Her entries changed after rehab. Her self-loathing eased. She’d confided to Sheridan what had happened, and Sheridan had convinced her to go to therapy, which we never knew about. The therapy helped.
Until the hospital TV drama. The rape storyline. It dragged Skye right back to that place Foster Steadman had taken her four years before.
Shaking hard, I cast aside the last journal and stumbled into the bathroom to throw up. As I cast up my sorrow and bile, rage, guilt, and grief fought to overwhelm me.
We never knew.
None of us knew.
And as far as I was concerned, Foster Steadman was the real reason my beautiful Skye was gone.
I leaned back against the bathroom wall, trembling so hard, my back moved against the tile. Shock. I think I was in shock.
That’s how Jamie found me.
As he lowered beside me, I stared at him, at his concerned eyes and furrowed brow, and terror flooded me.
If I gave Jamie those diaries … would I lose him too?
Months Later
JAMIE
Twenty-one years old
* * *
There weren’t a lot of things I was afraid of in life. After Skye died, I was sure the only thing I feared was losing Jane and Lorna.
Somehow, I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t afraid of prison. Yeah, I was afraid of losing out on five to seven years of a life with Jane. I was worried about my future, my career, once I got out.
It wasn’t until I found myself inside a cell in medium security at the state prison that the fear set in. I’d been there a week and some sick, twisted bastards that haunted the halls were eyeing me like I wasn’t human, but just a walking, talking orifice for them to stick something into.
“You’re too pretty for here, son,” a biker warned me in the cafeteria the first day. “Find yourself some protection, or you ain’t gonna last.”
It was like something out of a bad prison movie, except it was real. It was happening. To me.
And I was fucking scared all the time and pretending like I wasn’t.
Walking into the visitation room, seeing Jane sitting behind the Plexiglas of a visitor booth, I felt my feet touch the ground for the first time in a week. Lying in my cell at night, I missed her as much as I missed not being afraid.
I despised that she was seeing me like this.
She gave me a sad smile and that cute dimple in her cheek eased the ache in my chest as I sat down opposite her and reached for the phone.
“Hey, baby,” she said as she pressed her palm flat to the thick barrier.
I placed my palm over hers, wishing I could feel her skin. “Doe.”
She let out a shuddering breath. “How are you?”
“I’m okay,” I lied.
Jane knew. “Jamie.”
There was no way I would tell her anything that might keep her awake at night. “How’s it going with you? You and Cassie find a place?”
After my arrest, we couldn’t post bail, so I’d waited in remand. My case went to court quicker than expected, probably because Steadman wanted me there as fast as possible. My lawyer wanted me to plead guilty; I told my lawyer to go fuck himself. So I went to trial, was convicted, and ended up with a longer sentence for standing up for myself.
Jane had given up the small apartment we’d only just moved into and shacked up with her friend Cassie from art school in her one-bedroom apartment. After my sentencing, they got a place together.
“Yeah. We found an apartment in Pomona. Near school.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Jamie, I don’t want to talk about the apartment. I want to talk about you.”
Frustration blew through me. “About what? There’s nothing to talk about.”
“I need to know you’re okay.”
“Do you love me?”
Jane blinked at the seemingly random question. “You know I do. You’re my everything.”
I let out a slow exhalation. “Then I’m okay. He thought he took everything from me … but he didn’t take you, and you’re all that fucking matters. So, I’m okay.”
She squeezed her eyes closed.
“It’ll get easier, Doe,” I promised her.
I hoped it was a promise I could keep.
With the rage that stirred inside me, I wasn’t sure I could. I wasn’t sure I could live with myself if I let this go once I got out. My sentence was seven years, but my lawyer told me they’d let me out in five if I behaved myself and kept my head down.
“They’ve got classes here. Computing, stuff like that. There’s even a workshop. I’ll keep busy,” I promised.
“Can you write?”
“There’s a computer lounge. I can write there.”
“Good.” She nodded, seeming somewhat appeased.
“Now tell me about you. I want to know what you’re up to.”
I let Jane’s voice soothe me as she talked about her sophomore classes at Pomona. The projects she was working on. Dramas unfolding with her friends. That stuff seemed juvenile to us both now, I knew, but it was a distraction.
A distraction from the knowledge that we wouldn’t be able to touch each other for at least five years. Sometimes that thought took my breath away.
What would Skye think of me here?
That I’d been a naive, stupid, impulsive asshole, that’s what.
A moronic kid who had no idea what he was doing when he broke into Foster Steadman’s office and confronted him about Skye and what Jane had found in her journals. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to rip his fucking dick off so he could never hurt another woman again.
I knew I would do just that when I grabbed the letter opener off his desk. His security arrived before I could touch him and threw me out.
It was enough to calm my ass down. As was the tongue-lashing from Jane. We would do it right, she said. We’d take the journals to the police and they’d investigate Steadman.
We went out that night. Trying to distract ourselves. Skye had left a far more substantial amount of money than I’d been expecting, to be split three ways among Jane, Lorna, and me. My little sister threatened to contest Jane’s share, but I shut her down, promising I’d never speak to her again if she didn’t abide by Skye’s wishes.
