6
I turned back to my sister to tell her she could make the drink order while I went and hid in the bathroom—okay, I wasn’t going to tell her that part—but she was nowhere to be found.
Great.
I considered going to one of the other bars, but I didn’t know exactly where they were. Besides, it was a Friday night and the place was packed. It would take me an hour to get back to our table with all the drinks, by which time the girls would have probably disappeared onto the dance floor.
I glanced hopefully up and down the bar, checking if there was another bartender on duty on a night as busy as this, but no such luck. All I saw was Lucas and his crowd of adoring fans. Accepting my fate with a sigh, I half-heartedly placed my elbow on the bar, waiting my turn. My face felt heavy with all the makeup those evil harpies had painted on me and the contacts were making my eyes burn. I desperately wanted to yank them out of my eyes, but how would I even get in there with all the mascara in the way? (I’d drawn the line at the fake eyelashes.) I closed my eyes to try to ease the burning, and when I opened them again Lucas was standing in front of me.
Considering what I looked like, I was a little surprised at his reaction. He smiled warmly and asked how I was, then leaned forward so I could hear him better.
“Is your sister here with you?” he asked.
I gave him a confused look. Lucas had barely shown any interest in Emily before. “Yeah,” I said. “She’s over there somewhere.” I gestured over my shoulder, nearly hitting the girl standing behind me in the eye. She seemed pretty irritated, not because I’d almost blinded her, but because I was taking up so much of Lucas’s time. I mumbled an apology and she raised her voice as she called out her drink order to him for the third time. He ignored her.
“I don’t see her,” he said as he peered into the dark, trying to locate our table.
When he looked back at me again, he said, “I like your hair,” and I looked down at my dark locks hanging over my shoulder, super-straight tonight because of the magic flat iron Melissa had provided.
It suddenly dawned on me why Lucas was asking about Emily.
“Lucas, it’s me,” I said. “It’s Katie.”
The grin slipped off his face. His eyes widened with surprise and then darkened with something else as they moved from my eyes to my lips and then downward to the insanely tight black top I was wearing. Sally had wanted me to wear nothing but a black bra underneath the see-through material, but I’d insisted on wearing a camisole. She’d produced the laciest one I’d ever seen from her bag of tricks and pulled it over my head. I noticed Lucas’s gaze lingering on that lace stretched across my chest and the generous amount of cleavage just above it. More cleavage than I’d ever shown in my life, that was for sure. I felt my neck flushing, the redness creeping up to my cheeks. As much as being stared at made me want to break something, I had to admit the guy sure knew how to make a girl feel seen.
“Katie?” Lucas said. His voice was thick and at least two octaves lower than it had been a minute ago.
“You know, you might recognize me a little better if you looked at my face,” I snapped.
“Oh, I…right,” he said. Now his eyes were planted firmly on the bar in front of him. “You’re not wearing your glasses.”
“Emily made me put on these ridiculous blue contacts,” I replied. “She says brown eyes are boring.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Lucas muttered so low I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly. He cleared his throat and suddenly he was all business. “What’ll you have?” he said, picking up a cocktail glass.
I recited the list of drinks and he didn’t even bat an eyelash, just began setting out the glasses in a row. I wondered if he thought Em and I were drinking them all ourselves and I was going to clarify that there were five of us in all, but I didn’t get the chance. The show going on in front of me was far too distracting.
First he dropped the glass in his hand twice then nearly dropped a full bottle of vodka when he set it down too close to the edge of the counter. I placed my chin in my palm, frowning at him. As I watched, he put double the amount of rum in Anita’s rum and Coke and then accidentally threw a lime wedge into the glass when I was pretty sure it was supposed to go on the rim. Then he asked me to repeat the names of the other drinks because he’d forgotten them. While all this was going on he didn’t look at me once.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked with some amusement as he dropped yet another glass. They just seemed to be slipping right through his fingers tonight.
“What? Nothing!” he said as he finished the last drink—a vodka cranberry, for me. He’d put three cherries in it, which I was pretty sure also wasn’t right, but I didn’t mention it. I was just glad he hadn’t made it a triple by accident—I wasn’t much of a drinker.
