Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,44
look like bones. I picked up the receiver with my grim-reaper fingers and didn’t give myself a chance to wonder if this was the right thing to do.
My heart said it was, and I was listening to my heart.
Which frankly probably meant I was making a huge mistake. That was the kind of decision maker my heart was. Like one of those rats in a maze looking for cheese—that was my heart—always going down blind alleys and making wrong turns.
But this, this was just a thing that had to be done. Right or wrong.
Dylan was worried. Scared. And I knew that kind of fear. That daily, grinding concern, not knowing where my sister was and if she was safe. If she was alive.
It was a pounding in the back of my skull, every hour of every day. And it was no fucking way to live. This phone call was my gift to Max—not that he’d see it that way.
Or that he deserved a gift.
But I’d ripped open his chest on that bed reading the text from Dylan.
And I was deeply sorry for that. For both our sakes.
I deposited my coins and punched in the number from Max’s phone into the pay phone.
It rang exactly once.
“Max?” a man asked. Dylan. It could only be Dylan. God, the relief and fear in his voice was painful.
“No…I mean, not exactly.”
“Joan?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s…where’s Max?”
Chained to a bed in Florida. I have your brother chained to a bed and I’m keeping him there until he agrees to go on a suicide mission to save my sister.
“Oh my God,” Dylan whispered, assuming the worst in my silence.
“No. No, he’s fine. He’s okay.”
Dylan made a rough sound, like a laugh or a sob. I couldn’t tell.
“I’m calling to tell you he’s okay. We’re safe.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“He doesn’t….” I looked up at the sky. The stars and the moon were covered by skinny clouds and I wished maybe I’d just texted Dylan. It would have been easier to avoid this moment.
It was dangerous with those cops circling him but easier for me.
“He doesn’t want to talk to me,” Dylan said.
“I’m sorry.”
Dylan laughed and then sighed, like he was picking up a heavy burden he’d thought he was done with.
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure why I expected anything different.”
“Rabbit’s dead?”
“Yeah. Look, tell him,” he said, his voice soft and strangled. “Tell him not to go back to Jacksonville. Tell him he’s got a choice and he should come home.”
“Home?” Foreign word. Foreign fucking concept. Max wouldn’t understand it any better than I did. “Sure. I’ll tell him.”
“Hold on a second,” he said.
“I don’t have much change—”
“Joan?”
Oh Jesus. It was Annie. Sweet, soft, stupid Annie. I closed my eyes.
Growing up the way we did, in the trailer in the back lot of a salvage yard, we didn’t have many friends. Or I didn’t. Jennifer was worlds better than me. She was the kind of person people wanted to be around. A little bit like Annie. A little too kind. A little too soft.
But I never picked up the skill. Which made me a shit friend.
But Annie didn’t seem to care.
She kept trying. I’d give her that.
And she must have just worn me down with her boxes of wine and her bruised neck, because for some reason I stopped trying to bite her head off every time she was nice to me.
And then—somehow—we were friends.
“Hey,” I said.
“You okay?”
“Just great.”
“Joan. Don’t…make jokes.”
Oh honey, I thought. Don’t take away my jokes. I got nothing but tears without them.
“I’m fine. Max is fine.”
“We’re moving up to Dylan’s house in the mountains. Once Ben gets out of the hospital.”
I put my head down on the side of the phone booth. “Sounds nice,” I whispered.
It sounded like a commercial on TV for mops or something. A vision so perfect it had to be fake. But it wasn’t. It was Annie’s reality.
And I was glad for her. Glad that for some people, there were happy endings.
Annie deserved it.
“It is. And there’s room. I know Dylan wants Max to come. You should bring him.”
“And what? Move into your commune?” I joked. I’d already done that and I have the scars to prove it.
“I’m just saying you have a place to go. If you want it.”
“I don’t, but thanks,” I was being mean. I couldn’t help it. There was something about her kindness that made me want to rip the world to shreds. “My coins are running out.”