Page 106 of The Love Bandits

So he does, and I do.

Damien seeks out Jake’s gaze. “Dale seemed pretty torn up about thinking something might have happened to you. You might want to reach out to him.”

Jake breaks their stare-off. “I can’t do that. I’d be incriminating Ryan.”

“Who did nothing but take a gift that was offered to him. No criminal charges would apply.”

“Identity theft. Pretending to be someone else.”

“I’m not going to try to talk you into it,” Damien says with a shrug. “You make your own decisions, but if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that your ghosts will keep haunting you unless you lay them to rest.”

“He’s still alive.” Jake says it a little urgently. Like he’s asking, not telling.

“For now,” Damien agrees. “But none of us are getting any younger.”

Jake nods but quickly changes the subject, asking for their read on whether I should tell Mrs. Rosings about the other stolen jewels.

Damien shrugs. “Might as well. Maybe she can scare Nina into coughing up the other one…if she has it. Of course, we’d have to go through the trouble of stealing it again, but at this point we just need to know where it is.” He falls silent for a second, looking off into the distance, in the direction of the rolling mountains, barely illuminated by a sliver of moon. “What are the chances your boss will know if you give him the fake? Mrs. Rosings still hasn’t figured it out.”

“Presuming she’s not the one who took it from the box in the first place,” I put in, Damien acknowledging the point with a nod.

Jake swallows. “He’d know. Joe does other fakes for him. There’s a…signature of sorts.”

“Well, that’s inconvenient,” Nicole says with a sigh. “But we still have a week. We can manage this.”

Later, Claire and Declan join us at the fire. I’m curious about where Rosie’s been—she’s not the sort of person to fade into thenight—but I don’t ask, and they don’t say, and suddenly it’s late, the dark nearly shifting into light. Claire and Declan go home. Nicole and Damien go upstairs, and Jake and I stay out later than any of them, even after the fire fades to embers. He douses it with sand, then gives me his hand. I let him pull me up from my chair.

“Thank you for believing in me,” he says, when I’m standing inches from him, his hand resting on my hip.

“I didn’t,” I admit, feeling guilty about it.

“That’s what it felt like to me earlier,” he says, sweeping my hair away from my face. “But you did believe in me. If you’d genuinely thought I was lying about everything, you wouldn’t have gone to that house with me. You would have thought of an excuse to put it off until Nicole or Damien got back. But you didn’t. You went with me because you hoped I’d have an explanation.”

I consider this, then nod in acknowledgment. I needed him to have an explanation, because what Damien had told me had broken something inside of me.

“There’s something I need to show you.”

He leads me inside and upstairs to his room—hisoriginalroom—and removes something from the back of the closet. I instantly recognize it as the bag that I retrieved from his Airbnb. I’ve been thinking of that bag, wondering what it could contain.

“You didn’t look at this,” he says. “I know you didn’t. But I want to show you.” He grins at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “And if you tell anyone else, I’ll claim you planted it.”

“You’re building this up to the point where anything will be a disappointment,” I say.

He laughs, then nods to the bed, and we sit next to each other, our thighs pressed together. The bag is sitting next to us. It’s not enough, though, so I turn toward him and climb onto hislap, facing him. He smiles at me, like he’s not surprised but is very much pleased. “It’s not a particularly funny story, hellcat.”

“It’s yours, and I want it. Not everything in life needs to be funny.”

A corner of his mouth lifts. “But it helps if you can find humor in everything.”

He upends the bag onto the mattress without ceremony. A small, worn teddy bear falls out, one of the eyes crusted-over plastic, like the bear has aged the way an actual bear might.

“Is there something inside of it?” I ask, thrown.

“No,” he says, laughing. “It’s not stuffed with cocaine or the codes to bank safes. It’s exactly what it seems to be, and I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. I know it’s really fucking weird for a grown-ass man to carry around a teddy bear everywhere he goes. Especially one that looks like that. I’d feel more dignified if it were Paddington.”

Something twists inside of me, and I remember a few of the things he’s told me about his past—puzzle pieces thrown out with pretended carelessness. How his mother left them. How he and Ryan never knew their father…

He swallows. “This is…” He swallows again, and even though I already chose to believe him, any iota of doubt that might have been left in me is obliterated by the look on his face. “I don’t like being locked in because when we were four, our mother locked us into a motel room by the beach in Jersey and left. We didn’t know how to unlock the door. So we waited for her, and we ate the gummy bears and Goldfish she left with us, and the only thing we had left was this damn teddy bear, only one for the two of us. She told us not to make any noise, because it would get her into trouble, so we didn’t.”

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