Follow Her Down by Victoria Helen Stone

Author:Victoria Helen Stone [Stone, Victoria Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

“There’s nothing here, Kyle. I read everything she wrote to Amber that summer. No Jeremy, no Billy, and definitely no Christian. And she didn’t complain about any creepy encounters with college guys. There is a Chris mentioned twice, but that could be anyone.”

Kyle went straight to the fridge and grabbed a beer. Either he was trying to grow a beard or he hadn’t shaved in a week. He looked tired, which only added to the knot of worry in her stomach.

“I need to show you something,” he said, his voice low and dark.

Her heart fell. He wasn’t even listening to her.

She was too tired to deal with a possible mental-health crisis. The night before, she’d stayed up way too late reading letters, bringing her sister’s ghost into the cabin as she’d followed Robin through her adolescence.

Elise had been too young to remember what her big sister had been like at twelve or thirteen. She’d always known her as the outgoing, confident older teen, filled with all the energy and bravado of that age. But she’d been much less sure of herself in junior high, worrying about whether she was pretty or her clothes were cute enough to pass muster with the other kids.

She’d gossiped like a fiend back then too. Well . . . she’d gossiped right up until the end, but her earlier letters were tinged by an anxious need to tear down the girls she didn’t like. That nastiness had faded as her confidence had grown, and watching her sister blossom on the page had warmed Elise’s heart.

Something she’d held tight inside her had loosened in the small hours of the morning. Maybe it was the grief for Robin she’d never had the chance to process. Perhaps when she got past this weird episode with Kyle, she could really sit with the loss for a while. Her therapist would undoubtedly say she’d never truly grieved and it was past time.

She discovered her sister had lost her virginity at fifteen to a nineteen-year-old. They’d worked at summer camp together, and Elise cringed at the idea of an adult counselor sleeping with a junior counselor while they were surrounded by camp kids. Robin had called him “soooo sexy and experienced.” The boy—or man—had moved on to a new junior counselor within a week, of course, deflowering his way through the teenage girls. Disgusting.

Robin had written a letter to Amber dotted with actual tear splotches and thickly underlined curse words about that asshole, but she seemed to have recovered two weeks later when she’d fallen hard for a boy her age and had a much better time messing around with him.

But aside from all the fascinating details of watching her sister grow up, there hadn’t been much on the page. Through the dozens of boys she’d crushed on or ignored or loved or slept with over the years, none had been named Jeremy or Billy or even Chris. A total bust.

Now she was grieving both Robin and Christian, and Kyle ignored it all to type away on his keyboard.

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