“So it’s like this every morning? I’ve forgotten everything from the day before?”
“Usually.” She picks at a thread on her pencil skirt. “You have better days sometimes. But the last month has been rough. Before that, you seemed happy most of the time when I saw you. But now you’re always crying. And you seem…”
I lift my eyebrows. “I seem what?”
“Scared. You always seem scared of something.”
She isn’t wrong. But who wouldn’t be scared in this situation? Every morning, I wake up next to a stranger. In my own bed! In hisunderwear!
“Lucy,” I say, “what happened to Harry?”
She frowns. “That’s another thing. Every time we talk, you ask me about Harry. You used to just occasionally ask about him. But now, it’s like you’re desperate to see him every day.”
My eyes fill with tears again. “The last thing Iremember is him getting down on one knee and proposing to me…”
A smile twitches at Lucy’s lips. “Right. The keyboard proposal. That was… um, cute.”
“It was so romantic!”
“It was signature dorky Harry.” She rolls her eyes. “If that’s what you like…”
“Harry and I are supposed to be married by now.” I sniffle loudly. “If I woke up next tohimevery morning, I could deal with all this. But Graham…”
“Graham is nice.” She sounds almost exasperated. I wonder how many times she’s had this conversation with me. “He’s a good guy. So much better for you than Harry.”
“Maybe…” But as she says those words, something flashes in my head. Something about Graham. But I can’t quite grab onto it. My memory has become so frustrating.
“He cares about you a lot, Tess.” She lowers her voice a notch. “Also, he’s really handsome, don’t you think so?”
“I… I guess so.” Yes, Graham is attractive. But when I look at him, I feel nothing. “In my head, I’m engaged to someone else. Someone I love. So even though Graham is nice and he’s handsome…”
“He’s not Harry.”
I nod miserably.
Lucy crosses her legs. “Has Harry tried to contact you at all? Like, on your phone?”
“What do you mean?”
She glances around, as if checking to see if somebody is listening in. “Like, has he sent you any text messages? Or tried to call you?”
“I don’t have a phone, so…”
Lucy frowns. “You don’t?”
“Graham pointed out that I would probably lose it. And he let me use his. He gave me my father’s number this morning and I tried to call him.”
“Yes, but—” Lucy starts to say something, but abruptly stops. She chews on her lip, looking across the sofa at me. “Graham didn’t give you a phone to use this morning?”
“No…” My stomach sinks. “Are you saying that he usually gives me a phone?”
She hesitates. “No, not at all. That’s not what I’m saying.”
But Lucy is a terrible liar. Whenever she’s lying, her whole face turns as red as her hair. I’m beginning to think that I did have a phone. And for whatever reason, Graham decided he didn’t want me to have it anymore.
And then that memory comes back to me. A little tiny snippet of Harry’s voice whispering in my ear.
Graham has a desk upstairs. There’s a drawer that’s always locked, and you said you think that’s where he’s keeping whatever he’s giving you.