As I handed him the cash for the drinks he glanced down at the floor and shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe the mess around his feet. I couldn’t, either. Was he drinking on the job? Was that allowed? In movies bartenders were always doing shots with the patrons, but I was pretty sure in real life it was a no-no.
When I thanked him for the drinks he finally managed to look me in the face again. He held my gaze there, his eyes darting between mine, his chest heaving as though he’d run a mile. When he broke the gaze to look down at the drinks in front of me, I felt a physical loss and cursed myself for it.
Bad news, out of my league, one hundred percent trouble, I repeated silently to myself.
“That’s too many for you to carry,” Lucas said, and before I could say a thing he was calling over one of the waitresses, a tattooed girl with severe eye makeup and bleached blonde pigtails. “Brit, can you help her carry these back to her table?”
Brit started collecting the drinks onto her tray.
“Try not to hurt anybody, okay?” I said to Lucas as we walked away, and I thought I saw him heave a sigh of relief as he smiled at me.
“Wow,” Brit said. She was expertly carrying the five drinks on a tray balanced on her palm. “I’ve never seen Lucas like that before.”
“Do you think he’s drunk?” I said to her as we maneuvered through the crowd. If that was the case, I was going to ask her to get him some coffee. I didn’t want him to lose his job.
Brit gave me a funny look. “No, hon,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it was the sight of you that had him tripping over his own feet.”
“What?” I said with a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
The girls grinned as Brit set the tray down on the table and they all reached forward to grab their drinks. Brit leaned in to talk into my ear while they were distracted.
“Girls shove their boobs in his face all the time and he doesn’t even react,” she said. “Trust me, I’ve been working with him three nights a week for months. Lucas has the hots for you, sweetie. You’d better watch yourself.” She winked at me as she picked up her tray and made her way back to the bar.
“What’s wrong, Katie?” Anita said. “I mean, besides the fact that these drinks are crazy strong!”
I let my eyes travel back to the bar where Lucas was pouring a line of shots. Lucas had the hots for me? Lucas was dropping glasses and acting like an idiot because of me? It was beyond comprehension. Guys didn’t fall all over themselves for me. They did that for Em, for Sally, for the flirts of the world, not me. Still, my stomach was doing all kinds of ecstatic cartwheels at the idea. I wished I could settle into that feeling, just for a minute or two, snatch back some of that happiness from two nights ago. But Brit’s last words—You’d better watch yourself—reminded me why I couldn’t. No matter how he felt about me, all I could do was stare at him from across the room and wish and dream and yearn. The dream of Lucas—that’s all I could ever have.
Except, that wasn’t quite true. I could also have the drink he’d made me.
“Cheers!” I said and downed more than half my cocktail in one gulp as the other girls stared at me, goggle-eyed.
“Oh yeah!” Sally cried, putting her arm around my shoulder. “Let’s get smashed!”
Oh, hell yes.
An hour later I was out on the dance floor with Sally, my head all kinds of fuzzy, Emily and the others girls nowhere in sight, and grabby male hands coming at me from every direction. If I’d had to write out the definition of a situation that was way out of my comfort zone, this would probably be it to the letter. As I watched Sally grinding up against the same beefy guy she’d met in the line, her skirt hitched up so high I could literally see half her ass, I felt another pair of hands gripping me by the hips and flung them off.
What it all came down to was bad decision making. My first bad decision had been agreeing to come out for Anita’s birthday in the first place, although I now seemed to recall that I’d given a noncommittal maybe and it was Em who had transformed my answer into a yes. My second bad decision had been imagining that actually coming tonight was in the realm of a good idea, that Em and her friends would create a little cocoon of safety around me, allowing me to avoid actually speaking to anybody but them, that I could actually let loose and get away from myself. And the third bad decision was the most obvious one. That decision was sloshing around in my stomach and making me lightheaded and would soon be showing itself to the entire dance floor if I didn’t get out of there really soon.
As the crowd thrashed around me, I tried to remember where Emily had said she was going before she’d disappeared through the press of bodies. To get more drinks? To the bathroom? I couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d left. I didn’t even know what time it was. The evil harpies had made me take off my watch. My head began to feel very heavy as the crowd shifted around me and I lost sight of Sally altogether. Suddenly I felt the seeds of panic beginning to germinate in my gut and I turned around, scanning the faces on every side, trying to spot Sally’s red lips and blonde curls. The threat of the Facebook message loomed large in my mind, the words echoing in my brain, louder than the music—although it occurred to me that the music in here was so loud no one would be able to hear me scream. If a hand came out and grabbed me, dragging me down, nobody would even notice.
