I wasn’t going to have this conversation with her. “Nothing.”
“I get it,” Libby told me. “You hate him, and you have every right to. And, yes, the thing with Skye is kind of weird, but—”
“Weird,” I repeated. “Libby, she tried to have me killed!” It took me a full three seconds to realize what I’d done.
Libby stared at me. “What? When?” Libby knew Skye moved out—but she didn’t know why. “Have you told the police?” she demanded.
“It’s complicated,” I hedged. I was trying to figure out how to explain my promise to Grayson, but Libby didn’t give me more than a second.
“And I’m not,” she said quietly, her chin jutting out.
At first, I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “What?”
“I’m not complicated,” Libby clarified. “That’s what you think. It’s what you’ve always thought. I’m too optimistic and too trusting. I never went to college. I don’t think the way you think. I give people too many chances. I’m naive—”
“Where is this coming from?” I asked.
Blue hair fell into Libby’s face as she looked down. “Forget it,” she said. “I signed the emancipation papers. Pretty soon, you officially won’t have to listen to me. Or Dad. Or anyone.” Her voice caught. “That’s what you want, right?”
I hadn’t asked to be emancipated. That was all Alisa, but I recognized that it was probably the right move. “Lib, it’s not like that.” Before I could say anything else, my phone rang.
It was Jameson.
I looked back up from the screen to Libby. “I have to take this,” I told her. “But…”
Libby just shook her head. “You do what you have to do, Ave—and I’ll try not to cause any more scenes.”
CHAPTER 35
Hello?”
For a moment, there was silence on the phone. “Avery?”
I recognized that low, rich voice in a heartbeat. Not Jameson. “Grayson?” He’d never called me before. “Did something happen? Are you—”
“Jameson dared me to call.”
Nothing—literally nothing—about that sentence made sense. “Jameson what?”
“Jameson when, Jameson where, Jameson who?” That was Jameson, in the background, his voice taking on a musical lilt, his tone almost philosophical.
“Am I on speakerphone?” I asked. “And is Jameson drunk?”
“He shouldn’t be,” Grayson said, sounding truly disgruntled. “He doesn’t really turn down dares.”
Grayson wasn’t slurring his words. His speech wasn’t slow. His voice coated me, surrounded me—but it occurred to me suddenly that Grayson might be drunk.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re playing Drink or Dare.”
“You’re really good at guessing things,” drunk Grayson said. “Do you think the old man knew that about you?” His tone was hushed and almost confessional. “Do you think that he knew that you were… you?”
I heard a thud in the background. There was a long pause, and then one of them—I was betting on Jameson—started cracking up.
“We have to go,” Grayson said with a great deal of dignity, but when he went to hang up the phone, he must have hit the wrong button, because I could still hear the two of them.
“I think we can both agree,” Jameson said, “that it’s time for Drink or Dare to give way to Drink or Truth.”
A better person probably would have hung up right then, but I turned the volume on my phone all the way up.
“What did you say to Avery,” I heard Jameson ask, “the night we solved the old man’s puzzle?”
Grayson hadn’t said anything to me that night. But the next day, after he’d sent Skye on her way, he’d had plenty to say. I will always protect you. But this… us… It can’t happen, Avery.
“Because right after that,” Jameson continued, “she took to the tunnels with me.”
Grayson started to say something—what, I couldn’t quite hear—but then he cut off. “The door,” Grayson said, clear as day. He sounded dumbfounded.
Someone’s at the door, I realized. And then I heard some more muffled sounds. And then I heard Grayson’s father.
At first, I couldn’t entirely make out the words being exchanged, but at some point, either the conversation moved closer to the phone, or the phone moved closer to the conversation, because suddenly, I hear every word.