Something has to give.
That’s been the one thought spiraling through my mind for the past few weeks, and it was still there as I parked the car in the garage, turned it off, stared through the windshield.
Tripp charged with Blanche’s murder, Bea locked away upstairs, and Jane …
Fuck, Jane.
Sighing, I opened the car door and headed into the house. It’s late, and the weather is shit, and I should’ve come home earlier, but I was waiting out Jane, hoping she’d already gone to bed.
I wanted to talk to Bea.
Bea would know what to do here, how to fix this. Even though I snapped at her the last time for suggesting that the situation couldn’t stand, I also knew she’d be the only one to get us out of it.
Opening the front door, the house felt too quiet and a little too cold, especially after the heat of outside, but I didn’t mind.
And then I saw it.
It looked like a goddamn tornado had torn through. Like it had been ransacked.
Jane.
I didn’t even remember going up the stairs. Just that I was there at the closet, opening the door.
It actually took me a minute to realize what I was seeing. That the doors were open. That Jane was in there.
That she and Bea were standing there together.
It felt enough like a nightmare or some kind of stress-induced hallucination that I just stared at them for the longest time. Bea, her face pale, Jane, nearly gray, her eyes huge in her face.
And even as I looked at them, my brain was trying to whir into motion, trying to explain, to fix this.
Too late, I saw Jane reach for the silver pineapple on the table by the door. One of those knickknacks from Southern Manors I’d taken from somewhere else in the house to put up here, trying to make it look nicer.
As it swung toward me, Jane’s face screwed up in fear and anger, I realized my mistake.
But Jane made a mistake, too.
The hit was too hard and badly aimed, crunching against the side of my face so that I immediately felt teeth break, tasted blood, the world just white-hot crushing pain.
Then darkness.