Born Losers

32.

February 27
59 Weeks Before
4:22 p.m.

"Would you knock it off?"

Graham stuck his sunny head around the doorframe and glared at her, stopped her in her sixteen-step track.

"Knock what off?" she asked, perplexed.

"Your stupid widow's walk, or whatever you're doing in here. I'm trying to sleep and you're stomping around and keeping everyone awake."

"Graham, it's 4:30 in the afternoon."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

She abandoned her pacing.

"How do you think it went? Do you think the detective is going to let him go?"

Graham yawned extravagantly and leaned against the edge of the door, scratching his stomach idly.

"I'm sure the detective loved him, believed him, and he will be free and clear by dinnertime. Does that make you feel better? Now stop."

Em was a tornado trapped in a sixteen-by-sixteen room, weeks of pent-up emotion with no outlet, and Graham never stood a chance.

"Does that make me feel better?" She whirled around and jabbed at the air with a finger. "Does that make me feel better? No! No, it doesn't. Not even a little bit. You know what I realized this morning? I don't even care that he slept with her. I love him. I love him, and I might never get to tell him, and right now the only thing that makes me feel better is to walk up and down this room again and again and again-"

She was just getting started and might have kept on rolling for a good ten minutes or more, but then her phone jangled from the bed and she dove for it.

"Hello," she said breathlessly, her forehead creasing as the masculine voice that came across the line was not the one she'd been expecting.

"Em, are you home?" Beck had none of his usual politeness, was brusque to the point of rudeness, and Em's fingers clenched on the phone hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

"What happened?" she asked tonelessly.

"Are you?"

"Yes," she ripped her eyes back to the door, but Graham had vanished, presumably heading back to his own room and the bed therein.

"I'm coming over. Okay? Don't answer the phone if anyone calls. Wait for me."

"Beck!"

But he had already hung up, and she looked at the phone in bewilderment and immediately pulled up a blank text to August.

Are you okay? I don't know what's going on, or if I'm allowed to call you. Please text me.

She read it over, chewing on a fingernail as she did so, and then hit send.

Surely someone would have let her know if they'd already arrested him, right?

Maybe Beck was frantic because the school had burned down along with a paper he'd written and not turned in yet. Maybe terrorists had captured his tailor. Maybe it was because-

Maybe everything is fine and he sounded like that because he has explosive diarrhea, calm yourself, Emaline.

Becca had strictly forbidden her from smoking in the house, a rule that Em kept to without complaint, but Becca was at work, and there was a vanilla candle on the desk, and she could light it and raise the window, sit by the screen and blow the smoke out while she watched for Beck.