What feels like only minutes later, Sophie clears her throat. Only moving my eyes, I look up at her. “Do you need something?” I huff, “I’m mid page here.”

She laughs. “You’ve been missing for an hour and a half, I’m ready to take lunch. Do you want to check that one out, or?”

I stand, letting the pages fall together, closing the door on Ellie and her friends, leaving them to fight the war alone. “Oh, this? No, I have it at home, I just haven’t read it in so long — it missed me; we were getting reacquainted.”

A smile graces Sophie’s lips and we walk in silence, out of the library and to her car.

* * *

“See? Perfectly safe. No surprises here. I bet if you wave at that security camera.” I point to the one directly above the front door “Tanner will magically appear,” I say, throwing my hands in the air and spinning around in a circle.

“Why don’t I doubt that for a second,” she says and we both burst into laughter.

I place the two containers of Pad Thai, along with the plastic cutlery, down on the coffee table. We eat the takeout, which we picked up on the way here, and Soph harasses me about staying vigilant.

It’s not that I don’t feel threatened by what’s going on, I just feel as though we have enough precautions in place to keep me safe. Maybe my relaxed state of mind has something to do with the fact that I am looking for these guys, and if they want to place themselves in front of me, make my job easier, then so be it. I want to find them; to understand what happened to my dad and Kyle, and to seek my own justice for them both. Jesse disagrees. He wants to get the police involved as soon as we have enough evidence, but me? I would be happy to go all dark and twisted, and deal with them however I see fit.

Giving Sophie a brief hug, something I have had to come to terms with in our friendship, I promise to not stay in my apartment alone any longer than I need to be; then we say our goodbyes.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Tanner