even been able to talk because of the damage he’d sustained to his throat.
The men who did that were still after him.
With a sigh, I began composing a reply to Hadley. There was one obvious solution to all of this. It wasn’t one I liked, but it might just keep Gus safe.
And I’d do whatever it took to make that happen.
17
Ari
From the moment I met Hadley, I wanted to hate her.
She was way too pretty, for one thing. Not just regular pretty. TV pretty.
She had lustrous brown hair that belonged in a shampoo commercial, and she had better eyebrows than I did, and this spray of brown freckles across her nose and cheekbones that made it look like she should be frolicking in a meadow somewhere, hawking those little red wax cheese wheels.
Her lips could have sold a million lip kits on Instagram, and her smile was that perfect mix of sporty and sexy that promised all my problems would go away if I just bought the brand of deodorant or tampons she was shilling. I didn’t even need tampons, but I was sure if I saw her in an ad for them, I’d want to buy them. That’s how good her smile was.
Then there was the fact that she was nice. Not fake nice, like I thought someone from Hollywood might be, but actually nice. She’d arrived at Edgecliffe on Friday night, almost twenty-four hours exactly from when we went to the winter festival, and straightaway, she offered to help me with dinner and told me I had a beautifully bright aura, whatever that meant.
She was funny too. Infinity Falls had basically folded after Aggie’s death and Holden’s departure, and instead of finding a new acting gig, Hadley had opened a plant and crystal shop.
But she was the first person to make fun of how stereotypically Californian that was, and somehow managed to convey that she both believed in the healing powers of amethysts and also judged herself for that fact.
Plus, she had great stories about the drama in the online herbiary community, and spent half of dinner explaining the epic saga of when a self-declared kitchen witch decided to hex all the lavender plants in the world in a bid to get back at a bee-keeping ex-boyfriend.
She hadn’t batted an eye when Holden told her he wasn’t kissing a mystery woman in that picture, but a mystery me. She’d just clapped her hands and squealed and asked me how I put up with his grumpiness, which I thought was a fair question, all things considered. And when Holden explained that we didn’t want anyone to know I was here, she didn’t press for our reasons. She just asked how she could help.
In short, if I’d met her any other way, I probably would have wanted to be her best friend, and possibly fallen in love.
But instead, I’d met her because Holden had called her to Maine as reinforcement, and even though I knew he was doing it specifically to keep me safe, I couldn’t help wishing he didn’t need to.
“You guys ready?” Hadley called from the other side of the bathroom door on Saturday morning. She was using a bedroom and bathroom up on the third floor, because—I kid you not—she wanted to be closer to the vibrations of the moon.
“We’ve been ready for an hour,” Holden said, rolling his eyes. But his voice was warm. “How long does it take to shave your head? Aren’t you the person who told me our bodies are merely temporary earthly vessels for our eternal souls?”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t want my earthly vessel to look as good as possible while I’m inhabiting it,” Hadley shot back.
Holden gave me an incredulous look, nodding his head at the door as if to say, ‘Can you believe her?’
All I could do was shrug and smile. I’d known Hadley for less than a day, but from what I’d seen, yes, I could believe this of her. We’d been sitting on the floor of the hallway outside the bathroom for the past hour, listening to Hadley narrate her hair journey in breathless tones.
I didn’t mind, exactly. She made me laugh. And the longer she took to cut her hair, the longer I could put off acknowledging what was happening next.
Holden took my hand and squeezed it, and I fought the urge to squirm. Not at his touch—never that. My body still reacted to his body the same way it always had, which was to say