Kat
“WHAT THE HELL?”
Silas nearly falls out of the tiny bed. I grab his arm, not that it would help, and blink because everything is blurry, someone’s shouting, I’m mostly naked, and I’ve got no idea where I am.
“The police?” the shouter shouts, and I swear it sounds like he’s right outside the door of… right, Silas’s cabin in the middle of the woods. That’s where I am.
“Search and rescue?!” he goes on. “You called search and rescue?”
Silas is out of bed and swearing already, the early sunlight glowing in through two small curtained windows.
“Fuck. That’s Javi,” he says, shaking out the pants he was wearing yesterday.
“He’s back,” I offer, pulling the blanket over myself.
“And pissed.”
“But he’s back.”
Silas blows out a breath, his shirt held in one hand, as he shoves a hand through his hair. Then he smiles, the relief practically cracking his face in half.
“Yeah. Thank fuck.”
“You were gone for three days,” Gideon says, outside the cabins. “The fuck were we supposed to do?”
“Not call my mom!” Javier says. “Not call my father, because now half the Navy is going through Norfolk and Portsmouth, hanging up have you seen this unfortunate young man posters!”
Silas shoves open his cabin door, shirt mostly on.
“We didn’t tell your father,” he says, walking out and letting the door swing shut behind him.
“Someone fucking did,” Javier says. “You called the cops? You called search and rescue?”
“Your car was here and you weren’t.” That’s Gideon again, sounding even more pissed off. “Tell me, what were we supposed to think?”
There’s no answer as I pull on the same thing I was wearing yesterday and finally grab my glasses from the crate by the bed. When I come through the door, blinking in the just-barely-dawn, Javier’s standing stock-still in the open doorway of his own cabin.
“Did you go through my shit?” he asks, his voice quieter now and twice as dangerous.
“We were hoping you’d left a note,” says Silas.
Everyone’s out here now: Levi and June in the middle, near the fire pit; Wyatt and Lainey in front of his cabin, looking tired. I can see the circles under Wyatt’s eyes from here.
Javier steps in, looks around. There’s a long, tense silence before he shouts again.
“You find anything?” he asks. “Anything at all? Some pills? A beer bottle? Did you find a fucking Snickers?”
“No,” says Silas, who’s finally raising his voice. “We also didn’t find a single fucking clue of where you’d gone for three days without talking to anyone.”
“I don’t owe you knowledge of every movement! You don’t have to keep an eye on me!”
“Where the fuck were you, then?” That’s Gideon.
We’re all slowly moving closer to the three of them, like the circle is closing in. I sort of feel like I’m snooping and don’t know what else I could do, given the volume of the argument.
“It’s none of your business,” Javier says.
That gets another long, tense silence, and I can feel everyone looking at each other.