Page 110 of The Risk

With a heavy breath, she reaches for the phone again. “Eric, hey. I told you I don’t have time for—” Her sentence comes to an abrupt halt. When she speaks again, concern has softened her voice. “What do you mean you don’t know where you are?”

Brooks and I exchange a wary look.

“Slow down, slow down. You’re not making any sense. Where are you?” There’s a long silence. “Okay, stay put,” she finally says, and I swear her voice cracks a little. She blinks rapidly, as if fighting tears. “I’ll be right there.”

26

JAKE

“THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR DOING THIS.”

Brenna’s voice is barely audible, and she’s sitting directly beside me. The rain is nothing more than drizzle now, the brunt of the storm having finally blown past us, but beyond the windshield, several streetlights still aren’t functioning. I’m behind the wheel of the Mercedes, because Brooks had too much to drink. He’s in the backseat, though, after insisting on tagging along.

“I mean it,” she stresses. “You guys didn’t have to come. You could’ve just let me borrow the car.”

I glance over darkly. “Really, and let you drive in a storm—”

“It’s not storming anymore,” she protests.

“—in a storm,” I repeat, “to track down your ex-boyfriend?”

At least that’s what I understood of her objective, when, in a panic, she begged to borrow Brooks’s car. Apparently she dated this Eric dude in high school and now he’s in trouble.

“What kind of trouble is he in, anyway?” I demand.

“I’m not sure.”

I give her a sharp look.

She seems to be grinding her molars. To dust, from the looks of it. “Drugs,” she finally mutters.

“What kind of drugs?” I’m not purposely trying to interrogate her, but I do need to know exactly what we’re walking into.

Rather than respond, she gazes down at her phone to examine the map. Two fingers pinch the screen to zoom in. “Okay, so he said he can see a street sign—Forest something,” she says absently. “Hethinksit’s Forest Lane.”

“That narrows it down,” I say sarcastically. “There are probably dozens of Forest Lanes or Streets or Avenues around here.”

She scans the map. “Four,” she corrects. “One is about ten minutes away, the others are upstate. I think it’s probably this one near Nashua. That’s closest to Westlynn.”

I blow out a breath. “So we’re driving to New Hampshire?”

“Is that okay?”

I don’t answer. But I do click on the turn signal and get in the right lane to be ready for the I-93 ramp. “Who is this guy, Brenna?” I grumble. “He sounds sketchy.”

“Super sketchy,” Weston agrees from the backseat.

“I told you, we dated in high school.”

“And this requires you to drop everything and rescue his ass?”

Bitter? Who’s bitter?

“Eric and I went through a lot together. And yes, his life has gone off the rails, but—”

“Off the rails how?” Before she can even answer, I pull over abruptly, flicking on the emergency signal. I draw a loud honk from the motorist who was behind us, but everyone else goes around.

“What are you doing?” she demands.

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