Broken Compass

“Okay. So… what does this all mean?”

“I dunno, Syd. I’m thinking… What if it wasn’t his uncle he was running away from? What if Zane’s memory isn’t perfect when it comes to the uncle? What if Kash really went back home? He is heir to a fortune, after all, and now he is of legal age.”

My heart sinks.

Which is stupid and selfish. Better if he’s with his uncle and heir to a fortune than dead in a ditch somewhere, right?

Or here with us. Why not this last option? Why can’t we get a happy ending together?

“He wouldn’t do that,” I whisper. “Leave us without saying goodbye, at least. And why are there never any pictures of Kash in these articles? This smells fishy to me.”

“Come on, Syd. As it turns out, we barely know Kash.”

“I know him. And no way. He wouldn’t have done this.”

He wouldn’t do this to us.

But doubt is eating at me and it keeps gnawing at my thoughts as I go through the motions at work, and stare without seeing the texts I’m studying for my diploma, as I take the bus home.

He wouldn’t.

Is he there right now, in that mansion shown in the article? Of that there is a pic all right. It looks like a palace with open grounds around it, and lawns, and tennis courts.

Was Kash biding his time until now, until he came of legal age to claim what was his? But who was he running from, then? None of this makes any sense.

Why has his uncle been lying, saying Kash was in a boarding school somewhere in Europe when he was here all along, smoking weed through panic attacks and scraping by to make a living?

There were clues, of course. Clues I totally missed. Like the expensive things he had and sold to set us up here. I thought he’d stolen them.

But maybe he hadn’t. Maybe they had been his. He’d run, taking with him some things of value.

I still want to talk to the pusher who said he saw something involving Kash. And it’s time to go back to the journal and read it to the end.

“Syd. Come here,” Nate says as I put the final touches to my make-up. Since he came back from his appointment with the psychologist yesterday, he’s been off. “You said you’d tell us where you go with Gigi and why.”

“You’re right. I said that.”

Then again, he can’t be all that happy with me going off all the time without them to drink and dance with my friend. I know he and West go out for drinks sometimes, and I wish I were with them. I wish I didn’t have secrets from them.

“Well?” He’s glowering at me, his eyes like fire under his lashes. He snags my hand when I approach and hauls me in his lap. “Talk.”

West approaches us and sits beside us. “Is it another man?” He slides his hand up my arm to my neck and brushes his thumb over the thick vein beating frantically there, pressing gently. Measuring my wild heartbeat.

“What? Of course not.” I hadn’t even considered I was hurting them with such a possibility. “Never. I love you guys with all my heart!”

Nate growls. “Good. You can’t keep hiding from us. Tell us what is going on.”

And it’s a relief to have the secrets forced from me, to have his anger at hiding anything from him. From both of them.

We are together, and they should know. They deserve to know, they deserve to worry and ache along with me.

So I tell them. About my idea that Kash’s dealers might know something, about the pusher who might have seen something. About my need to find out if it’s true, if it’s important, before I let it go and accept that Kash has walked away from us of his own free will.

No matter how much it hurts, or how much I want to hate him for it.

“But there’s no need any more to ask the dealers, is there?” West says. “Kash is with his uncle. What does it matter?”

“There are no pics,” I insist. “No proof he’s with his uncle.”