30. Ava

AVA

I n my bedroom, I sat on my bed, staring between my open backpack and a photo book.

The grandfather clock in the main foyer sounded out, the clanging echoing through the cavernous house.

Once again, I was the only one to hear it because Ebony was working late.

I glanced over at the clock on my dresser.

Six p.m.

He’d given me until six a.m. the next morning to decide.

I had twelve hours left. And I was still no closer to having an answer.

I stared around the room and tried to imagine never seeing it again. Never seeing this mansion again.

Or Ebony.

She had pulled me out of whatever dark hole I’d been in and given me a home .

It may not have been a cozy house filled with photos and trinkets, but it was stable, she was always there when I needed her, and she gave me everything I could ask for and more.

The best education.

The best healthcare.

More clothes than I could wear and books that I could read.

Ebony might appear not to have proper feelings but she did. She just hid them.

Some nights, I’d creep to her study when she thought I was already asleep. I’d spot her through the crack in the doorway and she’d be crying into a glass of whiskey and I’d know she’d lost someone on the operating table that day.

She cared about me.

In the way she pressed the back of her hand to my head with a frown or when she framed and hung up in her study an award I’d won for an article I wrote.

She loved me in her own way.

And losing me, her only family left, would devastate her.

Could I do that to my adopted mother? To the only mother I’d ever had?

I pulled Lisa’s photo book into my lap.

“I can’t believe you don’t have any photos!” she’d said as I tore open the wrapping paper to reveal the album filled with a hand-pasted collage. “Now you do.”

I’d never had anyone give me anything so precious.

I opened the book to the first page and choked back a laugh at our two heads pinned together while we shared a toilet seat lid in the girl’s bathroom at our elite private prep school.

She’d caught me crying in one of the giant stalls on my first day. Instead of leaving when I insisted I was fine, she’d climbed up onto the neighboring toilet seat and literally jumped into my stall.

I’d jolted as she crashed onto the marble next to me like a red high-top Conversed superhero, her uniform untucked, plaid skirt uniform (illegally) sewn into shorts, camera slung around her neck, hair tied into two messy buns and no makeup obscuring the smattering of freckles across her pale cheeks.

“Move up,” she’d said to me as I gaped at her.

She’d plonked her butt onto the other half of the toilet seat lid and just sat there with me until I was ready to face the world again.

Since then, the budding photojournalist had taken more photos of me than I’d ever had in my life.

She’d laid them all out in this book along with concert stubs and dried daisies that I’d turned into crowns for us. A timeline of our friendship.

I flicked through the pages, reliving our friendship.

I laughed at us made up as actual grannies for one Halloween. We’d convinced one of the Drama kids to give us prosthetics to age our eyes and chins and swiped white-haired wigs from the prop room.

We bought cheap dressing gowns covered in cats with scarves and furry slippers.

We’d been sneered at by all the sexy nurses and slutty cops, but we hadn’t cared. We’d snuck up to Todd’s rooftop, laughing our asses off with a smuggled flask of Jameson and promised we’d be grannies together, rocking beside each other and laughing our asses off on a porch somewhere.

Lisa’s friendship had begun to heal me.

How the hell could I abandon her now ?

I flipped the page and it felt like a sword had pierced my heart as it opened to reveal a photo of me, Lisa, Aisling, and Liath. Arms slung around each other’s necks, wide grins, the tops of our shoulders already turning pink.

It was summer and we’d all gone out sailing on Liath’s parents’ boat off the coast of Greece.

Liath stared out at me with her gray eyes so full of life with a dimple in her cheek and white-toothed laugh.

My blood turned to ice when I imagined her pupils frosted over with death. Her tanned skin covered in dirt and worms. Her cheeks sunken and mouth frozen forever in a silent scream.

Lying in an unmarked grave with no one to grieve for her.

Unwanted images of her moments before death flashed through me, lighting my body with cracking forks of terror. My heart ached as if I could feel her hurt echoing inside me as I imagined all she might have suffered.

No one else was looking for her.