Just as this thought entered my brain an arm reached out and looped itself around my waist, the fingers spreading across my stomach, and I felt my panic spike up into real terror. Without looking around to see who it was, I tried to scramble away, but we were packed in so tightly there was really nowhere to scramble to. Feeling my movement, the hand tightened slightly and something inside of me snapped. I took hold of the fingers gripping me just above my bellybutton and bent them backwards as fast and as hard as I could. I heard a shriek of pain—which, as I predicted, went unnoticed by the rest of the dancing crowd—and then I lunged forward and roughly shoved my way through the bodies, adrenaline pumping like jet fuel through my veins. I focused on the edge of the dance floor and nothing else until I reached it and slammed headfirst into something sturdy and warm and tall.
Something or someone.
This time I actually screamed and pushed out hard with my forearms, flinging myself backwards. I heard someone calling my name but I ignored it, so intent was I on getting away, although it didn’t really seem like that was going to happen. Not when I was wearing four-inch borrowed heels and I was losing my balance, my arms pin wheeling as I careened toward the floor. I squeezed my eyes shut, preparing myself for the horrifying crunch of my bones breaking, when a pair of arms reached out and caught me at the critical last second.
My eyes flew open as I found myself once again on my feet, my hands locked onto those arms like vises, not only to brace myself, but also out of fear of who was attached to them.
“Katie, it’s me,” a voice said. “It’s Lucas.”
They were the same words I’d said to him earlier when he’d mistaken me for Emily. I guess it was a night for mistaken identities.
“Lucas,” I breathed, loosening my grip on his arms. I felt one of his hands slide down to the small of my back, holding me steady, his eyes focused on my face, full of concern. “Get me away from here.”
Taking me by the hand, he led me up one staircase and then another to a lounge at the very top of the club. There were couches and armchairs scattered around the area and it was mostly empty, just one couple making out and two girls who seemed to be sleeping, their heads resting one on top of the other. Lucas and I sat down on a couch in the corner. It was a loveseat, meant for two people in theory, though in this case I had to assume two twelve-year-old girls—it was that narrow. I was practically sitting in his lap. I tried to wiggle over, but there was no couch left next to me, and he kept leaning toward me and touching me with his warm hands and murmuring softly to me, which was so calming, almost like a lullaby, except liking his lullaby was so totally against the promise I’d made myself. The more he tried to calm me, the more agitated I became, until I felt his hands cupping my face, holding it still.
“Breathe, Katie,” he said. “Breathe.”
With his words, and the steady breaths that followed, I felt the adrenaline leeching out of my body being Withd by a none-too-subtle pounding in my head. Drawing my legs up onto the couch, I wrapped my arms around them and pressed my cheek into my kneecaps, closing my eyes. I felt his palm, warm against my back as he rubbed it and smoothed my long hair, something I’d done countless times for Emily when she was hungover, though having it done to me was quite a different thing. If the music in the club hadn’t been so incredibly loud, I might have actually drifted off.
When I finally opened my eyes again and sat up, Lucas was still right there beside me with a sweet smile. I tried to smile back but I was too embarrassed, remembering the perfect fool I’d made of myself downstairs. Luckily, Lucas didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead he handed me a bowl of pretzels.
“Here, eat this,” he said. “Sorry, it’s all we have to snack on. And drink this.”
He handed me a glass full of clear liquid, which I eyed warily.
“It’s water,” he added.
Looking down at the food in my hands, I gave him a puzzled look. “When did you get this?” I said. Had he left me alone on the couch while my eyes were closed? I hadn’t felt him move. And if he had gone, whose hand had I felt on my back? I felt my heart begin to pound again.
“I texted Brit to bring this stuff up,” he said, his voice full of reassurance. “I’m actually hiding up here with you. Brit’s covering for me.”
“You should go back to work,” I said. “I don’t want you to get into trouble because of me.”
“No trouble,” Lucas said easily. “I covered for her last month while she spent four hours behind the club having a screaming fight with her boyfriend. She owes me. This won’t even cover it.”
