“Are you saying Cassie has a greasy griddle?” Avery says, cocking an eyebrow.
Ruby smacks her gently on the butt. “I’m sure Cassie’s griddle is pristine.” She nods at me. “But Ryder’s not the only pancake in the world it’ll heat up.”
In the small dressing room of the boutique, still wearing the red stilettos, I have the black dress Shelby picked out half zipped when my cell phone rings in my tote bag. Only a handful of people have this new American number in the first place and I’m with a third of them right now, so normally I wouldn’t answer a call that says Blocked.
But normally a lump doesn’t form in my throat when I get a blocked call either.
Jamie.
Calling from prison. The inside of a car trunk. The last pay phone in
downtown Tijuana where he’s stranded and penniless and scared.
I close my eyes, suck in my breath. “Hello?” I say.
“Hello, love,” a male voice says on the other end of the line. Deep and clear.
And accented.
Sebastian.
Barely able to inhale much less respond, I hang up, throwing the phone into my bag and closing the top, the way you might trap a poisonous snake that was about to take a bite.
I can hear my heartbeat, like the beating of a kettle drum that shakes my whole body, as it fills my ears, underscores the questions that run together in my mind: How did he get this number? Why is he calling me?
Where the fuck is he?
The phone rings again. I’m too paralyzed even to silence it, letting it buzz in the oblivion of my bag.
“Cass, let’s see the dress,” Shelby says. I can hear her and Ruby and Avery chattering and laughing, same as a few minutes ago when I was right there with them, smiling and giggling, before the world leaned over, the axis no longer upright, the orbit no longer predictable.
Out of sight, out of mind: that’s what I’d assumed my disappearance would be for Sebastian.
Or maybe not assumed, exactly. Maybe really, if I’m honest with myself, I’d just hoped that’s how he’d feel. That if I shut him out, left one morning without saying why and never came back he’d forget about me the same way I wanted to forget about him.
Because he knows why I left. Whether he wants to admit it or not.
My voicemail alert tinkles, muffled in my bag. Of course—after all this time, did I really think not listening would deter Sebastian from speaking anyway? Persistence is his talent, part of why he’s so successful as an investment banker, even one of the things I first liked about him. His courtship was so intentional—surprise dinners after my day at the auto shop, little gifts all the time, flowers and jewelry and lingerie.
So much attention. It took me a while to figure out there’s a difference between being showered and smothered, that his constant focus wasn’t about making me happy. It was about him keeping control.
I sink to the stool bolted into the dressing room wall, let my head fall back, and close my eyes, shutting out the present. It’s such a basic response, isn’t it? When we don’t want to see something or know something is there, we cover our face, block out the view. And we assume, kind of feel reassured, that because we can’t see the monster, it doesn’t exist. It won’t hurt us. It’s not real.
But it is real. And it’s left me a message.
I sigh and dig the phone out of my bag. As much as I want to, it seems pointless to ignore the voicemail.
And potentially harmful not to get all the information I can since he obviously has more about me than I’d thought he did.
I play the message: Seems we have a connection problem, love. Surely you aren’t just avoiding my call when you must know that all I’ve done since you’ve been gone is think about you. When I’m home, every sound I hear I imagine it’s you at our doorstep, every ring of my mobile, I expect to hear your voice. I’m growing tired of waiting for you to regain your senses. It’s time to come home, Cassie. There’s no reason to drag this out another moment. I’m not letting you go without a fight, and you know how I fight. To the death. Cheers, love. See you soon, I’m sure.
My finger shakes as I press delete.
My mom told me once that anger and fear are relational, that often we’re mad because we’re afraid. Anger is a way to cover the emotions that make us vulnerable, exposed, weak. It makes us feel in charge in times when we’re not.
Hearing Sebastian’s voice again, the menace thinly veiled by his charming British accent, certainly brings back a lot of memories that I usually only revisit in my nightmares, and my body tenses instinctively.
But my muscles don’t twitch just because I’m scared of him and what he wants. What he might be capable of. The fury I feel now is just as real as the fear. With some distance from the source, finally, it might even be realer this time than usual.
“Cassie, get your tiny ass out here,” Shelby says. “Or we’re coming in there.”