No one else believed that she hadn’t just run away.

Liath deserved for everyone to know what happened to her. She deserved her story to be told.

Liath deserved justice.

And if I were to leave, she’d never get it. And I would have to live with that fact every day.

Could I live with the guilt of abandoning her—abandoning everyone —and becoming another “missing girl”?

But the more I dug, the more I cut open Liath’s dark secrets, the more my own vile truths would keep surfacing. I couldn’t expose Liath’s mystery without ripping my own open .

I didn’t want to know any more.

I didn’t want to remember.

Now that I’d been forced a taste, I didn’t want to have to swallow down the full bitter poisonous truth.

I didn’t know if I’d survive it.

My eyes drifted to the open backpack and the piles of bright summer clothes that I’d laid around it in piles.

Didn’t I deserve to be happy? Here my childhood best friend, my foster brother was promising to take me away, to look after me always.

To fill my days with sunshine and laughter and to fill my nights with pleasure.

To love me.

And I loved him.

I froze, this thought hitting me like a sledgehammer.

I loved him.

I loved my Scáth.

I always had.

I loved him when he was my best friend. And I even loved him when he was my bully.

I loved him. And he loved me.

And that was enough.

Spurred on by my realization, I snatched my backpack into my lap and grabbed the closest pile of soft cotton summer dresses. Would this be enough?

Who knows? Who cares? We could buy more clothes wherever we were going. All I needed was him .

I shoved the dresses into the backpack and froze as something rattled at the bottom.

I set the clothes aside and reached into the bottom of the bag, pulling out a thin cotton shopping bag .

It was Liath’s stuff that she’d left at Aisling’s house, gathered into a bag like I’d asked her to.

“Take it.” Aisling had shoved it into my hands before running off that day in the pub.

But I’d been so dizzy with my own realization I hadn’t looked inside. I’d shoved it into my backpack and forgotten about it.

I pushed the backpack and photo album aside and pulled the bag of Liath’s stuff in my lap, picking at the This Is Not a Plastic Bag label on the side in stamped paint.

I was leaving. I was.

So… what did it matter what was in Liath’s stuff. Right?

I fidgeted with the long cotton handles, running my finger along the opening.

If I looked inside, I might find something. And…

And that didn’t matter anyway because I was leaving.

I was leaving.

I dumped the bag upside down onto the bed before I could change my mind.

Out rolled a yellow toothbrush, a tortoiseshell brush with several dark hairs weaved through the bristles, her favorite faded black Radiohead t-shirt.

And… Liath’s pills.

I picked up the yellow bottle and rolled it between my fingers, the pills rattling in my hand like a bag of bones.

She’d been taking antidepressants, Aisling had said. Or really, she’d stopped taking them.

These must be them.

I popped the lid and shook a pill out into my palm.

White, round, and with an indented line across the middle .

I frowned.

I scooted off the bed and raced to my bathroom, pulling out my own pill bottle and shaking out a pill into my palm.

I stared at the two pills side by side.

Hers were supposed to be antidepressants.

So why did they look exactly like my antipsychotic pills?

I turned Liath’s pill bottle over so I could read the label.

They were prescribed to Liath Byrne by… Dr. Vale.

My skin began to prickle.

I didn’t realize Liath had been seeing the same therapist as me. I mean, it made sense seeing as he was also the college therapist.

Aisling had said something about Liath wanting to do deep memory revival therapy in her sessions.

What if… Liath had remembered something in her therapy session.

Clues that would lead to whoever abused her.

Or perhaps she even remembered who that person was.

But surely if Dr. Vale knew something about Liath’s disappearance, he would have told someone. The police.

But maybe… just maybe Dr. Vale didn’t know the significance of it.

Or.

Perhaps Dr. Vale wasn’t so innocent.

Maybe whoever had gotten to the police chief to make him deem Liath’s disappearance as a “runaway” had gotten to Dr. Vale, too.

Spurred on by my change of mind, I snatched my purse and ran for the door.

Before I left, I was going to find out what Dr. Vale knew.