But I still couldn’t believe it. Refused to believe it.
“It wasn’t her. It wasn’t her, Joe.” My voice was scratchy and too loud. People were staring at us, and I didn’t care. Let them fill the tabloids with reports that I’d gone mad at the Corner Mart, I didn’t fucking care.
The only thing I did care about at the moment was correcting this… this… misunderstanding. This lie. “Say it. Say it wasn’t her, Joe.” I clutched my fingers into his jacket, pleading. “Fucking say it!”
“It was her, Emily.” He pulled me into him, wrapping his arms around me. “It was her.”
“You don’t know. You can’t know.”
“I do know. They know. It was her.” He stroked my hair and I buried my face in his shoulder, not to sob, but to hide. Hide from the ridiculous nonsense this man was trying to feed me.
Yet, even as I closed my eyes and held my breath, the villainous veracity seeped into my thinking, forcing me to face its validity. She’d been gone before I’d started looking for her. She’d been gone before I even heard her message. As I’d wracked my mind for ways to find her she’d already lain in a cold morgue. When I’d told Joe that she was alive because she was a survivor, I’d been fighting for a corpse. The times I’d imagined her voice in my head and felt her presence and heard her memory speak vividly to me, it may not have been imagined at all but traces of her life imprinted on this world. Real remnants of her spirit in the form of a ghost.
I was dead, she said now. I’ve been dead the whole time.
Tears leaked silently onto his jacket, but I couldn’t call it crying. This was shock. This was reality soaking past the truth I’d built up, drops of it spilling from my eyes. This wasn’t the dam. This wasn’t grief. Not yet.
But it was also anger. Anger at myself. Then, when I thought about it, anger at Joe.
I pushed back from his embrace. “How come you’re only finding out about this now? You should have dug this up before. Shouldn’t her name have come up in whatever search things you do? She wasn’t a Jane Doe if they connected it to her hospital visit. Why didn’t you find her before?”
It was misplaced rage, but it felt good to blame. Joe could have saved me the time and energy. Could have spared me the hope.
He seemed to expect my accusations, comfortable enough with the natural path of mourning to not have to defend himself, but simply present the facts. “She didn’t use her real last name at the hospital,” he said.
I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand. “What do you mean? What name did she use?”
“Yours.” He cleared his throat. “Barnes.”
My real last name. She was in trouble, on the verge of death, and thinking of me. While I… what? Rode the high of a breakout show. Complained about the inconvenience of an unwell mother and dealt with it by writing a check in an amount I didn’t notice. Even as I searched for Amber, believing she was alive, how often had I forgotten about her? While I’d played a version of my younger self. Seduced her ex-lover. Lost myself in fascination with him.
This detail of the circumstances surrounding her death was only a small one. A tiny laceration amidst extensive injuries. But it stung and burrowed deep inside me, promising to resurface any time I looked closely at myself.
In the meantime, the wound that needed attention was the largest one, the one that gushed and bled from my spirit like a slice across the carotid artery: Amber. Was. Gone.
She was gone.
I was still trying to process. Trying to find reason. Trying to nail down the cause and effect.
My hand rubbed across my forehead – back and forth. Back and forth. “The slave ring, you think?” I had to see the whole picture, know what she’d suffered. Was that how she’d ended up beaten and bruised? Had she been abused by her “owner”? Was she too much trouble? Was she just not worth the inconvenience?
“Or Vilanakis himself.” He stuck his hands in his pockets as if awkward now that he wasn’t holding me. “Look, I don’t know if this is any consolation, but I’m not convinced anymore that Sallis was involved.”
“That’s what I think.” I said it too fast, before I thought it through. It was a lie primed at the tip of my tongue, sliding off without any regard.
And yet, even as I acknowledged the lie in my head, I kept on with it. “We don’t really know when she broke up with Reeve, do we? Maybe she was even with Michelis when she called me. Maybe she just met him through Reeve. Because they run in the same circles.” Or because they’re related. I didn’t know why I felt the need to keep that secret still, but I did.
“I’m considering that.” Joe’s jaw worked as if chewing the information, preparing it for digestion. “I could look into it further, if you like. Try to get some closure.”
I shook my head emphatically. “You can’t risk it. It’s too dangerous. They…” I swallowed, giving myself time to be sure of what I wanted to say. “I think Missy’s death may have been related to Vilanakis’s family, too.”
Joe arched a brow. “Do you know something you haven’t told me?”
“A friend of mine who knew her said that several members of the family hung around her. They were even at the island the day she died.”
“And your friend thinks it was the mob, not Sallis, not an accident?”
“Maybe an accident. Not Reeve at all.” I couldn’t stop the lies regarding him. In truth, I suspected he was at least partially guilty in Missy’s death and I didn’t for one second believe the call Amber had made had anything to do with Vilanakis and all to do with Reeve. And I was convinced that, even if he hadn’t been the executioner, Reeve still had culpability, still had some of the blame.