Page 64 of Paper Ghosts

“They’re sneaky like that.”

“Are you anywhere near your kitchen? Do you want to have a midnight snack with me on the phone?”

She immediately stood. “Let me go downstairs. My dad has been thera-cooking a lot lately.”

“So you have a dad?”

“A good one.”

When she got to the dining room, she glanced out the French door windows and stopped. Theo was saying, “Do you have any idea why Ruby would keep geodes in her refrigerator? I’m too afraid to take them out, like maybe it would be bad luck.”

But she didn’t hear him. The man was back. If he wasn’t real, maybe her memory was haunting her, just like Mim’s memory of Jack.

She’d known intrinsically, from a lifetime of knowing Mim, that the story she’d told today wasn’t the whole story. Mim only gave things in pieces. And just like in her childhood, Bailey had to fill in the gaps.

Mim had said, Don’t be like me. But she had never let Bailey know the real her.

She’d said, Move on. But she hadn’t done that herself, for more reasons than she was letting on.

She’d said, Clutch is nothing to worry about. But the man was still out there. So until Bailey faced this, until she faced him, nothing was going to change.

“I’m sorry, Theo,” she said, lowering the phone even as she spoke. “I’ll have to call you back.”

She set the phone on the dining room table and opened the doors. She had to fight them, the wind and rain pushing back as if warning her. They slammed shut behind her as soon as she was outside.

She was immediately drenched, her sweatshirt becoming weighted and her Converses filling, giving her a wet-sock shiver. She stared across the yard, raindrops on her lashes. Lightning shone in the distance like the sweep of a flashlight, and it illuminated him more clearly than ever before.

It was Clutch. But it was the Clutch from eight years ago. Torn jeans, ripped T-shirt, the side of his face a strawberry rash of road burn. He was smiling that same smile that lived in her nightmares.

She took off in a sprint, taking him head-on, images coming to her as if on a screen.

The woods.

The music on her phone.

The fog on the water.

His arm on her throat.

The sound his body made when she hit him.

She suddenly slid on the grass and fell hard. It took her two tries to get up because her shoes kept slipping. She finally stood again, and he was gone. She turned in a circle.

“This ends now!” she yelled into the rain.

She listened for a reply. There was none. She went to the edge of the lawn and looked down the hill. It was ominously dark. Only the white caps of the water could be seen as it splashed downstream. “You don’t have any power over me anymore! I’m not afraid of you! I used to think I was the coward, but it was you!”

She felt a shifting under her feet, and she thought for a split second it was the universe finally righting itself. But then the ground started to depress. She was too close to the precipice, where the heavy rain was eating away at the bank. She felt herself slipping—down, down toward the water.

Then someone grabbed her arm and jerked her back.

Tasha, her nightgown plastered to her body, was standing there. Her open plaid umbrella was on the ground several feet away, as if she’d dropped it and run to Bailey the moment she realized she was about to go into the water. She still had a tight grip on Bailey’s arm. She looked terrified.

Bailey tried to shake her off. “Go back inside, Tasha,” she said, struggling to be heard over the rain.

“Who were you yelling at?”

“No one. Myself. This has nothing to do with you. Go back inside.”