Page 154 of Dare To Live

Miles shakes his head. “Making clothes is your thing.”

“You can handle a pair of scissors, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can make yourself useful.”

Miles is silent for thirty seconds, and then his mouth curls. “Fine, I’ll help you make your dress.”

He doesn’t feel it’s safe. Has this been triggered from what he relived yesterday, or is it something darker? I never really thought about what reliving the day Kellan died might bring up. Concerns over us all being here with an accomplice to murder lurking in our midst? A trauma response for self-preservation and a sense of danger?

I don’t remind him that I know how to take care of myself now. That I can handle a fight.

Being here with me is important to him. Whatever the reason driving him, I have a feeling that his need to be in here with me is more for himself than my protection.

Chapter 86

Eli

“You’re in my way.”

Garrett takes a step back so I can move past him and pull the dust sheet off the sculpture I last looked at ten years ago.

“You have to question why they left everything mostly untouched.”

I glance over my shoulder at his words. “There was a murder on the grounds. They’ll have gone into a lockdown protocol of some sort. Closed the doors, not quite thrown away the key, but close enough, and waited for all the media attention to die down.”

“Why do you think they decided to reopen?”

“Are you kidding me? Churchill Bradley was the number one private school. They had over a ninety-nine percent acceptance rate for seniors applying to Harvard, Stanford, MIT. The money donated by parents to this place, over and above student fees, were in the millions every year. My dad must have handed over more than twenty million during the years I was here. And he wasn’t even the richest parent.”

“You think it’s for the money, then?”

“Of course, it is. The place has been sitting empty for ten years. I bet if we looked into it, the board tried to sell it a few times and got no takers. It’s probably been costing them money for the last ten years. It might not have been open, but it will still have had overheads. What else can they do but reopen and try and make their investment back?”

“Does it bother you?”

I put down the chisel I was studying and turn to face him. “It’s just a bunch of buildings. It wasn’t the school that killed Kellan. It was the fucked-up behavior of the students inside it that was the problem.” And the part I don’t add is that I include myself in that statement.

Hefting up a file, I turn to the sculpture.

“Why are you here, anyway? I thought you did computer science with Kellan?”

“I did. Ivan and Miles don’t want you and Arabella to be alone, though.”

“And you drew the short straw?”

He laughs. “No. I just asked myself WWKD.”

“WWKD?” I run my fingers over one of the monster’s wings, finding the rough spots I need to smooth.

“What would Kellan do? And the answer is that he’d be here annoying you.”

I get to work on the marble. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

“I know, but you saw the state of Miles last night. He needs this for his own peace of mind.”

I give a grunt in response. I can’t really argue with him. Miles had been a mess.

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