Copyright 2018 by Colleen Hoover

He’s not leaving me down here alone.
I grab my shirt, pull it on over my head, and then run after him. I refuse to be
alone in this house for another second.
When I reach the top of the stairs, he’s standing in her doorway, staring into
her room. He hears me approaching. And then he just…leaves. He brushes past
me without making eye contact and stomps down the stairs.
I take several steps until I’m close enough to peek into her room. I only
glance in there for one second. It’s all the time I need to see that she’s in bed.
Under the covers. Asleep.

---

I shake my head, feeling my knees wanting to buckle. This can’t be
happening. I somehow make it to the stairs, but I only make it halfway down
them before I have to sit. I can’t move. I can barely draw a breath. My heart has
never beat this fast.
Jeremy is at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me. He probably doesn’t
know what to think about what just happened. I don’t know what to think. He
walks back and forth in front of the stairs, looking at me every now and then,
I’m sure because he’s waiting for me to start laughing at my tasteless joke. It
wasn’t a joke.
“I saw her,” I whisper.
He hears me. He looks at me, not with anger, but with apology. He walks up
the stairs and helps me up, then keeps his arm around me as he leads me back
down. He takes me to the bedroom and closes the door, then wraps himself
around me. I bury my face in his neck, wanting the image of her out of my head.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I just… Maybe I haven’t been getting enough sleep…
Maybe I…”
“It’s my fault,” Jeremy says, interrupting me. “You’ve been working for two
weeks without a break. You’re exhausted. And then I—we—it’s paranoia. Guilt.
I don’t know.” He pulls back, holding my face with both hands. “I think we both
need about twelve hours of solid sleep.”
I’m convinced by what I saw. We can blame it on exhaustion or guilt, but I
saw her. I saw everything. Her fists clenched at her sides. The anger in her
expression before she rushed away.
“Do you want some water?”
I shake my head. I don’t want him to leave. I don’t want to be alone. “Please
don’t leave me alone tonight,” I beg.
His expression doesn’t reveal what he’s thinking at all. He nods, just a little,
then says, “I won’t. But I need to turn off the TV and lock the doors. Put the
cake in the fridge.” He heads for the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I go to the bathroom and wash my face, hoping the cold water will help calm
me. It doesn’t. When I return to the bedroom, Jeremy is sliding the lock across
the top of the door. “I can’t stay all night,” he says. “I don’t want Crew to get
scared if he wakes up and can’t find me.”
I climb into the bed and face the window. Jeremy climbs in behind me, then
wraps himself around me. I can feel his heartbeat, and it’s almost as fast as mine.
He shares the pillow with me, finds my hand, and slides his fingers through
mine.
I try to mimic his pattern of breathing so that mine will slow down. I’m
breathing through my nose because my jaw is clamped too tight to take in

---

normal breaths. Jeremy presses a kiss to the side of my head.
“Relax,” he whispers. “You’re okay.”
I try to relax. And maybe I do, but it’s only because we both lie here for so
long, it’s hard for muscles to retain that much tension after a while. “Jeremy?” I
whisper.
He runs a thumb across my hand to let me know he hears me.
“Is there a chance… Could she be faking her injuries?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Almost as if he has to give the question some
thought. “No,” he finally says. “I saw the scans.”
“But people get better. Injuries heal.”
“I know,” he says. “But Verity wouldn’t fake something like this. No one
would. It would be impossible.”
I close my eyes, because he’s trying to reassure me that he knows her well
enough to know that she wouldn’t do something like that. But if there’s one
thing I know that Jeremy doesn’t…it’s that he doesn’t know Verity at all.

---

I went to bed convinced I had seen Verity at the top of the stairs last night.
I woke up full of doubt.
I’ve spent most of my life not trusting myself in my sleep. Now I’m starting
to not trust myself when I’m awake. Did I see her? Was it a hallucination