And since I didn’t trust these guys to not boo-hoo-woo-woo over her pretty little blue eyes getting teary, I jumped in. “What are you sorry for? What you said to me?”

Nope. Not that. “For what I did,” she answered, still using that tiny voice I wanted to stomp on. “For the phone numbers….”

The phone numbers?

I thought it was Zac who actually said those same words out loud in a question.

Jessica nodded all timidly and at the floor again.

What phone numbers?

It was the man who asked with a bewildered face, “What phone numbers? What did you do? Tell the truth.”

The fact he kept asking what she had done wouldn’t settle in my brain for hours. What kind of person were you? I would wonder later, that someone would assume you had done something. But I wouldn’t worry about that for hours. Until later. Until after all this had come to the surface.

She started to cry, just a tear, then two, and she sniffed. “The phone numbers.”

What the hell was she talking about?

“I… I’m sorry. I was j-j-jealous, Enzo. Do you understand? I was jealous, and I… I was a lot younger, and I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I did it.” She broke off, sniffling and sniffling and sniffling.

Fake, fake, fake. Did people really fall for this act? I glanced at my old friend to check his reaction and froze at his expression.

“What did you do?” Zac asked in the calmest, flattest voice I’d ever heard from him. His shoulders were down, and that sparkle in his eye, which was about as steady as the sun, was gone. Even all the lines on his face were smooth. Two stripes of pink flagged his cheeks, and I knew it wasn’t a blush. It was anger.

Zac was angry.

She moved her gaze toward him, tearing up, and murmured, “About swapping your numbers….”

What?

Zac looked at me. “Darlin’, do you know what she’s talkin’ about?”

I had no idea and I said so.

The woman started weeping, and I could see a couple faces turn at the sound. The tears sounded so goddamn fake, I couldn’t believe it. My niece had been better at fake crying than that by the time she was one. I’d seen Connie make herself cry a hundred times, and she could have won an Academy Award for her acting job.

Jessica had experience, I could tell, but she didn’t have the same talent as my sister or my niece at doing it. Plus, I didn’t like her, so I didn’t get a kick out of it.

My stomach tensed.

“What numbers did you swap?” the Enzo guy asked, carefully, slowly too.

She sniffed again, and I barely heard her answer. “Theirs….”

What the hell was she talking about?

One of them must have asked because she answered. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I just forgot, and I thought that they would eventually notice and it wouldn’t be a big deal, and I didn’t know, okay? I didn’t mean to—”

“Jessica.” The man named Enzo took a step back before he asked, “What did you do exactly? Don’t. Lie.”

She put her hands to her face as her shoulders hunched, and I was pretty sure we all barely heard her.

But we heard her all right. At least most of it.

“I swapped your phone numbers out in each of your phones.” She wept. Fake, fake, fucking fake. “I… I… you left your phones around, and I took them, okay? I took them and swapped out your numbers for my granny’s, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I sucked in a breath that only I heard, mostly because I was pretty sure Zac had made the same sound. And the Enzo man stilled.

She….

She….

“You…,” Zac started to say in a voice so hard and brittle, I figured he’d learned it from Trevor. It was mean. Relentless. Unpliable. “You sayin’ you took my phone and changed Bianca’s phone number in it?”

No.

He kept going, all frost and ice and absolutely unlike the man I knew and loved. “Is that what you’re tryin’ to say?”

“You’ve complained to me about your grandma having a cell she refused to use….” Enzo trailed off, sounding stunned.

She cried even harder.

And it made me feel so fucking cold.

Sick.

Mad.

Because I was pretty sure I understood what she’d done.

She had been jealous.

She had taken our cells from wherever they had been lying around close to her during one of the few times I’d met her.

She had changed the numbers under our contacts to her grandmother’s phone?

Was that what she was saying? A phone that might have never been answered or checked? My parents had given Mamá Lupe a prepaid phone that had lived in her glove compartment. She had only used her home phone.

And then Zac broke up with her sometime soon after that and she never fixed it? Never said anything?

“Why would you do that?” I asked her before I could stop myself, arms tingling and nearly numb.

She had changed our numbers.

She had changed our numbers.

This Jessica Asshole hiccupped. “I’m sorry!”

I didn’t think I’d ever wanted to punch someone so much in my fucking life. And I hoped I never would. My hands were freezing, and my stomach cramped.

I could hear Zac saying something to her. Could hear the other guy speaking too. All three of them seemed to be talking at the same time, but my heart was beating so fast it made my ears buzz, and all I wanted right then was one thing.

To beat her ass, but since I couldn’t do that—wouldn’t do that, she wasn’t worth going to jail—there was only one option left, considering I wanted to kill her.

To get the hell out of there and away from this fucking monster.

I didn’t even really process taking my phone out and requesting a car.

I knew Trevor said something to me as I walked by him on my way out, staring at my phone and at the blinking dot that said my driver was close. Maybe even CJ said something when I passed by him, and maybe I said something to him back, but I wasn’t sure.

All I knew was that I wanted to fucking… I wasn’t sure what I wanted to fucking do. Scream. Cry. Kick someone’s ass.

I wanted to kick my own ass most of all.

But what I did know was that I wanted to get the hell out of there at least.

I wanted to go home.

And that was what I did as I got into the car that was already parked and waiting in the lot by the time I pushed through the crowd. Maybe it was the same ride someone had taken there. It wasn’t like it mattered.

It might have only been five minutes later, maybe less—just long enough for the driver and me to introduce each other—when my phone vibrated. The screen showed ZAC THE SNACK PACK on it. For one millisecond, I thought about not answering it.

But that wasn’t me, and this wasn’t the right moment. He hadn’t done anything.

Maybe he’d been right.

Maybe he really had tried to call me. Or text me.

Maybe he hadn’t gotten some of my messages or calls either.

I couldn’t think of a single person I hated as much as I hated Jessica in that moment. Not the ex who had cheated on me. Not the girl he had cheated on me with who had known he had a girlfriend. Not anyone. Not even Gunner. Not even the meanest people to ever leave comments on my uploads.