Page 145 of The Love Haters

I MADE ITback to Key West in an hour and fifteen minutes, which is thirty minutes faster than Google thought possible. That’s the upside of going against a mass evacuation, I guess. My side of the highway was totally empty, and the cops had other things to do.

I sped, and I ran red lights, and, to be honest, I called Cole.

“Ace Hutcheson,” he said when he answered.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I knew it was you. But I’m trying it out.”

“I think you should go with Boots and Saddles.”

“You were eavesdropping!”

“Of course I was. We all were.”

“Itoldyou Hutch was going to beat me up.”

“Youwantedhim to beat you up.”

Cole thought about it. “Maybe that’s true.”

“I hope you got it out of your system.”

“I think, actually, maybe I did.”

I was getting close to the marina. I needed to get to the point. “Listen,” I said. “Did you say something weird to Hutch that night?”

“Defineweird.”

“Did you talk to him about me?”

“I thought you said you were eavesdropping.”

“I missed the end because I was helping Sullivan throw up.”

Cole paused. “Yes. At the end, he asked me about you. He wanted to know what you could possibly have been thinking to go along with all my lies.”

I felt my core clench up. “What did you tell him?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell him it was for Rue’s sake—because he still doesn’t know about Rue.”

“I repeat: What did you tell him?”

“I told him it was all to save your job.”

“Myjob?”

“Yeah. So you could do the ‘Day in the Life,’ and impress Sullivan, and not get fired.”

“But we’d already done the filming by then!”

“I told him you were afraid he’d revoke his permission.”

“You—what?”

“It was the best I could do. I was thinking fast, okay?”

“But I wasn’t even going to upload it anyway.”

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