Page 80 of Chasing Your Ghost

Noah looked away, his jaw tightening. “I don’t like her,” he whispered back, at least caring enough not to let Ella hear him. “That hasn’t changed.”

Riley threw her hands up in frustration. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she hissed. “That girl is perfectly nice.”

He scoffed. “Ella is superficial and selfish. She always has been.”

Riley stared at her stepbrother, not understanding how on earth he’d gotten that idea of her. She’d only known Ella for a day, but it was already evident to her that she was not at all how Noah was describing her. She looked to Chris for help, but he lifted his shoulders in a shrug and said, “He’s not wrong.”

“Explain,” Riley demanded, her arms crossing over her chest as her anger grew.

“For one, she gets her nails painted every single week without fail,” Noah said. “And that includes the weeks that Asher has been missing. For another, she also apparently had time for her yoga classes, but not for the search parties everyone else made sure to be at.”

“Just because she was going to a yoga class that day we bumped into her outside the ballet studio doesn’t mean she was going to them when Asher first went missing,” Riley argued quietly.

“Maybe, but I know for a fact that she had her nails done only a few days after he disappeared,” Noah retorted. “I saw her in a coffee shop with her gran, and she was going on and on about how pretty the color was, like she didn’t even care that her best friend was missing.”

Riley had to admit that what he was saying sounded pretty bad, but she also knew that Ella cared a lot about Asher. Anybody who couldn’t see that had to be blind. “If she didn’t care about Asher, do you think she’d be helping us right now?” she pointed out.

“I’m not saying she doesn’t care about him,” he said. “I’m saying she doesn’t care about him as much as she should. How could she if she was still going to her weekly nail appointment but didn’t help us hand out missing person posters?”

Riley didn’t have an answer for that, and she hated to admit that her stepbrother might have had a point. Still, she didn’t think it was as simple as he was making it out to be. But she knew it would be useless to keep arguing, so she let out a disappointed exhale and turned away from Noah and Chris.

Her eyes landed on the small table in the corner of the room that housed records on its shelf and a turntable on top of it. Ignoring the grumpy and frustrating men at her back, Riley approached the table and began looking through the records on display, knowing almost immediately that they belonged to Ella and not her parents.

“Here we go,” Ella chirped when she returned with a tray of coffees for everyone. “Riley, you’ve got sugar and milk in yours. Chris, you have milk only, and Noah, I made yours black.”

Noah took his coffee with sugar and milk, so Riley had to suppress a chuckle when she saw his unimpressed frown.

“Like my soul, I’m guessing?” he asked.

“I didn’t realize you possessed one of those,” Ella quipped with a straight face, and Riley couldn’t hold in her laughter any longer.

“Solid burn,” Chris praised, despite his own negative feelings about the woman who’d just insulted his friend.

“I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that you’re really into Taylor Swift,” Riley said as her fingers glided over Ella’s small vinyl collection.

There were records from other artists and bands, but she owned every single Taylor Swift album on vinyl, including both the original and Taylor Swift’s re-recorded versions of Fearless and Red. They took up more than half of the small shelf under the turntable.

“Tay Tay is basically my religion,” Ella replied.

“I’m more of a Guns N’ Roses girl myself, but I can respect that.”

“That makes one of us,” Noah muttered. “Ella has the taste of a prepubescent teenage girl.”

Riley sighed. Whatever softness her stepbrother had started to show toward Ella the day before hadn’t stuck around for very long. Though he hadn’t made any more comments implying she didn’t care about Asher or that she was to blame for his disappearance—at least not to her face—he’d had plenty to say that day about anything from the lack of soda in her fridge to her (in his opinion) terrible taste in just about everything.

Ella sent a nasty glare his way, and Riley knew Noah had hit a sore spot. “Oh, I’m sorry that a woman who won twelve Grammys and is a lyrical genius just isn’t sophisticated enough for you.”

Noah blinked at her, hopefully realizing that the woman had made a very valid point, but if he had realized he was being a condescending, judgmental ass, he didn’t let on. “You’re right,” he said with a nod. “Your taste in music is way too unsophisticated for my liking.”

“Noah,” Riley hissed.

“It’s a good thing I don’t give a rat’s ass about your opinion then,” Ella snarled.

“Sure,” Noah replied sarcastically. “Keep telling yourself that, Montgomery.”

The muscles in Ella’s jaw jumped, her teeth probably hurting with how hard she was grinding them together. “You know what, Noah? Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

Riley and Chris exchanged a wide-eyed look. This was not how things were meant to be going. They were meant to be working as a team, not tearing out each other’s throats.

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