had still been Katy until the very last second, and now she was gone.
And he had done this.
All of it. Every piece. The cruelty and the cowardice and the monstrous choice to believe a lie because the truth required bravery he didn’t have. He’d had the power to find her and keep her and he’d used it to push her away, and the man in the bathroom mirror, the one with his mother’s eyes, was not a warning anymore.
He was a reflection.
Chapter 6
THE FIRST INVESTIGATOR came back empty after nine days.
Julian sat in his office at Gubat with the report open on his desk and the Los Angeles skyline behind him and a cup of coffee he hadn’t touched going cold at his elbow. The report was thorough. Katy Gates had quit Haven Country Club without notice. Her last shift had been a Tuesday. Her mother, Amy, still lived at the same address in Silver Lake, still worked her paralegal job, still attended her Wednesday night meetings. Amy hadn’t filed a missing persons report. Amy hadn’t seemed distressed when the investigator’s associate, posing as a census worker, had spoken to her at the door.
Which meant Amy knew where her daughter was. Which meant Katy had chosen to leave.
He closed the report and opened his laptop. The quarterly projections for Gubat’s Southeast Asian expansion were still on his screen, the same numbers he’d been studying for a week without processing a single digit. The cursor blinked in a cell he’d forgotten the purpose of. He closed the laptop too.
The second investigator, hired a week later, was more expensive and less polite. She specialized in skip traces and had a success rate she’d quoted at ninety-four percent. She came back on day six with the same nothing. Katy Gates had no active credit cards. No social media updates since prom night. No cell phone pings outside a seventy-two-hour window that ended the night she’d disappeared. The phone had gone dark somewhere in Pasadena and never come back on.