Page 140 of The Ruse

I nodded. Leaning close to her ear so no one else would hear, I said, “Last I heard, her parents are number twelve in the United States for wealthiest families.”

“So not quite as rich as the Hastings,” Elyse said, a playful smile on her lips.

“Not quite.” I laughed, grateful for the slight break in the tension.

Footsteps sounded on the floor behind us, and when I craned my neck to see who it was, I found myself looking at the brown-haired, brown-eyed girl I’d last seen face to face in The Italian Amigos eight months ago. A whoosh of nerves flooded my chest and my hands instantly felt tingly when our gazes met.

But she was here. She was right in front of me. The nightmare really was over.

“Hi, Bailee.” My voice shook slightly as I stood to give her a hug.

“Asher!” she said, rushing forward and wrapping her arms around me.

And once I had her in my arms, I was instantly taken back to the time when we’d been putting on our ruse.

A lot of time may have passed and things had changed a lot since then, but she still felt and smelled the same.

Well, almost felt the same. She was slightly softer—probably a product of becoming a mom. And while my heart had started racing every time we’d gotten close that last month we’d been together, I didn’t have the same reaction to her now.

Those kinds of butterflies only happened with Elyse these days.

We pulled away from the embrace, and Bailee seemed to noticed Elyse.

“Hi,” Bailee said, walking over to Elyse to shake her hand. “I was told you’re the one who found my journal.”

“Yeah,” Elyse said, glancing at me as she shook Bailee’s hand—like she wasn’t sure exactly what she was supposed to say or how much I might have told Bailee about her in our brief phone conversation earlier.

“And I guess you probably read it, too.” Bailee scrunched up her nose, like she was embarrassed about what she’d written.

Elyse nodded. “People thought Asher killed you so…”

“Yeah, I’d probably read it, too,” Bailee admitted. “And man, I was an idiot, wasn’t I?”

Elyse and I looked at each other, not sure how to answer that.

Bailee just laughed. “Sorry, I haven’t been around people for so long that I’m super socially awkward right now.”

“It’s okay,” I said. And then, since she’d brought it up and I was crazy curious about what she’d actually been up to for the better part of a year, I asked, “So we know what happened before you disappeared, but what happened after that?”

“It’s actually not super exciting,” Bailee said, taking a seat on the chair diagonal from us. “Basically, a lot of sitting around in a cabin and then a house by myself.”

42

ELYSE

I studiedAsher as Bailee told us about what she’d been up to since her little disappearing act.

Did he seem like he still had feelings for her?

Was he looking like he wanted to pick up where they’d left things and be best buddies again?

Or was he upset that she’d just disappeared and left him to deal with the fallout?

I’d read her journal and had felt the confusion and desperation she had felt as she’d written her entries, so I didn’t think she’d even really thought about how it would affect Asher. Because she was never actually in love with him, she probably didn’t even consider that people would think she’d been killed in a crime of passion.

But I was a bit protective of him and hoped that she knew just how bad her choices had made things for him.

“I was just kind of stuck in the cabin for the first two months and had no idea what was going on,” Bailee said. “I left my phone and laptop and basically everything else in my dorm room as you probably found out. There was no internet. No TV channels. No connection to the outside world, really. It honestly felt like I went back in time to like the early nineteen hundreds.”

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