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CHAPTER 26

How Can You Sleep When the World Is Burning?

I put Harper to bed, muttering and drunk in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her.94I leave water, a garbage can, and some Tylenol by her bedside. She’ll be embarrassed and in pain in the morning, and if I could use some device to erase her memories, I would.

And yeah, I know there are consequences to doing that.

That’s what the movies tell us, anyway. But I’m not so sure. If we could find a way to eliminate memories of our worst mistakes, wouldn’t we all be better off?

But for now, Harperisforgetting. Because that’s what sleep is. A way to shut out the day and live in another world. I’ll let her do that for as long as she likes.

I close her door as quietly as I can and let out a long sigh.

“Is she okay?” Oliver asks.

He moves behind me and starts massaging my shoulders. I lean against his chest, and a large part of me wants to turn around and put my mouth on his and end up in the bedroom, where we can’t talk and can’t remember either.

“She’ll live,” I say. “But she won’t ever be the same.”

“It’s hard to believe...Shawna, of all people.” I can feel Oliver’s breath against my neck.

I turn around. Oliver’s taken apart his bow tie, the ties loose around his neck, and undone the top buttons on his shirt. He looks tired and comfortable at the same time, like a rumpled bed you want to crawl into.

But I shake that impulse away because I can’t let my guard down.

Not with Shawna on the loose.

“Did you lock the front door?”

“Yes. And I put the chain on and a chair under it for good measure. I’ll keep watch.”

“I’ll do it with you.”

I move away from him, walking to the window. It’s rain-streaked. The ocean looks black. Or maybe all I’m looking at is the night, dark and menacing.

It occurs to me how very isolated we are here.

Because of course we are.

But even if we weren’t, that doesn’t matter.

One person with a determined plan can cause so much chaos whether it’s dark out or not.

I know that better than most.

I pull the curtains closed.

“What did Officer Anderson tell you?” Oliver asks.

I catch him up on the details. What she found in Shawna’sroom. How Shawna’s still missing. What it must mean for what’s been happening. How there are still so many things that don’t make sense.

“What’s this about the script colors?” Oliver asks.

“The final script before you start shooting has a white cover. And then, every shooting day, we get sides—that’s the pages that are being shot that day—with the call sheet. If there are any revisions, they give you those pages in the revision color so you can swap them out in your script. And then a new cover for the script with the new version number on it.”

“Why do they do this?”

“No idea. But here, you can see my script.”