The Safest Lies by Megan Miranda Read Free Book Online Page B

I just tried it again before I came out here.”
    “Huh. I’ll check it.” Maybe it had been knocked off the cradle. I hadn’t heard it ring since the accident, now that she mentioned it.
    “So, listen, you want to come over tomorrow? I’m sentenced to family time today with Brett home from college for the weekend, but he’s going out tomorrow, so I should be free at least part of the day.”
    “I can’t come over,” I said, shaking my head. “Maybe later next week but…not now.” Not when it took three days to leave the house. Not when I already felt the vastness, as my mom called it, of the open air. The feeling of all the things that could go wrong the farther I walked from my door.
    “Sure. Later, then,” she said. This was another reason I thought we got along so well. We didn’t ask too many questions. I never asked why she kept changing schools, and she never asked why I lived behind bars and gates and wires.
    I slid off the wall, back to my side of the property, an invisible tether—the promise of safe, and predictable. She stared at the weeds, squeezed her eyes shut, and dropped down after me. “Hey,” she said, hand on my arm. “You’re okay, right?”

    I wasn’t sure if Annika knew about my mom, or what she suspected, but she must’ve known something. The leash I was kept on, the things I couldn’t do, the fact that we always went to her house instead of my own.
    “Yes,” I said. “I’m okay.” The darkness over the edge, the grip of my fingers…
    I felt an ache in the bruise on my shoulder, my elbows, and the line across my hands.
    Annika shuddered and picked her feet up, one exaggerated step at a time, like there might really be snakes in the grass. I uncurled my hand, overwhelmed with the sudden impulse to show her the line across my fingers—that maybe she would understand—
    “Annika?” A woman’s voice, from the other side of the wall.
    Annika rolled her eyes. “Gotta run.” But before she climbed back over the wall, she pulled me toward her, squeezed me tight, the ribbons in her hair tickling my neck. “I’m glad you’re okay, Kelsey darling.” Then she air-kissed my cheek, which was something only Annika could get away with, before finding a foothold in the stone wall.

B ack inside, Mom’s office door was closed, and Jan’s car was still parked just outside the front gate. They were probably having an official session. The box of my recovered items was still on the living room floor. I stepped around it and picked up the phone line—it had been left off the hook. I hung it up, picked it up again, heard a catch, a click, and then the dial tone. If it hadn’t been working before, at least it was now.
    Just as I hung up, a shrill ring cut through the silent living room. I let it ring twice, until the number flashed on the caller ID. Something local that I didn’t recognize. And then I remembered that my cell had been out of commission, and I’d called home from Ryan’s phone, and, in an uncharacteristic surge of irrational hope, I thought maybe he was checking in, like he said he would. I held the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

    But it was a woman. “Am I speaking with Kelsey Thomas?”
    “Yes,” I said slowly, shifting the phone from shoulder to shoulder, my eyes on the closed door of the office.
    “I’m Moira Little, and I was hoping to get a quote from you for a piece I’m writing for the Covington City Gazette. ”
    “Uh,” I said, “no comment.” That was a thing, right? Would that be printed in the paper? Ryan Baker, hero, rescues Kelsey Thomas, who has no comment. “Listen,” I added, keeping my voice low, “it’s just, I’m not supposed to do this.”
    “Give quotes to reporters?”
    Among other things. “Yes.” Ryan Baker, hero, rescues Kelsey Thomas, who is not supposed to give quotes to reporters. “No,” I said, “I mean, I’m just happy to be alive.”
    Silence, and then, “There’s a slight discrepancy between the police