Lock You Down (Rivers Brothers 2)

I was released heavily medicated forty-eight hours later, just in time to buy a dress, to walk rubber-legged into the funeral home, to accept embraces from people who loved Sammy.

But none of them as much as me.

I loved her more than I loved myself.

The meds numbed me enough that I couldn't attach those feelings of love and loss together right, couldn't process the pain, couldn't purge it.

Which meant I was composed through the service, as stoic as my dad and brother. My mother had to sit on a couch in the back, embraced in the changing arms of her friends as she cried.

I don't really remember much about the days that followed. Luis was there. In my apartment. He canceled all his shoots to try to make sure his only sister stayed on this earth. He was the one who ordered food, forced me to eat, cleaned my apartment, dealt with my work and my bills.

Eventually, he was the one to bring me back to the doctor, to insist I was too medicated, that I was a zombie. And I was.

I was weaned back downward gradually, letting the grief slip in, letting my mind finally wrap itself around this new reality.

Sammy had killed herself.

She had left my home, gone back to her apartment, climbed into her tub, and slowly and carefully downed an entire bottle of the sleeping pills prescribed to her for her migraines.

Her words came back to my brain that was no longer numb and slow.

I want it to be over.

She hadn't meant the week like I had.

She had meant the obvious pain inside.

She had meant her life.

She told me.

She told me and I didn't listen.

I didn't hear.

I didn't take five minutes out of my own life to save hers.

Eight weeks after the funeral, Luis needed to go back to his life. I had to let him.

And I retreated wholly from my own.

I never went back to work.

I didn't need the money.

I didn't clean.

I barely ate.

I screened calls from my family.

I shirked all social obligations I had agreed to attend before.

It was somewhere around the tenth week that I decided I couldn't just accept that Sammy, this woman I knew as well as I knew my damn self, was somehow secretly hiding depression from me for weeks or months.

It made no sense.

Yes, even knowing all the stories about celebrities who were happy and smiling and laughing with their families but later went and hanged themselves or shot themselves or downed some pills.

I understood depression could be sneaky.

I was becoming intimately acquainted with it myself.

But there was just a gut feeling, something sharp and uncomfortable, that told me Sammy hadn't lost a battle with depression.

It was something else.

It had to be.

And I was going to figure it out.

With a purpose again, I showered, I changed, I got in my car, and I drove the hour toward Sammy's apartment.

Sammy lived in a beautiful area in a giant penthouse apartment she shared with one of her friends who, clearly, was raised just as wealthy as we had been.

She could have afforded to live alone, but Sammy always claimed she didn't like being alone, that she didn't feel safe. Despite the twenty-four-hour doorman and the state-of-the-art security system.

She liked having someone close by.

That someone, Charlotte Patrick, had been the one to find her body, to call the police, to get the police to call my parents.

I didn't remember seeing her at the service, but I was sure she had been there, my brain just was too sluggish to place her.

I let myself up using my key, avoiding the sad eyes of the doorman and the fellow tenants in the elevator.

But, for the first time, I knocked on the door.

Because Sammy didn't live there anymore.

"Reagan," Charlotte's voice sighed out of her, shoulders slumping. "It's nice to see you up and about," she added, no doubt having heard of my descent into grief, And the depth of it.

"She wasn't depressed, Char," I said by way of greeting, shaking my head.

"Okay," Charlotte said, inviting me in, closing the door behind me.

"You know I'm right."

"I do," she agreed, nodding. "She wasn't depressed."

"Something else happened."

"Yes."

She wasn't just agreeing with me to be polite because I was clearly just one bad day away from being back in the psych ward. And she wasn't doing it out of respect for the dead or wishful thinking.

She was agreeing because she knew.

She knew more than I did.

"You know what happened, don't you?" I asked, adrenaline surging through my system at the idea of getting an answer, stopping the voice in my head demanding I do so, driving me crazier by the hour.

"Sit, Reagan," she demanded, moving to do so herself.

Because it was more of a demand than a request, I did, dropping down on the couch, one large cushion between us.

"What happened?" I demanded, wincing at the raw sound of my own voice.