Wistful Remembrance (Wattys 2014 HQ Love Award Winner!)

15. I'm Not Bossy...I Just Know What You Should Be Doing

Chapter 15

I’m Not Bossy…I Just Know What You Should Be Doing

 

 

Everyone was looking at John like he’d gone mad.  Why?  Because he had this creepy grin on his face, which made them stay away from him.  They didn’t even realize what was sitting on one of the tables in the library when they’d come in either.  In their defense, neither did I, mostly because he was smiling the same way when I’d come in before everyone else.  Even Juliet, who had come back earlier that morning from Pallandino, looked a little wary.

I stayed away, too, until he grabbed me by the hand and pulled me over.

“Okay, spill,” Ren finally said after a long few minutes of silence.  “What’s going on…unless you’ve officially lost your mind?  Then we’re sending you to a nuthouse.”

John’s grin broadened.  “Call me crazy all you want…but you’ll be in a moment once I show you all something.”

Letting go of my hand, he strode over to the table, picking up the book before placing it gently down on the table.  With the way he’d been acting, all excited and giddy, I was half expecting him to toss it at them.  He opened the front cover where we’d placed Lorraine Ellis’s note between it and the first page and gestured for them to take a look.  Juliet and Kate leaned forward, eyes scanning the pages.

“You found it,” Kate whispered, eyes glistening as they turned back up to John. 

“Emmy found it,” John said, turning his eyes - full of admiration – to me.  “Both of us couldn’t sleep, so we were reading through some of the books.  I’d had a pile on the table and she just picked one up to start flipping through.  And there it was.”

He didn’t mention the reason as to why I was down there, which I was grateful for.  That was the last thing my parents, especially my mom, needed to hear.  She would drag all of us home in a heartbeat, send me back to my therapist, and demand I be put back on my medication fully. 

She didn’t even know I hadn’t been taking it ever since we got to Paris. 

Everyone was leaning over the table as Kate flipped through some of the pages, pointing and reading passages out loud.  They all looked so excited with smiles plastered on their faces, laughing at the relief that we’d finally found it. 

Drake was the only one who was looking down at the book with furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips.  He seemed to be the only one who to realize that it was now that we could go get the three missing pages from the museums in Paris, D.C., and London.  And after that…well, that was still to be decided. 

“So this one isn’t the original,” Ryan said, reading the note from Lorraine Ellis.  “Why would Wesley Parsons want Lorraine Ellis to translate it?  Did he think none of us would have been able to read it or something?”

John rolled his eyes.  “Well, probably not that.  But maybe it was because all three of us – meaning the Brotherhood, the Knights, and the Order – knew what it looked like.  They wanted to hide it, so they had to make it look exactly like all the other books.”

“What this Lorraine Ellis said, though,” Dad started, holding up her note.  “What the last three pages lead to…will it really change everything?  Do we even have the faintest idea of what it could be?”

“I really don’t know what it could lead to…so we’ll see.”

While they poured over the book, John sat down in the chair at the end of the table.  He was about to pull me down in his lap, but there was no way that was happening since it wasn’t just the two of us.  So instead, I settled for sitting on the arm of the chair…and he settled for wrapping his arm around my waist, resting his hand on my leg.  Still really not appropriate, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.