Free Mountain Investigation by Jessica Andersen

nothing.
    From nowhere, sudden frustration bubbled through Mariah. Or maybe it didn’t come out of the blue, she realized after a moment of surprise. On some level the irritation had been humming beneath the surface for longer than she’d known, even before Lee had breached the defensive electronic wall around her cabin and taken her hostage. In the months leading up to that, as she’d slowly come awake from the shock of the disaster her life had become, she’d found a kernel of angry impatience growing inside her.
    Propelled by that hot irritation, she sat up and faced Gray in her hospital bed, leaning toward him in an effort to make her point, and maybe to see if she could find a crack or two in that cool façade.
    “Then what, exactly, do you want to hear?” Her voice rose beyond the sick-sounding whisper she’d been affecting as part of her hospital-bound role, but she didn’t care. She’d been lying there, waiting, for nearly two full days; surely Lee would’ve come for her by now if he were planning on taking her from the hospital. For all they knew, he’d left the country, slipping the noose once again.
    That fear, and the knowledge that she wouldn’t be safe as long as he was on the loose, sharpened her voice further as she said, “Okay, then. What part of my college angst do you want to hear about? Do you want to know how hard it was to finally be in a position to hang with a group of friends, and realize I didn’t want to, that I didn’t fit in with the uncool kids, never mind the cool ones? Or maybe how the only way I could really be a part of things was by hiding behind my camera, using it as an excuse to talk to people who forgot me the moment the frame was shot? Oh, wait. I bet you want to know that the reason I moved to New York after I graduated was because I hoped I’d fit in better with an artsy crowd. And how when I got there, when I got my dream job as the lowest of the low in a fashion photog’s shop, that was when I got to be a part of the cool crowd. That was when I got invited to the clubs, and partied until dawn without the damn camera in my hands.”
    Gray leaned in and touched one of her hands, where she’d balled it into a fist. “Mariah—”
    “I’m not done,” she snapped, barreling over him. “Because you probably want to hear about how I met Lee, not in one of those clubs, but in a coffee shop near my apartment. I was sitting at a sidewalk table reading a travel book about Paris—a girl can dream, right?—when someone reaches past me, taps the page I’m on, and a man’s voice says, ‘I’ve been there. It’s the most beautiful place on earth.’ The next thing I know, this absolutely gorgeous guy sits down opposite me and starts telling me about his trip to Paris. Only he doesn’t just tell me about himself, he asks me questions, too, and he listens as if he really cared about the answers, like he’s really into me. ”
    She thumped herself on the chest with one hand, barely registering that the other had somehow become tangled with Gray’s, that he’d turned to face her so they were practically knee-to-knee, nose-to-nose.
    He drew breath to say something, but she beat him to it, knowing what he was undoubtedly going to remind her. “Of course, I know it was a setup. I didn’t back then, though. Back then, I thought it was love at first sight, just like it’d been for my parents.” She stared down at her hands, unconsciously tightening her grip on Gray’s fingers. “I may not have wanted the childhood I got, but I wanted what they had. I wanted that connection, the sort of landslide love that swept away everything else and made the rest of the world less important than what the two of them had together.” Her voice broke on tears she hadn’t even realized werethreatening. “I thought I’d found it with Lee. He made me believe in him, in us, but it wasn’t real. Everything I thought and felt was a lie. Worse, I was so blind, so stupid, that I didn’t