The money allowed Jane and me to rent a decent apartment in Glendale and go out for the occasional nice meal if we felt like it.
That night we’d come back to our apartment.
It was ransacked.
And I knew why immediately.
Panicked, I’d hurried into the bedroom where I kept Skye’s journals in the closet, and they were gone.
That wasn’t even the worst of it. The next morning, there were cops at the door, and I was in handcuffs being arrested for armed robbery.
Armed. Fucking. Robbery.
“You tried to fuck with the wrong guy,” one of the cops whispered in my ear as he lowered me into the police car. Dirty bastard cop. On Steadman’s payroll.
The next few months were even more of a nightmare than I thought they could be after losing Skye. Steadman had paid a cashier near the studio offices to lie. And it must have been some amount of cash he bribed her with because she took a bullet. The footage from inside the store didn’t show my face—it just showed some guy with a similar build to mine, wearing a hoodie that hid his face from the security cameras, coming into the store and robbing the cashier at gunpoint. The attacker clipped the cashier in the shoulder with a bullet.
That woman took a bullet to bury me.
She miraculously identified me. Said I came into the store a lot. She remembered my name from when I used my card there.
The fuck of it was, I’d gone into the store the day I attacked Steadman to grab bottled water. With no cash on me, I’d used my card.
Steadman’s security must have followed me. Put all this together.
Cops were paid off. He paid for the cashier’s lawyer. No one would listen when I tried to tell them about Skye, and my defense attorney said
there was nothing he could do without any evidence.
There was no record of me showing up at Steadman’s office that day.
I spent all the money Skye left me on my defense fees. Worse, Jane had to give me a chunk of her share too to cover my legal costs. It didn’t matter. I got seven years for a crime I didn’t commit. To shut me up. To shut up anyone who knew about Skye.
Look what I can do, Steadman was saying. You’re a fucking bug and I’m a lion. I can squash you just by taking a stroll.
But I would get him.
I had patience. And I was smarter now.
As long as I could protect Jane while I did it, Foster Steadman was going to wish he’d kept his sick hands off my sister. I didn’t care how long it took.
I would bury the bastard.
One Year Later
JANE
Nineteen years old
* * *
For over a year, every Thursday, I’d gotten up early and driven Jamie’s car three and a half hours north to the state prison to make visiting hours at 11:00 a.m. I had not missed a week.
Nothing short of fire and brimstone could make me miss a week.
Not even the changes in Jamie. The coldness. The distance.
He hadn’t told me he loved me in weeks.
Yet still I said it. It was the last thing I said before I left him after every visit. Just for a moment, something would spark in his grim gaze and he’d lift his chin in acknowledgment.
I had to believe he still loved me.
Prison was chipping away at who he was.
Three weeks after he was put away, I got a call from the prison telling me Jamie was in the hospital. I had to leave a message for Lorna because she wouldn’t answer my calls, and she, thankfully, listened to my message and got the next flight to LA. We found ourselves paying vigil at his bedside for the next few days as he recovered from a stab wound to the gut.
It was only after he was back in prison that he told me he’d deliberately stepped between the attacker and a guy called Irwin Alderidge.
I’d googled Alderidge after our conversation.
He was this billionaire real estate mogul. He had properties all over the world, but his home was in Los Angeles. He’d been tried and sentenced to seven years for paying millions in bribes to two elected officials to be his eyes and ears in California’s government. The government officials were also convicted. It was a high sentence for the crime, but the jury had decided to make an example out of Alderidge.
Despite the large fine Alderidge received, the guy was still dripping in money. According to Jamie, that money kept him safe while he was behind bars. He paid the toughest sons of bitches in that place to watch his back.
But Jamie had been keeping his ear to the ground, and some psycho little shit who tried to blackmail cash out of Alderidge decided he was going to shiv him. Jamie watched. Waited. And took the shiv instead.
For the first time in my life, I wanted to scream at him. He’d almost died! And that’s when it all came out. That there were guys who wanted to hurt him. As much as it killed his pride, he needed protection. It was the shiv, or his life wouldn’t be worth living, he’d said.
Thankfully, Jamie recovered, and his risk paid off.
Turned out Irwin Alderidge wasn’t someone who let a debt go unpaid. I also got the impression from what my boyfriend had told me that Alderidge genuinely liked Jamie. They shared varied interests, were educated, and were avid readers. They spent a lot of their time keeping each other sane. Jamie didn’t speak about it, but I knew he’d witnessed things in that prison that haunted him.
It wasn’t just isolation and injustice eating away at him.
It was the whole damn place.
That Thursday I waited impatiently in a booth in the visitation room, desperate to see him. He stepped into the room behind a guard and the constant ache in my chest bloomed, spreading through my whole body.
To say I missed him was an understatement.
I’d lost all the McKennas, and even though Cassie was a good friend, my family was gone. Sometimes it felt like I was just going through the motions. Wasting time until Jamie was out of prison.
