Page 122 of South Beach Bodyguards

For half a second she looked terrified. But then she relaxed. “She’s at Publix. You can’t tell her anything right now. Besides, you wouldn’t do me like that, would you? My mom is fucking scary, you know that.”

She was. That’s why it was a valid threat. “I still could, you know, if you don’t stop telling me that I’m an idiot for still caring about my boyfriend who disappeared under mysterious circumstances.” Everyone seemed to forget that little fact. “Let’s see how you would feel living in limbo.”

Zoe chewed her lip and despite her wearing sunglasses, I could see she was mentally debating with herself whether she should argue with me or not. I knew full well she thought that if Max had been killed his body would have turned up by now. But we lived in South Florida. It took about a minute for a body to disintegrate. I had thought about it a million times. Visualized it. Kept myself awake at night imagining all the horrible things that might have been done to Max.

“I wouldn’t like living in limbo at all,” she finally said. “But I love you, Mandy, and I don’t want you to be making decisions for the rest of your life based on what may or may not have happened to Max. If you want to make a baby with Alejandro, it should be because you think he would make a beautiful, kind, intelligent baby. Not because he’s Max’s brother. Because that’s just holding you back in the past and not allowing you to move forward.”

I sighed, frustrated. No one ever understood where I was coming from. “I am moving forward! That’s why I am having a baby solo. I’m tired of waiting around to meet this mythical man I’m going to fall in love with and marry. He’s not real.” He was dead. That’s what I really wanted to say. Max was dead. He had to be or he would have found a way to come home.

“Then just go to a sperm bank. You don’t need Alejandro.”

She was right. I didn’t. It didn’t matter. It was me holding on to the idea of what my future was supposed to be. I was stubborn though and not about to admit anything I didn’t want to. “You want me to play Russian roulette with my child’s DNA?”

Zoe just snorted. “Are you kidding? Everyone is playing Russian roulette with DNA. You don’t know anything about Alejandro’s background. People have all sorts of sneaky shit hiding in their genes. Cancer, diabetes, alcoholism, schizophrenia. You don’t know unless you do a full screening.”

She had a way of making me feel like I was hopelessly naïve. “That’s reassuring, thanks.”

“All I’m saying is love and reproduction are a gamble. You didn’t even know Max as well as you thought you did.”

My body stiffened. I was getting tired of her hinting about Max but never really coming out and saying what she was thinking. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh my God,” she murmured, lifting her sunglasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I never wanted to do this. To have to say this.”

Now she had me completely bewildered and more than a little annoyed. “What is going on?” I sipped my orange juice and made a face. It was going warm in the mid-morning heat. We were under an umbrella but that didn’t mean anything other than the sun wasn’t in my eyes. I wished it were. I wished that I was blinded and couldn’t see Zoe because I had a really bad feeling that whatever was going to come out of her mouth was not going to make me happy.

“Max hit on me,” she blurted out. “More than once.”

I went completely still. I looked at her in shock. “What? Why would you say something like that?” Max was a flirt, just like Alejandro was. “Seriously, how dare you say that to me, now, after all these years? It’s bullshit, Zo, and you know it.”

Why did everyone want to take everything away from me? Why did everyone insist that I was a fucking fool? It made me furious. She was supposed to be my best friend and here she was telling me that for years she had allegedly kept a secret that my boyfriend had hit on her? I seethed, waiting for her answer.

“I’m not lying, Mandy, I swear. You know how there is harmless flirting and then there is, like, for real flirting? This was for real. He wanted me to go home with him when you were on tour.” She pushed her breakfast plate away like she couldn’t stand the sight of it. “God, my stomach hurts. I never wanted to tell you this.”

“So why are you?” I felt like I was out of my body, like I had that day when Max didn’t show up and no one could find him. When I got the phone call that he had missed Father’s Day and no one had seen him in three days and I texted him a hundred times and called and asked around and nothing. No response and I had felt like I was watching it all from far away.

Now I felt like I did on stage, when the lights shone right in my eyes and I did everything based on muscle memory. It was an odd sensation, like being yanked back out of myself, the shadows and the light swapping out with each other until reality was hazy and nebulous. Zoe was breaking what remained of my old life. She was warping it and shattering it and making it all feel like a dream, like five years of my life had been a lie, when I knew they weren’t.

“Because you won’t admit that Max wasn’t a perfect guy or a perfect boyfriend all the time. And if you won’t admit that you won’t be able to ever be with someone else because you’re comparing them to an ideal that isn’t even real.”

I was hurt. I trusted Zoe to not be just another person who thought I was an idiot. “Nice to know my oldest friend thinks I’m living in a fantasy world.” I pushed my chair back and stood up. “Thanks for brunch.”

“Where are you going? Don’t leave, come on.”

“I’ll talk to you later.” I was too pissed off to stay and just splash around in the pool. That held zero appeal. “I need to go to the store. My moving day is tomorrow and I need towels and sheets.” That was true, but mostly I wanted to get away from her.

“Miranda, wait.” She stood up and started to follow me but I held my hand out to stop her. Rushing, I let myself out through the side gate and hurried to my car.

Once I was down the street, I pulled over and took a few deep breaths and tried to calm my shaking nerves. As angry as I was, I knew why everyone thought I was a moron. Because they didn’t know what I knew.

They didn’t know I knew everything about Max. Including his carefully thought-out plan to leave Miami and create a new identity.

The reason I knew he was dead was because he hadn’t followed the plan. He hadn’t contacted me the way we had pre-arranged.

But I couldn’t tell the police any of that. So they didn’t believe he had been in danger and that was why I went around and around in my head, the girl who can’t leave the past alone. The past was murky and unresolved.

And Alejandro had answers I wanted.

He knew his brother better than anyone. Maybe even better than me.

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