I nodded feebly, nibbling on a pretzel, wishing heartily that they were the dipped-in-chocolate kind.
“Are you feeling better?” Lucas said tentatively.
I took a gulp of water so I could have time to think of what to say. “I’m really fine,” I said. “I just don’t usually come out to places like this. All the people. And I lost Emily. I was just overwhelmed and a little freaked and I’m going to strangle Sally later.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “And who’s this Sally?”
“One of Em’s friends,” I said.
“And that’s all it was?” he asked. “You just got overwhelmed? There wasn’t anything…”
He left the sentence hanging, waiting for me to fill in the blank. I could tell he sensed I was leaving something out, but I wasn’t about to explain.
“I’m never going clubbing again,” I said.
“It’s really not that bad once you get used to it,” Lucas said. “Although I guess I had to get used to it, since I work here. And I get to enjoy it all without the help of alcohol, which is quite a treat.”
“You never mentioned that you worked here,” I said. I was actually a little surprised. I’d naively thought Lucas was living on his daddy’s dime, another rich kid like Sally’s Alex, like me—although in our family it was my mom who made the big bucks. I didn’t have to work during the school year, but it looked like Lucas did.
He shrugged. “There’s a reason I work so far away from campus. I don’t want the party to follow me here. I just want to get the work done. So I don’t really mention it to anyone.”
“Yeah, there’s not much of a party going on down there,” I said teasingly.
“But it’s not my party,” Lucas pointed out, and I nodded in agreement, though I didn’t really get it. Wasn’t Lucas supposedly the life of the party? What exactly was he hiding from?
“And what about you, princess? Since when did you become such a party girl?” Lucas asked.
He pointed at my head and I reached up to find I had on Anita’s tiara. I vaguely recalled her placing it on my head earlier. Had I been wearing it this entire time?
I snatched it off my head.
“That’s just an inside joke,” I said lamely, trying to discreetly drop it into the seam of the couch behind me, but Lucas snaked his arm behind my back and grabbed it.
“Oh, no,” he said with a wicked grin. “You have to keep it on. It goes so well with your ensemble.” He tried to place it back on my head, but I twisted away with a laugh, wrestling with his outstretched arms until I looked up and he was hovering over me, one knee next to my thigh on the couch, his other leg planted on the ground on the other side of me, his face just inches from mine. I stopped struggling and he placed the tiara back on my head, then eased slowly back into his seat, letting his eyes trail down my body as he did so, ending at my boots.
“Did I mention how much I’m enjoying these?” he said with a slow grin, placing a light hand on my left calf.
“They’re not mine,” I said, painfully aware of every finger pressing into the leather.
“And this?” he said, tugging at the bottom of my top, his fingertips grazing against the skin of my stomach.
I sucked in a breath, sharply. “It doesn’t really fit me,” I said. It really didn’t. Sally was two sizes smaller than I was.
“Oh, it fits you,” Lucas said. “Trust me.”
My body flushed again and this time the flush didn’t fade as his eyes moved to my face.
“And this makeup,” he said, his gaze darting from my eyes to my lips to my cheeks to my lips again. “It’s certainly interesting. But you don’t need it. Same with the contacts. It’s covering up the real you.”
“It’s all covering up the real me,” I said. “That’s what I like about it.”
I blinked. The alcohol seemed to have loosened my tongue along with making the room spin, though I noticed it had pretty much stopped spinning now.
I said, “I mean, we all want to pretend to be someone else sometimes, don’t we? We all want to hide.”
Suddenly, he got to his feet and pulled me up with him. I gazed around dizzily.
“Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
We descended the same stairs we’d taken to come up and found ourselves on the second floor dance floor. There weren’t nearly as many people dancing as there had been earlier and I hardly had any trouble getting across the floor. I was nearly to the second staircase when Lucas tugged on my hand, pulling me back. When I saw that he wanted me to join him in the middle of the dance floor, I shook my head firmly. Was this what he had in mind? Dancing? If so, his mind was about to change very quickly, because I had no intention of going out there again. Ever.
I let go of his hand and folded my arms around my middle. He came to join me by the wall.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Aggressive guys? Grabby hands? I work here, you know. I know what some guys are like on the dance floor.”
