Series: Webs We Weave Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 167
Estimated words: 162520 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 813(@200wpm)___ 650(@250wpm)___ 542(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 162520 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 813(@200wpm)___ 650(@250wpm)___ 542(@300wpm)
“They gave me their two weeks’ notice.”
“I told Phoebe to give you a two-hour notice.” I swig beer.
“Thanks, jackass.” He rotates the beer, staring back at the water. “I’m glad they quit on their own terms.”
I make a face. “So you wouldn’t have to fire them?”
“I would’ve figured out how to keep them, but I like that they get to work together and own something.”
Like Mystic Pizza, I realize, and I roll my eyes and laugh. Fuck. How did I not make the comparison before? Instead of owning a pizza shop, the girls now own the bookstore. It’s in their name. It’s not mine anymore.
“They’re so fucking cliché,” I say, but I can’t help but smile.
Jake smiles off mine. “Did you get everything you wanted?”
I nod slowly in thought. “Yeah. I did.”
Revenge.
Love.
Power.
“And I keep thinking, Was it worth the cost? But I barely had to pay a cost.” I glance over at Jake. “I keep waiting for the reaper to come collect.”
“You and Phoebe have been paying the cost your whole lives,” Jake says. “He already collected.”
That almost breaks me. I bend into a lunge and dip my head toward the railing, my eyes scalding. His hand stays on my shoulder, and I recognize that he deeply understands what Phoebe and I have been through. He endured the emotional turmoil of loving a girl inside a job where you can’t be together, where you have to see her with another man and protect her from the same horrific man. He did it for three months.
I’ve done it for over ten years.
FIFTY
Hailey
Three minutes till midnight, Phoebe and I trek through the old cemetery in Victoria wearing woolen coats and laced boots. Leaves crunch beneath our feet, and fog hangs low over lichen-covered headstones. It’s eerily quiet, except for the hoot of an owl. I’m unsurprised to see my best friend grinning like we’re at Disney World.
I’ve always loved how much Phoebe loves the strange and scary.
She makes me less afraid.
Her hand reaches out to mine, almost unconsciously, and I clasp her fingers as we hike farther off the path and the hill steepens. I place a protective hand on my round belly. She’s a kicker, in a hurry to meet the world, but it’s definitely not time yet.
December, she’ll be here.
I can make it two more months.
Olly says her restlessness is because of all the books we keep reading out loud. She senses the world is so much bigger than the cramped darkness she’s inside now. I already love her, as she fights to escape her confines. Like a princess in a tower.
I step over a root.
Phoebe touches the gold heart-shaped locket at her neck. “You think we’re the first here?” she whispers.
“I told them not to be late,” I whisper back. “I think we’re the ones cutting it close.”
She scoffs. “We’re early. Like by ten minutes.”
I raise my brown leather Tiffany Gondolo watch that Jake gifted me. He’d seen me admiring it online. “Late by like one minute.” I put the watch in her face.
She scoffs even louder. “Nonsense. All you have to do is spin that little knob on the side and we’re ten minutes early. Turn back time, Hails.”
“I’d rather not,” I say too deeply, my eyes flooding as they meet the depth of hers.
She squeezes my hand, and I squeeze back as she says, “Me either.”
In the very beginning, it might’ve just been two girls, Elizabeth and Addison, who likely went by other names. Just as likely their childhood friendship didn’t start over something so innocent—a shared snow cone on a hot summer day. Likely, that was just a story.
I’m satisfied letting theirs go, no longer plagued with needing every fragmented detail. Fiction or fact—their story has no bearing on ours anymore. We’ve been writing our own. Pens in our hands. Indelible ink that won’t be easily scrubbed away.
I know Phoebe has been tormented at the idea of our story mirroring our moms’, of history repeating itself, but she forgets one important thing.
In our beginning, there weren’t just two girls.
As we come into a clearing at the deepest part of the cemetery, the boys of our childhood turn around to greet us.
We are the last ones to arrive. “Just like old times,” Phoebe says to me, and we share a grin, remembering a long-ago job at a coed boarding school. Where we all snuck out into a graveyard and passed around a bottle of booze.
Only now, Oliver has an aluminum flask, and they’re no longer boys. They’re hardened, timeworn confidence men.
Rocky looks like he’s hating every moment of this, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Especially as Phoebe approaches him and he slides an arm around his wife.
I join the huddle, closing the circle as I slip beside Jake.
Our newest member. My pinched smile puckers my cheeks the longer his affectionate gaze touches mine, as though he loves me.