“It was his stressor.”
“What?” I asked Maria as she stared at the note.
“His stressor, the thing that caused his psychological break to make him coo-coo.” She whistled and spun her fingers in a circle next to her temple.
“How do you even know anything about that?” I brought my legs to my chest and hugged my knees tight.
Maria took her phone out and took a picture of the note, and then laid it on the counter. “I watch a lot of Criminal Minds.” She crossed her arms under her breasts and checked the time on the oven. “What are you going to do? I’m not going to leave you here, and I need to go to work. I’m covering for someone tonight. You can’t be alone right now. He can be anywhere.”
“I feel like he is everywhere.” I shivered from the uneasiness and glanced around to make sure he wasn’t near me or hiding in a corner.
“He isn’t here, but do you want to call your brother? He needs to be here. Well, someone needs to be here.”
“I don’t want to leave the apartment. I’m safer here, but at the same time, I can’t let him run my life. If I stay here alone, then he can come here, and no one will be here, if I go with you, he won’t bother me.”
“I work until three in the morning, can you hang with me that long?”
My eyes rounded when I heard how late she worked. “Three? That’s like six hours past my bedtime.”
“You still give yourself a bedtime?” Maria glanced at the note on the counter, biting her lip as if something was bothering her.
“If I said no, would you stop hanging out with me?”
“I’ll have to think about it.” Maria smiled, but for the first time, it didn’t take over her entire face. Great. Now she was scared. She’d never come around me again.
“I understand if you don’t want to be my friend anymore. This isn’t exactly normal.”
“Normal? God no, you are anything but normal. You are the quirkiest person I have ever met and this? This is just a little action right when I thought you were getting boring.” She took three steps toward me and braced herself on the chair. “Lucy, I’m not that kind of friend that runs away when my friend needs me. If those are the people you are used to, I’m glad you moved because you needed new people.”
I did need new people. She was right about that. No one who wasn’t my brother had ever been there for me like Maria had. This was my new beginning, my new start, my way of getting new people, and I didn’t care what I had to do; Brian would not ruin that for me.
He wouldn’t.
Chapter Ten
Godrick
“Mr. Stoneridge?”
I glanced up from the blueprints I had in front of me of the new building to see Logan Green. “How can I help you Mr. Green?” I started sketching a new idea on the blueprint and then erased it. I couldn’t make up my damn mind. They were rough drafts, nothing too special yet. The workers had already started on the foundation of the building, but I’m nipping and tucking a few things about the building, adding another story, subtracting the scenic rooftop, and then changing my mind last minute and adding it back. Those aren’t things that I need to worry about right this moment, but in a few weeks, I’d need the final blueprint to get this building up and running across the river.
“I know I only got here a few hours ago, but I really need to leave. Something has happened at home, and my sister needs me.”
Pure fucking terror ices my veins. “Lucy? Is she okay?” I hurry around the desk, not giving a damn about the blueprint any longer. “What happened?”
“May I?” Logan asked as he took one foot inside my office.
“Come in, please. Tell me about Lucy. Is she safe?” My mind raced to a million different scenarios. I knew I shouldn’t have left her alone. Watching her the last five days without one single touch nearly drove me off a damn cliff, literally. I had been driving, and all I thought about was her wearing all those short dresses to work, proving that she did, in fact, own more than one dress that drove me crazy.
My mind was so focused on her, I didn’t make a turn I should have and nearly flew over a guard rail, but I corrected myself in time.
Logan stepped inside and took off his baseball cap. His shirt was wet with a day of hard work, and his jeans were filthy with dried cement. “I’m coming to you man to man, not employee to boss.”
I sat down in the chair in front of my desk and crossed my right ankle over my left knee. “I can respect that. I honestly do not care about anything else besides Lucy.”
“Alright,” Logan rubbed his palm over his mouth, seeming a
bit ragged. “Didn’t you say your friend Cortez was going to make sure she was safe? After what happened at the bar, Brian should be in jail.”