Page 63 of Possession

What I needed was Grace.

For years, I banked that need. In the summers, I took her classes. Anything she offered, I signed up for. If she recognized me from one year to the next, she never indicated so. Plenty of the students returned to the program, and she focused solely on sharing her gift.

Even in the off-season, I kept tabs on her. She was a pampered Marblehead townie, and I wasn’t good enough to shine her shoes. The car I’d scrimped to save for hadn’t been used only as transportation to my part-time job. It had also been about Grace. To say she became my obsession would be like saying glass could be used to shield as much as to reveal.

All along, I’d planned for the day I would stop watching Grace and we would be together. Until that door was closed to me forever.

I’d never expected Grace herself to be the one to blow it wide open again.

“Blake?”

Her voice forcibly ripped me out of the past. “Yeah, sorry.” I jerked my fingers over the trackpad, closing the photo of me and a dead woman. And inadvertently clicked on something so much worse.

The picture was as clear as the other one was grainy. This one showed a man in a dark suit moving up a driveway to a house. Beside him was a black Range Rover. His entire bearing betrayed his irritation. From the length of his stride and his pinched brow, he wasn’t pleased at being interrupted in what likely the middle of the day from the amount of sunlight.

The man was me, the driveway belonged to Grace’s grandmother’s beach house, and the date imprinted in the corner was the day before Annabelle Stuart died.

Chapter 16

Blake

“You.” Grace’s voice wobbled. “Another picture of you.”

There was no denying it. How could I? I was in living color, filling the damn screen.

That was Annabelle, always fucking me over. This time, she’d even managed it from beyond the grave.

“I can explain.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can. I don’t doubt that for a moment. The great Blake Carson always has a reasonable explanation for the ridiculous.” Grace gripped the edge of the counter and stared off into the distance. “The bigger question is will you even bother, or will you just fob me off with some morsel as you have every other time I’ve tried to dig at the truth?”

I hated that she was right. Hated more that I’d have to do it again this time, if I intended to keep her close. And I had to, because her safety was paramount.

That I’d wanted her for so long I couldn’t imagine my life without her now that I’d finally, finally gotten a taste…well, that was secondary.

I sure as hell hoped it was secondary.

“You won’t believe me, but I can assure you that I never intended for things to go like this.”

“Like what? Me squatting in your house, demanding my job back after you fired me? Or maybe you mean you never expected to get involved with me after you were clearly somehow involved with my grandmother. Something you refuse to elaborate on.”

“Refuse is a bit strong.”

“You know what’s strong? My willpower, or else I’d probably grab the lapels of your fancy shirt and demand some damn answers.” She slapped her hand down on the counter beside the laptop and it jumped, displacing my hand.

“Did it ever occur to you that I might not just be trying to hide things from you? That I could have genuine reasons for not elaborating? Ones that have nothing at all to do with keeping you in the dark, and everything to do with?—”

Just keeping you, period.

She stared at me, not speaking. Her eyes were bluer than I’d ever seen them, her hair somehow wild in its delicacy.

For an instant, I saw Annabelle in her face. Their features were more different than alike, their coloring closer to opposite than the same, but that knowing, shrewd expression was all her grandmother’s.

“I first met your grandmother as a teenager. After I met you, actually.”

“Met me? What are you talking about? You never met me back then.”

I moved my fingers over the trackpad, hoping that Annabelle would have more evidence to the contrary. More pictures had been taken that day at the Beacon school, and I hoped she’d kept them. But as I scrolled through the list of photos on the thumb drive, my eagerness dimmed.

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