Facade [h.s]

forty-three

"Have you already checked the papers you took?" Indigo asked as she walked inside, choosing to ignore my odd reply.

"Oh" I said, shooting Harry a glance. I'd completely forgotten about those in the heat of the moment and discarded them without as much as a second thought, my mind too taken by the events of that night. "No, I forgot."

My best friend moved her gaze from me to Harry, something I couldn't point out in her eyes. "Then we could do it now? We have to know if we have something on Joel" she suggested, and I nodded quickly.

"Yeah, of course" I agreed, giving a look around and furrowing my eyebrows when I discovered that they were nowhere to be seen. "Wait, where are they?"

Harry cleared his throat, throwing a knowing glance my way. "On the floor" he replied, crouching down to pick up some scattered papers that were on the other side of his desk among the rest of his books.

Indigo frowned. "Why is everything on the floor?"

"Uh, the wind" I said fast, earning a confused look from her, and Harry shook his head, letting out a sound between a laugh and a snort. I took the papers from him, dividing the pile in smaller ones and handing one to each one of them. "Let's divide them."

We moved to Harry's couch and Harry sat in a corner, lifting his feet up on the couch and bringing his knees to his chest. I sat right next to him, not caring about how it might've looked to Indigo, my leg grazing his when I moved a bit closer, making him give me a little look before going back to his papers.

I read through mine quickly, skimming them all to see if any had interesting content, sighing when I began to realise that none was mentioning what I was looking for. Apparently Joel hadn't been stupid enough to mention anything in his correspondence, and I was starting to feel like it was an impossible mission to prove his guiltiness.

I tapped Harry on the ankle, getting his attention. "Have you found anything?" I whispered to him when he looked up from the sheet he was reading.

He shook his head. "Not even a mention. You?"

"Nothing" I replied, my words attracting Indigo's attention.

You guys found nothing as well?" She asked us, and I nodded. "Fuck" she hissed, putting her pile on the floor and shooting a glare in its direction.

I stared at it for some seconds, knowing that the thoughts that were currently in my head were resembling the ones that everyone else was thinking. "So we basically wasted time and put Harry in danger for nothing" I said, feeling dread fill me the more I thought about it. "Now Joel is livid and we have no way of keeping him away from us."

"You're staying here, I'm not letting you go back to your apartment anytime soon" Harry told me, extending his arm on the couch behind me.

"It's not me I worry about, it's you" I replied, putting a hand on his thigh and removing it in the second I realised what I was doing.

Indigo shook her head. "This doesn't have to be it. We can find another way."

"How?" I asked her. I was pretty hopeless in that moment, it was like nothing we tried ever worked out. Was there even a point in keeping it up? Maybe it would just be more useful to try to cut a deal with Joel to get him to leave us alone.

She shrugged. "I don't know. Let's pause for a couple of days and then we'll come up with a new plan."

"I feel like nothing will ever work. We're screwed" I sighed, voicing my thoughts. What were we even doing? We only seemed to be fucking everything up more and more and get Joel even more mad at us than he previously was.