Layla - Colleen Hoover Page 0,27
mistake. Most sane people would call me crazy after hearing my story. And here I am trusting that this man won’t leak my story straight into the hands of all those sane people.
Honestly? I don’t even give a shit. My potential career, my meager following, the image Layla has been trying to build for me—none of it matters anymore. It all seems so insignificant now that I’ve seen what this world is capable of.
It’s like I’ve lived my entire life in shallow waters, but in the last few weeks, I’ve sunk all the way to the Challenger Deep.
The man is staring at the stove when I walk into the kitchen—his head tilted. He presses the knob in, turns it, and waits for the gas flame to ignite. When it does, he watches it burn for a moment. Then he turns it off.
He waves his hand at the stove. “You have to press it in to get it into the off position. How’d you explain that to yourself?”
I shrug. “I couldn’t.”
He laughs a little. It’s the first iota of expression I get from him. He takes a seat back at the table and places the recorder between us.
“Did Layla seem bothered by it?”
“Not really,” I say. “I took the blame, and she didn’t question me. We cleaned the kitchen together, and I ended up making plain pasta instead.”
“Did anything else strike you as strange that first night?”
“Not like what happened with the stove.”
“But something out of the ordinary did happen?”
“Several things happened over the course of the next couple of days that left me questioning whether or not I was going crazy.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things that would have sent anyone else out the front door without a second thought.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Layla is picking at her pasta, moving it around with her fork more than she’s eating it. She looks bored.
“You don’t like it?”
She stiffens when she realizes I’m watching her. “It’s good,” she says, taking a small bite.
She hasn’t had much of an appetite lately. She barely eats, and when she does, she picks out anything with carbs. Maybe that’s why she’s only taken three small bites—because everything in her bowl is a carb.
She weighed herself a week after she was released from the hospital. I remember I was brushing my teeth at the sink, and she stepped on the bathroom scale next to me. She whispered, “Oh my God,” to herself, and I haven’t really seen her eat a full meal since then.
She chews her food carefully, staring down at the bowl in front of her. She takes a sip of her wine and then begins scooting pasta around again.
“When are Aspen and Chad coming?” she asks.
“Friday.”
“How long are they staying?”
“Just one night. They have that road trip.” Layla nods like she knows what I’m talking about, but when I called Aspen to tell her about this trip, she told me she hasn’t spoken to Layla in two weeks. I checked Layla’s phone later that night, and she had several missed calls from both her mother and her sister. I don’t know why she’s avoiding them, but she sends their calls to voice mail more than she doesn’t.
“Have you talked to your mom today?” I ask her.
Layla shakes her head. “No.” She looks up at me. “Why?”
I don’t know why I asked that. I just hate that she’s avoiding most of her mother’s calls. When she does that, Gail starts texting me, wondering what’s wrong with Layla. Then she texts Aspen and worries Aspen. Then Aspen texts me, asking why Layla isn’t answering her phone.
It would just be easier for everyone if Layla updated them more often so they wouldn’t worry about her so much. But they do worry. We all do. Another thing that’s probably a setback for her.
“I wish my mother would get a hobby so she wouldn’t expect me to talk to her every day,” Layla says, dropping her fork to the table. She takes another sip of her wine. When she sets it down, she closes her eyes for several long seconds.
When she opens them, she stares down at her pasta in silence.
She inhales a breath, as if she just wants to forget the conversation.
Maybe she spent too much time with them when she was released from the hospital. She probably needs a nice break from them, much like I need a break from the rest of the world.
Layla picks up her fork and looks at it; then she looks down at her bowl of pasta again.