Page 42 of Ruin Me Sweetly

Amber Rayne is in a relationship with Zach Rayne.

I sat completely still, staring at my phone as if the screen might rearrange itself into something that made sense. It didn’t. The words stayed exactly where they were, small and impossible and glowing back at me.

It had to be a joke, right?

The office around me kept moving—Priya’s laugh drifting from the desk two doors down, the printer humming through another set of exhibition labels, a delivery van reversing somewhere in the car park below. All of it carried on as though the world hadn’t just tilted sideways beneath me.

I read it again. And again. Willing the surname to blur, to change, to belong to some other Zach entirely.

But it didn’t.

My hands had gone cold around the phone. My heart pounded somewhere far too high in my throat, and for a long, disorienting moment, I couldn’t seem to remember how to breathe properly. Zach. My Zach. Clive’s Zach. The boy I’d tucked into bed a hundred times, the boy who’d once called me nothing at all for years, who I’d grieved as though I’d lost a second son the day he walked out the door.

And Amber. My Amber. My baby.

Together.

I set the phone down on the desk, very carefully, as though it might go off if I moved too fast.

I don’t know how much time passed, but I called Luke, utterly shell-shocked. The guilt hit the moment he said those words again.

I’m on my way.

He knew I’d been uneasy since Sadie used her Land Rover to try and squish me like a bug. The SUV had been waiting near the pickup and drop-off section at the supermarket. She’d waited until I was crossing the road before she’d put her foot down.

Luke said the verbal abuse from her had been sporadic, but he was capturing all of it from her Kristie Killer email account.

She obviously hadn’t watched enough true crime documentaries, or she’d have known to disguise herself, or at least use an anonymous name, before committing a crime.

I closed my eyes and thought about Zach and Amber.

Then it hit me.

Shortly after Christmas, she’d broken up with Nolan.

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Deep, long breaths.

Inhale. Exhale.

Do not kill your children.

Just keep breathing through it all.

❧ ❧ ❧

His hand kept coming to rest on my leg as he drove us home. He’d slide his palm up and down, as though he were willing me to calm down through touch alone. My mind wouldn’t stop spinning. What could I even say to Amber?

You can’t date your brother?

I knew exactly what she’d say back—that he wasn’t her biological brother, that none of it counted the way I wanted it to. My palm drifted to rest on my belly, an anchor I didn’t quite mean to reach for.

“Do you have any cousins?” I asked Luke, needing something, anything, to hold onto that wasn’t Zach and Amber’s names colliding in my head.

I already knew my side of the family was sparse. Luke had no siblings. My Aunt Sophie and her husband had moved to Australia years ago and rarely called.

Family. There weren’t many of us left to speak of.