Next-Door Nemesis(48)
If anyone can talk some sense into me right now, it’s definitely Ruby. And Ashleigh—forgetting that she has sold both leggings and essential oils since I’ve known her—has been so supportive and kind since we’ve met. I know that if I want to keep from locking myself inside my bedroom for another week, I’m going to have to open up to them.
“Okay.” I drop my voice to a whisper and lean toward the table. “I need you to both help straighten me out because my mind is all jumbled.”
“The entire point of this trip is to straighten you out.” Ruby takes a long sip of her water before leaning back in the metal chair and making herself comfortable. “So shoot.”
Ashleigh nods emphatically. “I’m not the best at straightening people out, but I am a good listener.”
Since she’s listened to multiple rants from me and sat quietly during the longest HOA meeting ever, I know this to be a fact.
“Okay.” I take a long breath and try to figure out where to start. “So Ruby already knows, but just to make sure we’re all on the same page, Nate and I used to be really great friends. Besides Ruby, he was my best friend for quite some time, so he actually knows a lot about me.”
“Obviously I’ve always been her fun friend,” Ruby says to Ashleigh.
“Obviously.” Ashleigh laughs.
“Anyways!” I pretend to sound annoyed, but I’m sure the smile on my face gives me away. “When I was over at Nate’s the other night, even though a lot of time has passed and we’ve both lived a lot of life, it was really nice talking to him again. There’s something so comforting about having a shared history with someone and not having to explain myself. I don’t know, it just really made me miss him and our friendship.”
“That’s kind of sweet.” Ruby couldn’t sound more annoyed by this. I don’t blame her. I feel the exact same way. It’s the worst.
“It was. Which is how I got lost in the moment and I forgot what things are really like between the two of us now. I forgot I couldn’t trust him to not use what happened with Peter against me.”
I keep trying to figure out how I missed his true intentions. But every time I think back on that night, all I remember is sincerity in his hazel eyes and compassion in his deep voice. There was no way I could’ve known. The saddest part is, even knowing what I know now, if he were to look at me the way he did the other night and open up, I’d make the same mistakes all over again.
“Wait.” Ashleigh sits up straight in her seat. “I know you’re pissed about the video getting out—as you should be; that was super uncool—but are you saying you think Nate’s behind it?”
I can’t tell if this is a rhetorical question or not. I look to Ruby for help, but she just widens her eyes and shrugs.
I try to think of something other than duh or are you fucking kidding me to say, but it’s not easy. Becoming a better person is really hard. Maybe I should reward myself with an extra shot of tequila . . .
“Well, yeah,” I say after some thought. “I talked to him one night and a few hours later it’s plastered all over the HOA website by the woman who is always clinging to him? It doesn’t take a detective to piece those clues together.”
The part of all this that stings but that I haven’t given life to is the woman he told. I might’ve known that Angela was a bitch the moment I laid my eyes on her, but I can’t deny that she’s very pretty. Or that she looks an awful lot like Nate’s ex-fiancée . . . and the girlfriend he came back to school with after the summer he disappeared on me.
Ashleigh’s cornflower-blue eyes dance with mischief, and the smug smile pulling on the corners of her lips looks out of place on her perpetually kind face. “I hate to break it to you, but if you’re thinking about a second career as an investigator, you might want to think again.”
I tilt my head to the side, narrowing my eyes as I try to comprehend what, exactly, she’s trying to say. Ruby, my not-so-mild-mannered friend, slams her hands down on the tabletop and screams, “Come again? What do you mean by that?”
It feels as if the bustling rooftop comes to a screeching halt and all eyes focus on our table. I want to shrink beneath the attention. I want to crawl right back into my bed and throw the covers over my head.
But I can’t.
Not now.
Not when it feels like the crux of my entire existence depends on the answer.
Thankfully, Ashleigh must sense my desperation, or—more likely—fear Ruby, because she doesn’t hesitate to explain.
“However Angela came across that video, it was not because of Nate,” she says. “Rumor has it that even though Angela is married, she has a giant crush on Nate. Which, to be fair, is understandable. Nate is so cute and nice. I met her husband once and he’s not terrible to look at, but he corrected almost everything she said and—”
“Ashleigh, I love you so much and you know I love hearing neighborhood gossip, but could we maybe finish about Nate before switching to Angela’s husband?” Desperation is dripping out of my pores, or maybe that’s all the booze we’ve been drinking, but either way, I need her to focus.
“Oh yeah, sorry.” Her cheeks turn pink, but she gets back to the story at hand. “After you went over to his house, he started posting in the Facebook group, demanding the admins remove the video, and once he did, he went over to her house and in a way only Nate can do, he tore her a new one without ever raising his voice and using words some of the neighbors had to google. He made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the video was never to be posted and that if she knew the entire story, she’d be ashamed of herself.”