Page 6 of Keep Me In Your Heart

Before he can crowd me again, I turn and run toward the door. I step right over my shattered phone on the floor, turning back to pick up what’s left of it before bolting out the door I came in. The rain is still going strong as I stop and glance around for Aaron’s car. He’s parked just near the road, and I take off in a sprint toward him.

He’s giving me an impatient expression and is clearly stressed as I tear open the passenger side door and climb in.

“What the fuck, Sylvie?” he shouts.

“Just drive,” I mutter breathlessly.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get yourself killed.”

“There was no one in there,” I lie. “I just dropped my phone, so I don’t have your pictures.”

“You’re fucking unhinged,” he mumbles under his breath as he drives toward the road.

My heart is still hammering in my chest. As we reach the main road, I glance back at the manor in the distance, watching it grow smaller and smaller in my rearview.

At least I made it out of there unharmed.

And I’m never going back.

Chapter Two

“You could have gone to jail,” Aaron mutters. He’s sitting on the bed facing away from me, his elbows on his knees.

Rolling my eyes, I drop onto the bed and pick up my laptop. “Stop being so dramatic. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure no one saw you?” he asks in a panic.

I drop my hands in a huff. “I told you no one saw me. Why do you care so much?”

“I have my image to worry about, Sylvie. I’m sorryyoudon’t care about anything, but I do, and if I’m going to run for office someday, I don’t need a criminal record in Scotland holding me back because my impulsive and careless girlfriend thinks she can justdoanything.”

“Technically, Icando anything,” I mutter to myself as I open my laptop.

“Not without consequences, Sylvie.”

I click on the cloud drive on my laptop and immediately scan through the photos. There at the bottom of the array of pictures of the Scottish countryside and Edinburgh’s Royal Mile are the photos of the dusty old typewriter I nearly sacrificed my life for.

Aaron is still droning on and on about my actions andconsequences and how it’s not technically my fault that my parents didn’t raise me with any discipline.

Same shit, different day.

I decide not to show him the photos.

Instead, I open an internet browser. I typeBarclay Manor.

Immediately, a photo pops up on a basic wiki page about the manor, the town, the family, and its history.

The auto-generated questions below list:Does someone still live at Barclay Manor?

So I click on it.

“Are you even listening to me?” he asks. I glance up from my laptop.

“My parents were incompetent. I’m not going to disagree with you,” I reply noncommittally. He’s absolutely right. They were incredibly incompetent as parents. It’s not that they’re stupid people. In fact, they are brilliant and could hold a steady conversation for hours about the contextual theory of Van Gogh through his Parisian era, but they generally sucked as a mom and dad.

They were never afraid of being so bold to explain to me that parental love was inane and subconscious, which wasn’t always the warmest consolation as a child. Biologically, my mom loved me—because she had to.

Luckily for her and my father, they are both geniuses, and that talent paid for modern conveniences like full-time childcare, which made raising me nearly effortless.

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