Most parents would have called the police and spent day and night searching for their missing daughters. But Mom and Dad were certain Harper and Aria would return. When a week passed and that didn’t happen, Mom blamed Harper, committed to her long-held belief that her eldest daughter was hyperactive and out of control, determined to disrupt their family since the day she was born.
Sawyer had tried to work up the courage to tell her parents about Uncle Theo, but his threat of doing them harm stopped her every time. Without her parents, no matter how negligent, she would have no one. If not for Gramma being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and moving into their home months after her sisters ran off, Sawyer wasn’t sure she’d still be around. She imagined she might have taken her uncle’s life, or worse, her own.
Sawyer parked at the curb in front of Connor’s house. She climbed out of the car, and as she walked toward the house, she realized she hadn’t thought of Connor all day.
The door opened before she reached the welcome mat. “I knew you would come back,” he said.
“I’m here to collect my things.” She stepped inside and walked to the bedroom they had shared for eight months. She grabbed her duffel bag from the closet, opened it wide, and began stuffing it with her clothes and shoes.
“Please stay. That girl meant nothing.”
Sawyer turned toward Connor and looked him in the eye. “I should have moved out a long time ago.”
He stepped forward, reaching for her.
She raised her hands high to avoid his touch. Connor, she realized, had been nothing more than an experiment. Every rape victim reacted differently, but Sawyer had been left with an extreme aversion to being touched. Her therapists said she suffered from haphephobia. She had many of the symptoms, and things hadn’t been any different with Connor. The first time he’d kissed her, she’d felt as if she were on fire. Every touch burned her skin. The first time they’d had sex, she’d spent the rest of the night in the bathroom throwing up. She knew in her heart that she’d used him in an attempt to desensitize herself, also known as self-exposure, something she and her therapist often discussed.
Connor had backed off. He stood a few feet away, hands shoved into the front pockets of his pants. “I love you,” he said.
He’d never said the words before, and she was glad for that. She grabbed a tote bag that hung from a chair in the corner and took it with her into the bathroom. Connor stayed close, watching as she plucked toiletries from the shower, bathroom cabinets, and drawers.
“I only slept with her because—you know—you’ve been distant. I can’t remember the last time we made love.”
They had never made love. They had fucked. There was a big difference. She put the strap of the tote over her shoulder, walked back into the bedroom, picked up her duffel bag from the floor, then exited the bedroom and headed for the front door. It wasn’t until she stepped outside that she turned to face him.
His eyes pleaded.
She sighed, trying to think of what a normal person might say under the circumstances. “I’m not the girl for you, Connor. Not even close.”
“Stay,” he tried again. “We’ll talk it out.”
She couldn’t do this—deal with Connor, talk to him, set him straight. It would serve no purpose she could conceive of to tell him the truth—that being with him had been a mistake, and she didn’t love him. Hell, she hardly liked him. “My gramma passed away,” she said flatly. “I’m going to River Rock for her funeral. Please don’t call me again.”
She shut the door and walked away. The night air was warm and sticky as she put her things inside the trunk of her car. When she opened the car door, she noticed the same cat she’d seen earlier hiding behind her front tire. It was gray and white with black fur around its eyes.
She leaned over and grabbed the cat by the scruff before it could run off. Holding the animal close to her chest, she slid in behind the wheel and used her free hand to shut the door. The cat freaked out, clawed its way out of her hold, and jumped over her to the back seat.
Ouch! It had scratched her neck.
She released a long breath. What was she doing? She didn’t have time for a cat, and yet she couldn’t leave the animal to fend for itself. Aria would help her out. She turned on the ignition and drove off.
CHAPTER SIX
Sawyer sat in her car, parked outside a green, single-story, cookie-cutter house. She’d already shut off the engine and pulled the key from the ignition. Her neck stung where the cat had clawed her. She leaned over the seat to look for the cat, but it was hiding. She adjusted the rearview mirror to see a crisscross of bloody scratches on her chin and neck. Great.
For a long moment, she simply sat still and observed the house where both of her sisters lived. It was growing dark, but the lights were on, and she could see movement inside.
The house belonged to Harper and her husband, Nate. They had a boy, Lennon, fifteen, and a girl, Ella, ten. Aria lived in the garage, which sounded worse than it was since Nate was a contractor, and he’d fixed it up nice. There was a small kitchenette, lots of storage space, and plenty of light.
She could count the number of times on one hand she’d seen Harper since moving in with Connor. Her sister tended to treat her like one of her kids, hovering and smothering, which was one of the reasons Sawyer had been eager to move in with Connor.
Sawyer’s fingers turned white from holding on so tightly to the steering wheel. Her heart beat wildly within her chest. She’d caught Connor in bed with another woman. She’d found herself alone in a room with Kylie Hartford, murdered and lying in a pool of blood, eyes wide open. And Gramma Sally was dead.
And yet she’d managed to keep it together.
Until now.
All it had taken was sitting outside her sister’s house to feel the full breadth of her anxiety. All sorts of images floated around in her mind. She squeezed her eyes shut to stop the panic from taking hold.
She needed to calm down before knocking on the door. Heeding the advice she’d gotten from her therapist, she closed her eyes and imagined a long stretch of beach. She sank her toes under the warm sand, and when she opened her eyes again, she saw Connor’s slowly sinking dick.
Shit.
She blinked the vision away. No, she didn’t love Connor. But that didn’t stop his betrayal from making her gut ache, a mixture of anger and disappointment twisting and turning like clothes in a washing machine.
She got out, opened the trunk, and grabbed an old towel that had been there forever. She then opened the back door, and when the cat made a run for it, she grabbed hold, rolled it in the towel like a burrito, and rushed across the stone walkway with its perfectly manicured lawn and rows of tulips, which defined her older sister perfectly. She’d never been diagnosed, but it was clear to anyone who knew Harper that she suffered from OCD.
Her middle sister, Aria, wasn’t anything like Harper. Aria liked to pretend everything was okay. It seemed to Sawyer that all the horrible things that had happened to Aria had been tamped down, shoved beneath layers of false forgiveness and pent-up rage. Sawyer hated the thought of what might happen once the plug was pulled and Aria’s anger was let loose.
Bottom line was, terrible things had happened in River Rock.
Aria was convinced that something bad had happened to Harper too. Something worse than Uncle Theo and his friends, which was why Aria and Sawyer agreed to leave her alone and never talk about the past.