Page 30 of Mistaken Identity
“What?” I could hear the confusion in her voice.
“I didn’t know. About that night. About you.”
She went so still that I was forced to look over at her, and what I saw had nausea once again swelling in my belly.
“You didn’t…there’s no way you couldn’t know!” she hissed.
I scrubbed at my face. “I have a buddy who’s really good with computers.”
“I know who he is,” she snarled, pissed as hell.
She had a reason to be.
“He was snooping. Because of that douchebag Kory. He wanted to know his story, and so he got to looking into him, and found out that he was borderline stalking you. Looking you up obsessively on the internet multiple times a day. Making sure that he was always put on the same shifts as you. It concerned him, so he looked further. And he told me today what happened to you. But at first, he thought I knew, too. But I swear to you, on my life, I didn’t know.”
When I finally got the courage to look up at her again, she was crying silent tears, staring at me like I’d just shocked the holy hell out of her. “What…how? You walked in. He was restraining me. I was fucking crying. He had his hand over my mouth!”
Bile surged up my throat, and it was a very real possibility that I was about to throw up in the sand.
“I saw your hair, and I freaked the fuck out and left. I didn’t look at anything but your hair,” I promised.
There was no mistaking her hair.
It always drew my eyes first, it was so beautiful.
Never once had I looked at her and not immediately been drawn to her wild, curly hair.
“I…” She paused. “I don’t…”
“It’s what I see first, always,” I told her. “I see your hair first. No exceptions. That was why, that night, when I saw your hair…”
“You saw my hair, and someone on top of me, and you left,” she murmured so quietly I could barely hear her over the crashing sea.
“I was wrecked,” I admitted. “Once upon a time, I thought you’d be mine. I thought I could convince you…”
But that was the day that I realized that I would never call her mine.
“Jesus,” she said. “All these years I blamed you.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
I knew she had.
She had a reason to.
I should’ve protected her.
I’d been there.
I’d left her there to her fate.
“Was it Jordie?” I asked.
She mewled, and I wanted so badly to pull her into my arms. “Yeah.”
“Fuck.”
Eight
