Page 41 of Sharp Lies

LILY

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I WAS STARING OUT THE window, trying to get my feelings in order, when my mother rolled into the kitchen.

“You’re up early,” she murmured, making her way toward the counter where we kept the coffee maker.

I grinned wryly. “More like I finally decided to get out of bed rather than lying there staring at the ceiling. I haven’t slept all night.”

She stared at me for a moment and looked like she was about to say something but kept her mouth shut. Honestly, I couldn’t blame her. So much had happened in the past twelve hours that it was hard to know where to start. First, the storm, when I’d rushed out of the house without a backward glance in my need to make sure Warren was okay. Then the broken windshield. Then the cozy scene in our house where I told my mother everything, including what Tony McCarthy had been doing and how I felt about Warren.

I mean, I didn’t exactly tell her how I felt about him. But my mom had known me for a long time, and she’d evidently seen all the things I hadn’t been saying.

And then she’d told me that he was in love with me too, and that she hoped I knew what I was doing when it came to him.

I thought I did, but I hadn’t touched the idea much after I climbed up to bed and tried to go back to sleep because the truth was I’d had slightly more pressing matters on my mind. Someone had come to our driveway in the middle of the night and put an axe through the windshield of my VW bus. I’d spent my blood, sweat, and tears—and quite a bit of money—restoring that bus with my own two hands, and then I’d taken it on the road with me. It had seen me through thick and thin as both my transportation and my house, and it held a very special place in my heart.

And some axe-wielding bus murderer had attacked it.

I didn’t think I’d be able to find the words to say how betrayed I felt over that or how personally I was taking the attack. Sure, it was just a van, but it was part of me, and it felt a whole lot like someone had shoved a knife right through my heart.

Which was probably the reason they’d done it.

I’d known last night that it had to be Tony McCarthy, and that hadn’t changed. Okay, he might have hired someone else to do the actually axe-wielding for him—it seemed like too much hard work for him to take care of personally—but that didn’t change the fact that I thought it could be laid directly at his feet. First of all, no one in town had any reason to do that other than him. It had been flat-out pouring when it happened, and the middle of the night, and we didn’t exactly live in a crime-ridden neighborhood. That hadn’t been some random drive-by axing, if there even was such a thing. That had been a targeted attack, and someone had taken it upon themselves to go out into a storm in the middle of the night to do it.

That was personal.

And there was only one person in the entire world mad enough at my existence to do something like that.

Part of me was terrified at the thought, because if Tony would do that to my van, what would he do to me? He’d choked me and slammed my head against a cupboard the last time I’d let him catch me alone, and he’d had five years to think about it since then. Five years when, in theory, he didn’t know where I was or what I was doing—or why I wasn’t calling him and apologizing for whatever he’d decided to be mad about that night. I’d seen him since then, of course, and he hadn’t hidden the fact that he expected me to fall right back into line. Let him charm me again. Let him woo me with his money and pretty words.

He also hadn’t hidden his anger at being turned down.

So I was guessing I wouldn’t be getting many more pretty words or flirty smiles. And I was also thinking the axe was my first warning about that.

None of which I wanted to voice out loud, even to my mother. It was one thing thinking about it and another thing admitting it in words. I also didn’t want her worrying about him coming to the house or coming after me. She needed to focus on her physical therapy and recovering from the car crash.

A car crash that I thought Tony might have caused.

I still hadn’t asked her if she remembered anything about what happened right before the accident, and that was also down to not wanting to make her worry. If she didn’t remember a Tony-shaped person running her off the road, I didn’t want her to get paranoid at the thought that he might have. She hadn’t said anything to me about it, so I was guessing she didn’t have that memory.

So that particular suspicion was staying in my head.

These thoughts had been chasing themselves around and around in my brain all night as I tried to figure out what I could do with any of it, and I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d wanted to go next door and talk to Warren about what was going on but had stopped myself, thinking that if he’d managed to fall asleep, he deserved to stay that way.

Besides, these were my problems, not his. I didn’t need to get him involved in drama he’d never asked for.

Sure, there was a voice in my head telling me I was being stupid and that I didn’t have to handle everything on my own now that I was back home again, and said voice was also saying that both my mom and Warren deserved to hear everything I was thinking. But I’d spent five years dealing with things on my own, the way I wanted to, and I wasn’t ready to let go of that yet.

So I was shutting that voice down.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

I looked up to see my mom had rolled to the table, coffee and creamer in hand. She set everything down, then rolled over to get the sugar. When she turned back to me, her face was full of suspicion and expectations.

“When I talked to you last night, you were dreamy-eyed over our handsome neighbor and looking like you were about to run over there and tackle him. Now you look so edgy I’m thinking you might jump up and run away at the slightest sound. So what gives?”

At that moment, someone knocked on the door, and I jumped so hard that I knocked my own coffee over. There was a scramble as my mother and I both tried to dart for the paper towels, my skirt getting caught in the wheels of her chair and taking me right to the ground, and as I fought to disentangle myself and get back to my feet, getting more tangled the more I struggled, I forgot about all my dark thoughts and just... acted.