He looked tired when he sat across from me.
I smiled and his eyes dropped to my dimple, his harsh countenance softening a little.
“Decided not to shave today?” I teased into the phone.
He scratched at his stubbled jaw with those long, big-knuckled fingers. I missed his hands. “It makes me look older, no?”
I grinned. “It’s very sexy.”
His eyes glimmered a little. “You’re very sexy.”
My cheeks flushed.
I missed sex with Jamie.
It wasn’t the thing I missed most. I missed his laugh the most. I missed lying next to him at night while he slept. I missed waking up to find him writing, tiptoeing out of the room so as not to disturb him. I missed the way he used to look at me, like I was the one who made the world turn. Like I was the sun and the waves and the moon.
I missed hearing him whisper, “I love you, Doe.”
I missed the feel of his arms around me. The way a Jamie hug made me feel safe and loved and needed.
But I missed sex with Jamie too.
I missed the hunger in his eyes. The way he’d bare his teeth as he fucked me. The way he murmured my name across my lips as he made love to me.
I missed Jamie.
“How are you?” I asked as I always asked.
“Good,” he replied like he always replied. “What’s been happening?”
I regaled him with the dull minutiae of my life. At least it was dull to me, but Jamie seemed to enjoy listening to me talk. I told him about how my friend Tom had just found out Cassie was seeing a guy fifteen years her senior, and Tom was jealous as hell. He’d asked Cassie out a bunch of times over the last year and she’d said no every time, and now he knew it was because of this older firefighter named Cal.
I was the only one who knew she’d been seeing Cal since our freshman year. Considering she was eighteen and he was thirty-three when they’d first started dating, they’d kept the relationship on the down low. But a few of her friends found out the longer their relationship went on, and now it was no longer a secret.
Tom was not happy.
“I think she’s afraid he’s going to tell someone. Cal might lose his job.”
Jamie’s brow puckered. “She’s nineteen.”
“Yeah, but people can be judgmental about these age gaps. He’s worried he comes off as some cradle-robbing creep.” In truth, Cassie had lied to Cal about her age when they’d first met. By the time he realized she was only eighteen, he was already in love with her.
Jamie nodded slowly, but he frowned. “You haven’t mentioned Devin in a while.”
My stomach dropped. Despite Devin asking me out freshman year, Jamie had been cool that he was still part of the group I hung out with at school. He’d never been insecure or possessive that way. He didn’t have to be. I loved him, and he knew that.
So Devin and I were friends.
Good friends, as far as I was aware.
That’s why when he followed me into a bathroom at a party six weeks ago, I never saw it coming. He was wasted. He told me he loved me and that I needed to be with someone who wasn’t going to drag me down like Jamie. I told him to get out. That he didn’t know what he was talking about.
And he decided to kiss me to prove me wrong.
Cassie had talked me into taking self-defense classes just after Jamie was sentenced. Thank God she did.
At first Devin was too strong, too big at six four, and I was so busy struggling to breathe through the kiss and the panic that it took a minute for me to realize he’d shoved his hand up my skirt. Fury kicked in.
I grabbed his wrist and twisted it as hard as I could; then I disabled him with a swift kick to the nuts.
Cassie wanted to kill him, and she just might have if I hadn’t talked her out of it.
Instead, I w
ent to the police and had Devin charged with assault.
He got a slap on the wrist since it was my word against his. He lied to the cops about it all being a big misunderstanding, but then he tried to apologize to me. There was no coming back from either that moment in the bathroom or making me out to be a liar afterward.
I’d cut him out of my life and most of our friends had done the same.
Becoming a social pariah was a kind of punishment, I guess.
What I hadn’t done was tell Jamie any of this.
Over a year ago, I made the choice to tell him about Skye’s diaries. A choice I would never have made if I’d been able to see the future.
I knew Jamie would confront Steadman, and yet, I still told him.
I was part of the reason Jamie was behind bars.
Cassie tried to rationalize with me, and of course, I knew that this was Foster Steadman’s fault, but I couldn’t let go of my guilt.
Jamie scowled. “Well? Why haven’t you mentioned Devin?” His cheeks reddened before I could reply. “Has something happened between you two? Have you fucked him?”
I blinked rapidly, and shock made the phone slip in my hand.
Had Jamie, my Jamie, really just asked me that? “Are you kidding me?” I couldn’t even raise my voice above a whisper.
A manner of insolence took over his body, reminding me so much of fifteen-year-old Jamie. He leaned forward on his elbows, his eyes dark with jealousy. “You like sex, Jane. What am I supposed to think you’re doing out there without me? Especially when you never mention Devin anymore? And I know when you’re not telling me something. You got real weird there when I said his name.”
“So, I’m screwing him?” Tears of fury brightened my eyes. “Because I like sex?”
Uncertainty flickered over his expression, and he swallowed hard. “Well?”
I glared at him in wounded indignation. “I like sex with you. There’s a difference. That you would even suggest otherwise makes me want to knee you in the gonads.”
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