“What do you mean you don’t know? Look on Find My.”
“His phone’s off. His last reported location was Rush Creek.”
His eyebrows draw together. “Wait a second. I thought we were following him here on Find My.”
I shake my head.
“We came all the way here with no idea where he is?”
“Charlie said he was here.”
His look of disgust deepens. “Charlie is hisbrother. Why would he tell you the truth about where he is?”
“Because I threatened him?” I hazard.
Rhys scowls, shaking his head. “I thought youknewhe was here. I assumed we were following his dot on Find My. I wouldn’t have driven five hours on Charlie’s say-so.”
I’m tired and hungry, and Rhys makes me want to dig in my heels. “Well, I don’t know where he is, but Charlie said he was coming here.”
“Maybe he went into town for dinner?” he suggests.
I duck my head and one arm into the cobwebby underside of the porch to extract the house key.
“Seriously?” he says. “They leave the key to their mansion under theporch? There’s probably someone in there cooking meth.”
“You’regrim.”
“I live in the real world,” he says. “It’s grim.”
“You live in a grim corner of the real world. Everyone you meet is angry and hurting. It gives you a skewed view.”
He rolls his eyes. “Thank you for the free therapy.”
I climb the side steps and slide the key into the lock.
“Are you sure you should be doing that?” he asks.
“Doing what?”
“Breaking into a house that’s not yours?”
I give it about three seconds of thought and conclude that Paul’s decision to jilt me gives me all kinds of legal rights I wouldn’t have otherwise had. “They should be glad I didn’t smash a window and climb in,” I tell him.
He arches an eyebrow but mounts the steps behind me.
The house is two stories, with the entrance on the bottom floor and the bulk of the house upstairs. It smells faintly of disinfectant when we enter; Paul’s family has it professionally cleaned every three weeks regardless of whether they’re here or not. When I learned that, I thought about my grandmother, meticulously scrubbing every corner of the house where I mostly grew up, almost completely by hand. Of course, even if she’d had enough money to hire someone to clean it, she might have insisted on doing it anyway, teeth gritted and shoulders squared, determined not to enjoy herself at any cost.
He follows me up the stairs, and I turn on the lights, flooding the big open great room. It’s built out of ash-light wood, with a soaring cathedral interior and floor-to-ceiling windows that offer an unobstructed view of the Pacific. The kitchen is all pale neutrals, Scandinavian design—the expensive kind, not the Ikea version—and granite countertops.
“Nice,” Rhys says.
The lights are off, the air in the house still in a way that suggests it’s been days since anyone set foot inside. “It definitely doesn’t look like Paul’s been here.” I cross to the couch and collapse onto it. “Where is he?”
“We should go back to Rush Creek,” Rhys says. “We can’t keep driving without knowing where we’re going. He could be anywhere.”
My shoulders slump. He’s right. Without knowing where Paul is, we could easily have driven entirely the wrong direction. He could be halfway to the Grand Canyon by now.
I pull out my phone. Tap into Find My, and?—
