Dropping the bag of takeout, I step back, nausea crashing through me as my vision blurs and my head starts to pound, a weird screaming noise filling my ears and making it impossible to focus.
“Caleb?”
I shake my head, trying to clear it, but that only makes everything worse and before I know it, I can feel myself falling, my body collapsing beneath me.
“Caleb?”
I close my eyes, try to remember, try to understand, try to focus on where I am now. Try to make sense of what’s happening to me.
“Caleb.”
The voice is familiar, just like the firm grip on my arm, the heavy weight across my shoulders. When I finally lift my head, I see a face I’d recognize anywhere staring back at me.
“You okay?” Reid asks, his brow narrowed in concern.
I swallow hard, nodding once even though I’m far from okay right now. I focus on taking long slow deep breaths, remembering Liz’s advice. “Someone was here,” I force out, my voice husky and raw.
“Yeah,” Reid says. “He’s still here.”
My head snaps up at his words, a wave of dizziness nearly making me throw up. “Who the hell are you?” I ask, trying to make out the man in the darkness.
An older man steps forward now into the light cast from the mudroom. There’s fear on his face as he holds out something small to us. “I, I um…I’m your neighbor,” he stutters. “The girl who lives here asked about my security cameras.”
“You found something?” Reid says quickly.
“I’m not sure,” he says, holding out what I now realize is a USB drive. “Thought you might want to look though.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ruby
Caleb and Reid walk into the house, both of them moving quickly with Reid barking an order at Sienna to grab her laptop. We’re both caught off guard, scrambling from the couch where we were both sitting watching TV and waiting for the boys to come back with dinner.
“What’s going on?” I ask, my eyes immediately moving to Caleb’s face, checking his expression for any signs of fear, but all I’m met with is a nervous urgency, his eyes wide and his movement appear almost desperate as he stalks over to the kitchen table in long, weighted strides. My eyes move to his hands as they fidget with something small and he shakes his head slightly, almost in disbelief.
“That guy you talked to, the one with the security camera came through,” Caleb announces, holding up a small USB drive. He moves it back and forth, smiling at me now. I know what he’s thinking, because it’s the same exact thought running through my own head.
This could fix everything.
This small little piece of plastic and metal could hold the key to ending all of this. If this video shows Professor Keller outside my bedroom window it will prove Caleb didn’t attack him for no reason. It will prove he’s the creepy motherfucker we all think he is. It will also add a whole other level to the rape and assault claim Meagan hit me with just the other day.
This one little USB drive could validate it all.
Sienna and Reid return from her bedroom, laptop in hand, as the four of us gather around the kitchen table and Caleb hands the drive to Reid. The wait and the anticipation blooms all around us, our collective hearts racing at a speed that feels almost immeasurable.
“How far back did he give us?” I now ask, breaking the tension-filled silence with my question, a question I know all of us are asking ourselves.
I wasn’t specific when I knocked on the guy’s door unannounced. It was a vague date range, telling him I needed the footage from a few weeks ago and nothing more. It never felt like it would ever matter because who just hands over their security camera footage?
“I don’t know,” Reid answers. “He didn’t say much of anything.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t want to be involved in this mess,” Caleb says, once again worrying about how this will affect everyone around him.
“If he gave you the footage then he obviously found something,” Sie adds, a lilt of hopefulness hanging on her words.
She speaks the words I can’t bring myself to say, finding hope in this situation too many times, only to be shot down. I hate to put it out there in the world again. Caleb can only take so much.
The icon appears on the screen and Sienna opens it, finding it filled with separate folders, each with a date on them. There are five folders, five different dates, seemingly selected on purpose, but in no particular order.
I scan the dates quickly, the date of the assault, seared into my brain and find myself letting out a held breath when I find it’s tagged on one of the folders.
“That one,” Reid announces, pointing at the folder we’re all waiting with bated breath for Sienna to open.
I watch her swallow hard, her hand shaking slightly as she clicks the folder, opening up to an icon of a video. She hovers over it for a few seconds, each one ticking by slower than the last.
What the hell is she waiting for?
“Can I say something?” she asks, a kind regard in her voice that is supposed to ease our collective tension, but all it does is ramp up my anxiety.
“Yeah, what?” Caleb replies, trying not to sound bitter but failing.
“Can we agree not to be devastated if this isn’t the smoking gun we hoped for?” Living with a life of constant disappointment, she and Caleb, and maybe even Reid have become disillusioned that hope still exists. They hold out nothing any longer, living with the realization that they can’t catch a break, but today feels different and Sienna is the voice of reason.
Don’t get too excited.
“I can’t make any promises, Sie,” Caleb tells her, a bite to what he says, but all of us know he isn’t angry with her. “This is my life we’re talking about here. Two million dollars. That’s a fucking insane amount of money. The kind of money we don’t have.”
“We do have it,” Sie asserts. “We have the money from…” She falls quiet, looking back at Reid over her shoulder. He nods almost imperceptibly, as if to tell her it’s okay and she continues. “We have the money from Reid’s dad and Reid’s trust fund. We have it and I understand you don’t want to touch any of that, but if we need it, then that’s what we’ll do. We have an out.”
This is the first I’m hearing about money from Reid’s dad and I don’t want to sound nosy, but what the hell does that mean? I look over at Caleb, not wanting to be obvious, but clearly I am because he takes in a long slow breath and fills me in.
“When everything went down with Reid’s dad, Reid, I guess, essentially stole a bunch of money from his dad’s safe and gave it to Sienna and me.” He says it matter-of-factly and with little to no remorse, not that I think he should have any. After what he went through he was owed something in return. The money won’t give Caleb his life back, but it will at least help him and Sie start over.
“It was probably all the money my dad stole from Caleb anyway,” Reid adds, attempting to dismiss any doubts that may come from Sienna and Caleb or even me. But I have no doubts, no concern that Reid is a thief. What he did was protect his friends and give them back a small piece of what was lost.