Mine Alone のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 40

Tyler's POV California was too bright. That was the first thing I disliked about it. The sunlight came through the windows of the penthouse suite like it had something to prove, and every surface in the room seemed to glow. I preferred Manhattan, with its grey sky and heavy air, a city that never pretended to be anything it wasn't. I closed the curtains. "Boss." Williams stood in the doorway, white hair brushed back, grey eyes steady. He never entered a room until I acknowledged him. In ten years, that had never changed. "Talk." "Joe is back." "And?" "He says the girl at the coffee shop is Jane." I didn't move. Jane. Red hair, a dozen piercings, a mouth that never stopped. The photograph the bartender's address had led us to flashed through my head. "Did she say anything?" "Joe asked for Claire." Williams paused, as he always did before delivering a detail he knew would matter. "She didn't blink. She told him no one by that name worked there. Calm. Too calm." Hmm, Too cal

I got home before Jane did, which almost never happens, and I spent the first twenty minutes walking in circles around our room like a hamster someone had given too much coffee. Every time I sat down on the bed, I heard Veronica's voice again, so sweet it hurt, asking if Drake had put cash in my purse yet, and I would get right back up. How did she know? That was the part that kept snagging on me. If she had only said Drake was a player, or a cheater, or a man who'd had his share of women, I could have shrugged it off, because I'd more or less guessed that much the day he cornered me in that elevator. But she knew about the purse. She said it like she had been standing right there when I opened it. I had told exactly two people about that money. Jane, and Drake himself. I was still chewing on it when the front door banged open and Jane came in carrying a pizza box in one hand and a paper cup in the other, her red hair stuffed under a cap that said *Bean There* across the front

I don't know how long I stood on that staircase. It could have been a minute or ten, because everything in me had gone cold at the same time, from my fingers all the way down to my knees. The photo sat there glowing in my hand, Drake with his arm around that woman, and the first thing I thought was, of course. Of course it was too good to be true. Men like him don't open their chests and hand you the worst thing they know about themselves unless they've got something worse tucked away behind it. Then I heard Jane's voice in my head, as clear as if she'd been standing next to me. “That's exactly how it started with Tyler. One small thing you kept quiet about because you were scared.” So I sat down on the stair, right where I was, and did the only thing I could think of that Tyler would never have let me do. I forwarded the picture to Drake with the message still underneath it, and I typed, *Is this real? I'm asking you instead of deciding for myself. I'd like to see your face when y

Drake called me at six in the morning, which is not an hour I like to be spoken to at, and he said only, "Come to the office. Don't eat first. I'll explain when you get here." I should have been scared, but I think I was too sleepy. I pulled a jacket over my pajama top, told Jane through her door that I'd be back for lunch, and let Reuben drive me across a city that was still half dark. Drake was already waiting in the lobby when I arrived, in yesterday's shirt with a day's worth of stubble on his jaw, and when he took my hand to lead me into the elevator, his palm was cold. The meeting room on the fourth floor had a glass table and eight leather chairs, and only two of them were taken. At the head of the table sat a man with a shaved head and a very quiet face, whom Drake introduced as Idris, his head of security. At the far end, with both hands pressed flat on the glass as if he were afraid they might float away, sat a boy who couldn't have been older than twenty-four. "This

On Saturday night I slept at Drake's house again, and for most of it I lay awake doing arithmetic. Eleven minutes from the Meridian to Isaiah's front door. Fewer if you ran the lights. I worked out how long it would take from Isaiah's to the studio, and from the studio to Drake's gate, and then I started over, because numbers were the only thing I could hold onto in the dark. Drake slept beside me with one hand resting on my hip, breathing slow and even, the way a person does when he trusts the walls around him. I wished I could borrow that. Around five I gave up. I wrote a note on the back of a receipt from my purse, *Went home to check on Jane, I'll call you at nine*, left it on the pillow, and crept down the stairs with my shoes in my hand. Reuben was already awake in the kitchen with a mug of something, which made me wonder when that man ever slept. He coughed his nervous little cough, put the mug down, and drove me across the city without asking a single question, which I appr