Felicity’s eyes circled in her sockets. “Wow, Marin, you’ve really crossed a whole new line. You were my best friend, my sister, but I don’t even know you. I don’t know why you have drug contacts, or how you think what you did was remotely okay, but I am about to turn you over to the cops for giving drugs to a child. I’m sure it’s illegal.”

“Are you serious? You’d turn your own sister in to the police?”

“Maybe then you’d think twice before handing out an illegal substance to your own niece.”

“Felicity, I said I’m sorry! I was trying to avoid a big issue about it. You realize marijuana is less addictive than cigarettes, right?”

“You may think I’m a prude, but you’re not a mother, so you don’t understand. It’s one thing if you were a child who didn’t know better, but you’re a grown woman who made a stupid decision for someone else’s child without asking. You should have told me! And what’s worse is that you don’t know that this doesn’t have something to do with her disappearance. If she was keeping this secret from me, what else was she hiding?”

This was rapidly getting blown out of proportion. Turning me over to the police for an eighth of pot? I was family! For the past four years we’d been shopping buddies, made coffee runs, shared inside jokes, were soul sisters—and had matching T-shirts to prove it. How did it degrade to this? It would have been laughable if it didn’t shine a dangerous spotlight on me.

“Felicity, you act like every single thing is a clue, and every single person is a suspect.”

I felt like I was stuck in a real-life version of Clue or Knives Out. Every character a villain, every backstory a motive. Felicity daggered me with a cold stare.

“Until Vera is home safely, everyone is a suspect, including you.”

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

Felicity

The Barkalicious Boutique was the one place I could let it all go. The anger at the cops for not finding Vera. The impatience with the doctors for not curing Sydney. The sadness over missing Marin’s friendship. The regret of secrets that my family kept from each other. The frustration with Oliver for not fixing everything. But most of all, the fear that terrorized me. Physically my body still hurt from the hit-and-run. Mentally my brain was fried from wondering who was after me and why. Emotionally my heart was empty of hope. My dog-grooming business, my cute little store that I’d started from the ground up, was the one place I could rest my embattled soul.