Page 24 of Forget Me Not
“You don’t need to tell me your whole life story or anything,” he continues. “Places like this don’t exactly do things by the book. We’ve employed plenty of people with shady pasts—”
“I don’t have a shady past,” I snap, suddenly defensive as I lift my head.
“I didn’t mean to imply that you do,” he says, raising his hands in mock surrender. “You just gotta give me something.”
He looks at me, his eyes puppy-round, and I realize, at last, that it’s a fair question. These people hardly know anything about me, yet they’ve graciously invited me to live in their home. They’re saving me this summer, whether they know it or not, and it feels like I owe them at least a kernel of truth.
“I’m a journalist,” I say at last, deciding, in a flash, to just comeclean. That I don’t want to deal with an entire summer of lies, tiptoeing around my only coworker and friend. “I quit two months ago to go freelance, but I haven’t been having the best of luck.”
I look down to find my fingers pulling at the beer label, little wet rips scattered in the grass.
“I don’t really know why I kept it from him,” I continue. “Mitchell, I mean. I guess I’m embarrassed I haven’t published anything in a while. Plus, I didn’t want him to think I’d be poking around or something. Snooping through their stuff.”
I feel another flash of heat on my cheeks; the irony of Marcia’s diary sitting on my bed, concealed in the sheets, not at all lost on me.
“People can be wary of journalists,” I add, clocking the way Liam is nodding slowly, his eyes squinting in the glare of the sun.
“Right,” he says at last. “They can be a little paranoid.”
“Paranoid,” I echo, nudging him to go on.
“About their privacy. I guess you can say they’re… protective. Of their privacy.”
“Of course,” I say, that word,privacy,cutting like an insect sting, venomous and sharp, as Marcia’s diary pulses through my mind like a migraine. My blatant violation of keeping it to read.
“I wouldn’t mention that,” he says, and I’m suddenly confused, wondering how he could possibly know I’ve been reading her diary, when I realize he’s not talking about the diary. Of course he’s not. He’s still talking about my job. “I mean, I wouldn’t tell them what you do.”
“Okay…” I say, slightly perplexed about why my profession would be such an issue. I suppose, in recent years, that plenty of people have become distrustful of the news, wary of the media, and I start to wonder if maybe I was right to hide it from them.
Maybe Marcia and Mitchellarethe suspicious kind and Liam is simply saving me the headache.
“I won’t mention it,” I add, feeling a swell of gratitude at having someone to look out for me here. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Sure thing,” he says as he turns toward the water, his eyes trained on a spot in the distance. For a second, it looks like he’s about to say something else, his mouth parting only an inch, but then he shakes his head, a gentle twitch like he changed his mind, before bringing the bottle back to his lips and downing the rest in one fell swoop.
CHAPTER 15
I’m back in the guesthouse a few hours later, the gush of cold air cooling my skin and a yellow Post-it Note stuck to my finger.
“Wi-Fi,” Liam repeated when I asked for it earlier, eyes on the ground as he packed up the basket.
“Yeah,” I said before hesitating a second, turning toward him. “You do have internet here, don’t you?”
“Sure,” he replied, rubbing his hand against the back of his head. “But the modem is in the main house. The signal’s gonna be weak in your cabin, if it even reaches at all. I can’t promise how good it’ll be.”
“I’d still like to try,” I said. “If you don’t mind. I can’t just be totally cut off out here.”
“No, of course not,” he had said, laughing like the suggestion was crazy. “I’ll grab it for you on our way back up.”
I walk over to my desk now and stick the note onto the surface, opening my laptop and tapping the keys. Then I look down at thepaper, an alphabet soup of letters and numbers. The network and password are scribbled in pen, the kind that comes programmed when you first set it up. It doesn’t surprise me—Marcia and Mitchell don’t strike me as the kind of people who would update their password; I kind of doubt, based on their lifestyle, that they would even know how—so I tap on the network and type the password in, the wheel spinning slowly as I wait until that familiar little icon appears in the corner.
I’m connected, but barely. There’s a single bar there, but it’s better than nothing.
I grab my phone next, doing the same thing until a bar pops up in the corner there, too. Immediately, it starts emitting the faintestding,over and over, the sound of incoming texts flooding the cabin as increasingly more concerned questions start to trickle in from Ryan.
Picked up your mail and caught your tenant throwing a party. That didn’t take long.
Are you getting my texts? I’m green for some reason.
