Now That I've Found You - Kristina Forest Page 0,25
begin to tremble, and I realize that my hands are shaking.
“No. No, no, no, no.” I turn around and shout, “Gigi? Gigi!”
I suddenly hear a loud ruckus upstairs, like someone fell out of bed and landed on the floor. Mark Antony and Cleo hightail it out of the kitchen, and I race into the hallway, hoping and praying to see Gigi. Instead, I see Milo rushing out of his room. He struggles to run and put on a shirt at the same time. For a moment, I forgot he stayed here.
He looks at me with the wide, alert eyes of someone who just woke up and is trying to adjust to chaos. “What? What’s wrong?”
I don’t answer and dash upstairs, brushing past him with my sights set on Gigi’s door. I push it open and walk into her empty room. It smells like Chanel No. 5, and her huge bed is neatly made, covered in a soft cream-colored comforter. Nothing looks out of place. Nothing, except for the fact that Gigi isn’t here!
I groan. I lean against Gigi’s dresser and try to catch my breath.
“What’s wrong?” Milo repeats, coming to stand beside me.
“She’s gone!”
“What?” he says, blinking. “Who?”
“Gigi! Who else?” I shove her note into his hands. “It says so right here.”
Milo scrunches up his face and scans Gigi’s letter. The seconds I stand there waiting for him to finish are agonizing. He reads so slowly!
I don’t have time to wait. I walk around her huge bed to her nightstand and open her jewelry box, where she keeps her passport. It’s still there, so at least now I know she hasn’t left the country. She said she wouldn’t be too far away, but “far away” could have a completely different meaning for Gigi. She could be anywhere! And when did she even leave? She must have written the note this morning. But how long before I woke up? Minutes? Hours? I insinuated that she needed to get out of the house, but I meant, like, take a walk around the neighborhood, not just disappear altogether! What am I supposed to do? I can’t even call her because she doesn’t own a cell phone.
This is like when she left LA after she and James divorced. She fell off the face of the earth for weeks and then suddenly reappeared in New York. At least this time she left a note.
This is all my fault. She couldn’t stand to be around me anymore. I didn’t even get a chance to tell her about the Every Time We Meet remake. I don’t have the role if I can’t get Gigi’s blessing or convince her to agree to a meeting with James. How can I accomplish either of those things if she isn’t here?
I think I’m going to be sick.
“So we can probably rule out that she’s missing,” Milo finally says, refolding the note and handing it back to me. He still has crust in his eyes and sleep lines on his cheeks.
“What do you mean?” I say. “Of course she’s missing. You just took about three years to read her note.”
He narrows his eyes and, with measured patience, says, “I did read the note, and what I read lets me know that she left on purpose. I think the better word is disappeared.”
“Oh yeah, that’s much better,” I say sarcastically. I worry the note in my hands, but I stop because I’m afraid I might rip it. We might need this for evidence in the future. The last note that Gigi wrote before she went AWOL. The cops will have to keep it in a missing persons file. The story will break out everywhere. Gigi and I will be the subjects of yet another scandal.
Nobody can find out about this. Nobody.
“I talked to her this morning,” Milo says, snapping me out of my downward spiral.
“What?” I ask, gripping his arm. He winces. “Sorry,” I say, quickly pulling away. “You talked to her? Why didn’t you lead with that?”
“You didn’t give me a chance to!” he says, rubbing his arm where I grabbed him.
“What did she say? Tell me word for word.”
“I got back mad late, like almost four A.M., because we spent a long time trying to figure out stuff for tonight’s show. I walked inside, and your grandma was sitting in the living room with a suitcase next to her. I kind of just stood there because I didn’t know what was going on. She told me that she’d been waiting for