“It wasn’t just that,” I protested, though I was surprised at how much he had guessed. “I just don’t like being on display, like… I’m not really a good dancer. I’m just not comfortable and it’s so… I’m not… I just…”
I clamped my mouth shut, sick of listening to my own stuttering.
“You want to lose yourself?” he said and my eyes snapped to his face. “I do it all the time, right out there.” He pointed at the people dancing in front of us. “It’s easy. I can show you how if you’ll let me.”
Straight ahead of me a girl in a strapless sparkly top threw her head back, shaking her hair, a luminous smile on her face. I wanted to be like that, to be free. But I didn’t want to feel that panic creeping in again, not tonight. I looked up at Lucas. When he was around, I never felt afraid, probably because he was always so at ease—well, except during the glass-dropping intro to the night. A little dancing with Lucas couldn’t hurt, could it?
“If you embarrass me I’ll punch you in the junk,” I said as I put my hand in his.
He gave me an affirmative nod. “Got it, Hero,” he said.
Taking both my hands in his, he towed me into the middle of the fray. The song that was playing was one I knew and liked with an added house beat and synthesizer. Standing still in the middle of the dancing crowd I immediately felt self-conscious and my eyes kept darting to the people around us, watching to see if they were watching me. Lucas put his hands on my shoulders, drawing my eyes to his face.
“Don’t worry about them,” he said. “They don’t care what you’re doing. All they care about is looking hot.”
I smirked and his smile joined mine.
“Just look at me. Keep your eyes on mine,” he said. “Don’t look away.”
I nodded yes, but I didn’t think I’d be able to do it. I was terrible at keeping eye contact. Even when I was having a conversation with someone I would find myself staring at the wall behind their head. I didn’t like the feeling of being looked at, examined. It always made me feel as though the person looking was trying to figure me out. Then again, I didn’t seem to mind when Lucas looked at me. And looking at Lucas, well, that wasn’t what I would call hard. Actually, it was pretty damn easy.
As I stared into those big golden eyes of his, I felt Lucas place his hands on my waist. Instinctively, I felt my body tense and I was surprised that he didn’t say anything about it. He just left his hands there and kept his eyes on mine until I slowly felt my muscles relax.
“Now, I want you to move like I move,” he said. “Put your hands here.”
He placed my hands on his hips so we were mirroring each other. I nearly laughed. This felt very much like an elementary school dance. Then he started to move his hips and I felt his fingers digging into mine, encouraging me to do the same, and suddenly all thoughts of elementary school were gone.
I could feel the taut muscles of his stomach through his shirt. I wanted so much to look down at his body, to touch his chest, but that would mean breaking eye contact. My hips began to mimic his movements, moving much slower than the music, and he smiled at me, showing off his dimples, as our rhythm fell into sync. He ran one hand up my back and then back down again, sending a shiver down my spine, and then I felt the gentle pressure of his palm, pushing me forward until we were hip to hip. I forgot about keeping eye contact at that point—I sort of forgot about everything—and pressed my cheek into his shoulder, looping my arms around his neck.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered into my ear.
And I did.
The music throbbed around us, keeping our hips in motion and wiping out almost everything else except the feeling of his chest against mine and his hands holding me. I didn’t have a thought in my head. I certainly didn’t know and didn’t care if anyone was watching us. I didn’t know anything except that I loved this feeling of oblivion, of disappearing into the music, of being here with him. I felt one of his hands cupping the back of my head, his fingers moving through my hair. I clung to him and danced.
We were both sweaty when we finally pulled apart. His hand was still in my hair.
“How’d you do that?” I said to him. He was staring down at me so intently I wasn’t sure he would answer.
“Do what?” he finally said.
“Make the world disappear.”
He grinned, letting his hand slip out of my locks and down to my back. “And just think, you can do it any time you want. The wonderful land of the dance floor is always here for you.”
“Not just any time,” I said, and he gave me a questioning look, his eyes returning to my face. “I only feel like this when I’m with you.”
What did I just say?
I was still tangled in his arms and he looked like he had every intention of keeping me there, his eyes riveted to mine as though we were still dancing, but I pulled free and this time I was the one to guide him down the stairs, holding his hand, leading the way. This was good. Moving was good. Talking on the other hand, clearly not so good.
