Page 118 of Haunt Me

I chew on my lip. She’s right. I don’t know how to answer her, so I don’t.

Eden: By the way, I finally told my dad all about you—us. And I told my sisters. They want to meet you.

Shock freezes me.

Meet me? What?

I get up and start pacing around the room. My hands are shaking so badly I drop my phone twice, so I sit back down. I start typing, still trembling.

Isaiah: What do you think?

Isaiah: Scratch that, what do youwant?

Eden: I want them to meet you too.

My phone is wrenched away from my hands as the massage crew gets in. I let them start working on me with a groan; after two shows back to back, I can barely move. The whole time the chiropractor tries to put my destroyed body back together, I think about Eden’s texts.

It takes me all of a second to decide: I will meet them.

If that’s what she wants, I’ll do it.

I am calling Skye and I am flying back to the States at the earliest possible moment. I know Eden did not ask me to do this right now, but the waiting would kill me. When the crew is gone, leaving me a wreck, but somehow feeling better than before at the same time, I pick up my phone to call Skye.

But I change my mind. There is someone else I need to call first.

I know I am way out of my depth here, and, for once, I am not too proud to admit that I can’t do this alone. I need reinforcements.

I call my mom and I just tell her that I need her. I have never done that in my life, just because I know that if I tell her that, she will drop everything to fly back home for me; and that’s exactlywhat she does. We decide that we will meet in Chicago—it makes more sense that way.

Then I call James and he books his flight while we are still on the phone. His flight to Athens. He is, and I quote, ‘coming to get me’. Whatever that means.

While I wait for my brother to descend upon me, I have two options: Just sit on my hands while my head quietly explodes, or go to the gym to blow some steam off.

The tabloids always love selling the story about ‘Issy Woo’s rock-hard abs’ and what my ‘workout secrets’ are, but there all lying. There are no secrets. All I do is go to the gym every day and work out until I stop feeling like I am ten feet underwater. I sweat until the pressure on my chest lets me breathe.

Working out is my therapy—my medicine.

It usually takes about two hours of high impact training for the anxiety to subside enough so that I can function again. I’m exhausted afterwards, but it beats taking the pills.

Today, I’m all kinds of shattered even before I head to the hotel’s gym, but I have no choice. I can’t sleep any more, and I need to see someone—preferably my boys. As I expected, they are at the gym already, pretending to lift. Jude, Miki and Skye.

In reality, they are in various states of unconsciousness. The minute they see me, they straighten up with this terrified expression on their faces, almost turning around to flee. But I don’t give them a chance to escape. I start yelling at them.

“Why did this happen?” I say between clenched teeth.

They go absolutely still.

“Someone say something!” It was supposed to be a scream, but it comes out as a broken howl. “Start. Talking. Now.” But no one speaks.

They just stand quietly and let me scream at them in my hoarse non-voice. All the pain pours out of me in this hotel gym, the harsh fluorescent lights revealing all the hollow angles of my face, all the ugliness of my despair. I don’t care. I just stand there and scream and scream, and they take it. They let me let it all out. And I do.

“Why couldn’t someone have said something?” I am almost screeching at this point, and I don’t even care. “You knew all this time who she was, what had happened to her, and you didn’t say a word! Not one word!” I swallow, tasting bile. “I get that everyone was supposed to know about it, about Eden’s story. I know youthought I knew—you took it for granted. It was supposedly old news. You’d all heard it a million times. But couldn’t someone just have repeated the facts, just in passing?” I am screaming by the end.

I get no answer. I didn’t expect one.

“Why did everyone have to be sofreaking discreetaround her?” I go on. “Not one single person wanted to talk about it every time she left the room?”

Jude shakes his head slightly.

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