Extremely Classified-Deleted Scenes from the Gallagher Girls Series

OSOT

Sometime in the night I heard voices. There was talking in the other room, I could hear it through the old stone walls.

"She doesn't know," someone was saying.

"She's stubborn," someone else agreed.

The walls were cold and hard beneath my fingers and yet I clawed as if I could crawl through the other side. I felt my back arch off of the too thin mattress and I opened my mouth to scream but nothing came. No words. No truth. No lies. The words were gone and voice kept talking and my fingers still clawed until they bled.

"Cammie," another voice said, closer. "Gallagher Girl!" someone snapped. "Wake up."

And then I did. I bolted upright and realized I was lying on a king sized bed, Macey and Bex on either side of me. I would have had to crawl physically over Bex to go anywhere.

In other words, I wasn't going anywhere.

"What was it?" the words came floating to me through the dark and Zach leaned forward out of the shadows of the corner of the room. He was a threadbare chair, hands resting on his knees, looking as if he was never going to bed ever again.

"Go to sleep, Zach," I whispered and lay back down on the pillow, but he was standing. The jacket he'd been using as a blanket dropped to the floor. It was the same one that had been soaked with Abby's blood almost a year before. "Go away."

"What was it?"

Beside me, I felt Bex stir and rise. She wasn't even a little bit groggy when she asked, "What happened?"

"Nothing," I said, pushing past her and out of the bed, found myself walking down a hallway I didn't recognize, through a house I didn't know. I'd never been there before. That I knew of. And those days I hated how little I knew.

"Cammie," Abby said, meeting me in a living room. I saw Townsend splayed across a sofa, sleeping like the dead.

"I'm fine," I hissed and walked into an old kitchen. It had the kind of heavy cast iron stove that is so common in Europe and for the first time in months I wasn't cold. I wasn't sleepy. I wasn't anything.

"Come on, Gallagher Girl," Zach said. "Try to rest."

"I don't need rest, Zach. I need answers."

"Cammie, we already know so much." It was Bex who said it, standing in the doorway with Macey beside her.

"We don't know anything."

I believed it because it was true. The details that we had gathered were nothing but a fog inside my pitch black mind.

"We've got this." I reached for my father's journal. "Which-by the way-we had six months ago. We don't know where I went or what they did to me." I heard my voice crack. "I don't know where I messed up."

Suddenly and fiercely I missed Mr. Solomon. Mr. Solomon would know where I went wrong. He'd know how to keep me from making the same mistakes again.

"But all I have is this." I took the journal I'd treasured above everything else a few months before and hurled it against the wall.

"Cammie!" Abby hissed. She sounded just like my mother. She went to her knees as if to ask my father for forgiveness as she picked the small book off the floor. I had to remind myself she loved him too. Missed him too. Wanted to know what happened as badly as I did.

"Abby, I'm..."

But then I couldn't finish because the journal was on my aunt's lap and an envelope was in her hands. It must have been tucked inside the journal I hadn't even bothered to open.

"What is that?" Bex asked, pushing forward then she looked at me. "Is it from you?"

"No," I said, shaking my head and looking at my father's handwriting, the words FOR MY GIRLS. "It's for me."