Back on the first floor I was swarmed by Emily and her friends. I caught Lucas’s eye and saw him wink and wave at me, then disappear into the dark leading toward the bar.
“We’ve been looking for you everywhere!” Anita said, then took a sip of her drinks, one in each hand.
“Sally’s in the bathroom throwing up,” Melissa announced.
“We didn’t abandon her there,” Emily explained, as though worried I would disapprove. “She always insists on throwing up alone. She’s psychotic about it. She bit me. Are you okay?”
This last question she directed right into my ear, then looked at me worriedly as Anita and Melissa danced a circle around us. Em couldn’t always read my moods, but she sure as hell knew I didn’t like facing a nightclub alone, especially when she’d been the one to drag me there.
“Where were you?” I asked with more venom that I’d meant to, only now realizing how angry I still was at the way she’d left me alone. I watched her take a step away from me and lower her eyes to the floor.
Right away I regretted my outburst. How could I blame Em for not babysitting me the entire night? She was entitled to have her own fun. But before I could tell her this, Anita interrupted us.
“Did I see you holding hands with Lucas?” Apparently Anita’s reaction time was on a drunken five-minute delay.
“Oh my God!” Melissa cried. “Did he rescue you?”
“Did he dance with you?”
“Did you guys make out? Tell me you made out. You totally did. You made out, right?”
I didn’t answer any of their questions. I could still feel his fingers in my hair.
We left about an hour later. Sally was so drunk both Melissa and Anita had to help her to the car, her arms around their shoulders as she shouted obscenities at the beefy guy and his whole group of friends. None of the other girls seemed to know what had gone down between them, and I, for one, didn’t want to know. It seemed that Sally was a fun drunk right up until she got really loaded. Then she became a scratch-your-eyes-out-for-no-reason drunk.
“I’m gonna rip your head off and feed it to my snake!” she yelled as Melissa stuffed her into the passenger’s seat.
The beefy guy made a rude gesture back.
“Does she even have a snake?” I asked as Anita leaned on the car door to close it. We were all reluctant to get into the car with Sally.
“You think she has the ability to take care of a snake?” Anita asked.
“Don’t be mean,” Emily said. “Just because she goes a little nuts when she’s drunk doesn’t make her an idiot. She’s planning on going to law school after she’s done—”
At this moment Sally rolled down the window and threw up onto the street right beside my sister’s shoes.
“Puking,” Em finished.
We all piled into the car and Melissa eased us out into the non-existent traffic. I was impressed to find out she’d volunteered to be the designated driver and had stopped drinking two hours ago. Point one to Melissa. Sally was currently at point negative forty-two.
Emily put her head on my shoulder. She was always the most affectionate when she knew I was pissed at her. “So what really happened with Lucas?” she asked.
“Um,” I said, hoping Sally would scream out something else and I wouldn’t have to answer.
I couldn’t tell her the truth, of course. How could I when I hardly knew what the truth was? He’d rescued me from a panic attack and taught me to dance? I thought of his honey-coloured eyes. I’d stared at them for so long now I could picture perfectly how they were rimmed with dark gold and the exact way they’d stared into mine when I’d told him I could only feel that way with him.
My secret made me smile so wide I had to turn my face toward the window.
Melissa stopped the car at a light and that’s when I saw Lucas sitting on a bench by the curb with a girl. They weren’t touching, but they were sitting very close together. She had long blonde hair that stuck out of the hood of her winter coat. They were turned toward each other and she was talking animatedly with her hands. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but as the moments passed I could tell she’d started yelling. Lucas looked distraught. He covered his face with his hands. And then he looked up at her and reached a hand out to touch her face, brushing his thumb across her cheek. He seemed to be about to speak when the light turned green and we drove on.
Emily repeated her question.
“Nothing,” I said, turning away from the window. “Lucas and I are nothing to each other, and we’ll never be anything more. End of story.”
She stopped asking after that.
Just then my phone buzzed in my pocket with a text message. I dug into my jeans to pull it loose, hoping against hope it would be Lucas and that somehow he’d intuited that I’d seen what I had and he’d explain it and everything would be fine.
But it wasn’t Lucas, and nothing was fine.
There were three messages from an unknown number.
Unknown: You’ll never get away with it.
Unknown: You’re about to get what you deserve.
Unknown: I’m coming for you.