? ? ?
I said no, and Patrick dropped me off at home. He said he had an early deposition in the morning that he had to get ready for and I should give everyone his love. His headlights were gone before I’d even gotten to the front door.
Once I was alone, I took a deep breath and allowed myself to smile. I’d done it. Morales might be suspicious, but I’d gone through four FBI interviews and they had nothing on me. Maybe now I was out of the woods with them, and that meant I was as safe here as I could ever be.
I went inside the house and found Nicholas and Mia in the den, him on his laptop and her watching a movie. I sat down next to Mia, who put a pillow in my lap and laid her head down.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Out,” Nicholas said without looking up from his screen.
“Where?” It wasn’t strange for Jessica to be gone, but it was weird for Lex not to be here. I would have thought she’d be waiting at the door for me, probably with food in her arms.
Nicholas shrugged. He obviously didn’t find it as strange as I did. He closed his laptop and left the room.
For the next couple of hours I hung out with Mia, serving as her human pillow while she finished her movie and then playing game after game of Spit, her new obsession.
“I’m hungry,” she finally said, and I checked the clock on the cable box. It was after seven, and still neither Jessica nor Lex was home.
“Me too,” I said. “Let’s see what there is to eat.”
We went to the refrigerator and peered inside.
“Oh,” I said. “Nothing.”
“Can we order a pizza?” Mia asked.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Go ask Nicholas what he wants.”
Mia ran upstairs and came back with Nicholas in tow.
“Lex isn’t home yet?” he asked when he came into the kitchen.
I shook my head. “I’m going to call her.”
While Nicholas called to order two large pizzas—“And mozzarella sticks!” Mia said—I dialed Lex’s number. It went to voice mail, so I tried texting her. Where are you? Everything okay?
A half an hour later, the gate buzzer went off.
“I’ll get it,” I said. Mia followed me into the foyer, singing, “Mozzarella sticks, mozzarella sticks!”
I hit the button that would automatically open the gate, and opened the front door to wait for the pizza guy to drive up. But he was already there, climbing out of his car. Behind him Jessica was pulling up.
“Evening,” the delivery guy said.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I said, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was watching Jessica climb out of her car. She seemed more or less sober, which was good. Her windshield was coated in dust. She didn’t wobble on her high heels as she walked up behind the delivery guy and swept into the house.
“Want some pizza, Mom?” I asked her retreating form.
“Or some mozzarella sticks?” Mia added.
Jessica didn’t say anything, just disappeared up the stairs. I was probably imagining it, but I swear I could hear the click of the lock as she hid herself behind the door to her bedroom.
“She never wants to eat with us anymore,” Mia said.
I signed the delivery guy’s receipt while Mia took the boxes he handed her. “Did she use to?” I asked. “Before I got back?”
Mia shrugged. “I usually ate with Magda, but sometimes Mom would eat too. More than she does now.”
So Jessica was avoiding me. Mia and I took the pizza to the kitchen, where Nicholas was setting cold sodas and a roll of paper towels on the kitchen table.
“Mom’s home,” Mia said as we came in.
“She went upstairs,” I added. “She . . . wasn’t hungry.”
Nicholas smiled grimly. “Of course not.”
“Why doesn’t she eat with us anymore?” Mia asked.
Nicholas’s eyes flickered up to me and then away again. “I don’t know, Mimi. I guess she’s just tired.”
The three of us ate and cleaned up and watched another movie and Mia went to bed, and still Lex wasn’t home. I sent her another text and left another voice mail. Nicholas called Patrick, but he didn’t answer either, which was not unusual if he was working like he said he would be. He often turned off his phone whenever he went to the law library.
“This is weird,” Nicholas said. “Something’s wrong.”
If he was worried enough to be voluntarily speaking to me in more than monosyllables, it had to be.
“What should we do?” I asked.
Nicholas fished his keys out of his school bag. “I’m going to find her.”
“I’m coming with.”
He shook his head. “Someone’s got to stay here with Mia.”
“Mom’s upstairs,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said, and didn’t protest when I followed him to the garage and climbed into the passenger’s seat of his car.
“Where do you think she is?” I said as we left the gates of Hidden Hills behind.
“Her house,” Nicholas said. “Maybe one of her friends’. I have no idea. Try calling again.”
I called for the fourth time, and this time it went straight to voice mail without any rings. “Her phone is off,” I said.
Nicholas drove to Lex’s house, which I had never seen before. It was a small Craftsman in Century City on a street full of small, pretty houses. From the light of the streetlamp, I could see that Lex’s place had an air of neglect that none of the other homes had. The lawn had patches of dead, brown grass, and the paint was beginning to peel. Maybe it was because Lex wasn’t here very often, or maybe it didn’t occur to her to take care of a place that was already so much less grand than the home she had come from. Her car was parked at the curb, but Nicholas didn’t seem relieved, so I didn’t feel relieved either.
Nicholas knocked on the front door, but at the same time he tried the knob and found it unlocked. Without waiting for Lex to answer, he walked inside and I followed him.
“Lex?” he called. I spotted a switch on the wall and flipped on the lights. The place was a wreck. Unopened mail was piled up by the door. Clothes were strewn across the floor. Empty bottles lined the countertops. It was hard to reconcile this place with the Lex who was always cleaning at home.
“Lex?” Nicholas called again. There was no answer, and he started walking through rooms. I followed behind.
“Goddammit,” he said when he reached an open doorway. I came up behind him and saw Lex in her bedroom, passed out on top of the covers, a bottle of wine on the nightstand.
It looked to me like she’d just had a little too much to drink and fallen asleep—not exactly an emergency—but Nicholas rushed to her side and began to shake her.
“Lex, wake up!”
She roused slightly and moaned, but she didn’t open her eyes. Nicholas bent over her and lifted one of her eyelids with his fingers. The eye underneath was shockingly blue, her pinprick sized pupil almost swallowed up completely. I knew that look.
My heart seized in my chest.