Page 35

Jamil

“Okay, what is going on with you?” Harper asked me the second she got into the passenger seat.

I didn’t answer right away as I turned around in the Steels’ driveway and headed back toward the road.

“It’s been less than twenty-four hours since the game ended last night. What happened since then? I thought we were fine!”

My emotions were still warring inside of me.

Throughout the entire interview, I cycled between feeling so proud of Harper and feeling betrayal if she really was going to write a story on me after I’d told her I was trying my best to avoid as much press as I could.

It felt wrong to think that she was no different than the other sharks that circled until they smelled blood in the water, attacking with no sign of remorse.

“Are you writing a story on me?” My voice was barely above a whisper, but it still seemed to echo inside the quiet of the car.

“I’m sorry?”

“My mother mentioned that she met your boss yesterday at the game and he told her that you were covering a feature story on me this season.” Harper closed her eyes and let out a long breath before she leaned back in her seat.

I thought she wasn’t going to respond as the silence continued to stretch on between us. “Can we have this conversation not in the car?”

“I was going to cook you dinner tonight to celebrate another successful interview,” I told her, even though celebrating was the last thing I felt like doing right now.

“I would just like to have this conversation when you’re not behind the wheel of a car.”

My mind was already taking off at the speed of light with questions.

Did that mean she thought I was going to get angry enough to put us in danger?

Was it worse than I thought?

Did I really start falling for someone that was only using me this entire time?

Was any of it real?

“That’s probably best,” I told her as I lightened the death grip I had on my steering wheel.

Harper looked like she wanted to say something else, desperation in her eyes.

I hated that all I wanted to do was reach over for her hand to reassure her.

I hated that seeing her upset affected me the way that it did, despite the lingering unknown of her intentions.

It felt like whiplash with how quickly my mind went from the woman I was getting to know, how sweet and kind she was, to the person who could do something like this.

The only sense of rationality I had left whispered, you don’t know the whole situation, nor do you know the topic of the story.

“Jamil,” Harper started as I pulled into the driveway, completely lost in my thoughts.

“Let’s wait until we get inside,” I told her as I hit the garage door opener.

“No, Jamil. Look!” Harper was pointing toward my front door, which was sitting slightly ajar.

“What the hell?” I threw the car in park, not even bothering with pulling it into the garage before I undid my seatbelt and took off. Our conversation forgotten.

“Where’s your mom?” Harper’s voice was full of panic as she thought about the worst-case scenario.

“She was going to an off-Broadway show tonight, I think.” My brain felt like it was moving through molasses as I barreled toward my front door, every thought unclear.

“Wait!” Harper called after me.

I whirled around, my foot on the first step up to my front porch, to see her shutting her door and racing after me. “No,” I told her. “You stay out here. We don’t know if anyone’s still inside.”

“We should call 911. You shouldn’t go in either!” Her eyes were wide and wild-looking as she glanced between me and the door.

“It’ll be okay. Call 911 and tell them my house has been broken into.”

Harper reached out for me, but I took another step up onto my front porch. “We could be sitting ducks out here. I’m just going to look.”

Before I could even push the door open, Harper was pulling me backward. “You could be a sitting duck walking inside there. 911 is going to tell us to wait in the car until police show up. You don’t need to go in there and be a hero. Let them canvas it first.”

Her grip tightened when I glanced back to the door, her hand shaking with fear that I would barrel inside anyways.

“Fine. Call them.” The previous disappointment and anger that had been building up all day seemed less important. The only thing on my mind was making sure that we were safe as I wrapped an arm around Harper’s waist and escorted her back to the car.

I could hear the 911 operator telling her that we’d done the right thing by waiting on the police before heading inside. The closest unit was five minutes out and those minutes we waited felt like the longest of my life.

As soon as Harper hung up the phone, she turned to look at me, still too hesitant to come closer than a few feet.

The fear on her face mirrored the emotion racking my body.

None of the previous animosity I had in the car was left as soon as her hand slipped into mine and she let me pull her into my arms.

You can forgive her, my brain whispered to me as we sank into each other for support. You can forgive her if it means you get to keep her. Nothing worth having is ever easy.

In my heart, I knew that whatever Harper was doing, she meant well.

The sirens could be heard a few blocks away, growing louder the closer they got until the lights were visible on top of the cop car as it came racing down the street. Neither of us had said a word since Harper had hung up the 911 call, our eyes locked on the front door still sitting ajar.

“I hope they didn’t take anything of importance,” I heard Harper say quietly as we watched two more cop cars arrive as backup.

“I don’t care about anything in the house,” I told her, squeezing her in tighter to my body. I was thankful that neither of us had been here. That my mother hadn’t been here.

“You should call your mom and tell her not to come home yet,” Harper suggested as the cops approached us.

“Have you searched the home yet?” one of the officers asked us. I shook my head.

“Can you give us a quick overview of the layout of your home before we go in?” one of the officers asked me.

I walked him through the floor plan, including areas of interest—like the safe I had set behind a photo in my bedroom or my upstairs office where my files were kept.

The cops left me standing on my front lawn—helpless and only able to watch them enter through the front door. I sent a text to my mother letting her know what had happened and to avoid coming home for a bit.

“It’ll be okay.” Harper appeared next to me, her hand resting gently on my forearm.

“I’m just trying to figure out why. We don’t get break-ins in this neighborhood. And why only my house?”

Had my fame grown too much? Had all this attention brought this upon me? Should I have listened to Nico when all of this started happening at the end of last season and considered security?

Harper stayed quiet, only moving so her back pressed into me and provided me something solid to focus on as we waited for the officers to come back out.

“All clear!” the first officer shouted out to us as they walked back out the front door.

I reached down to slip Harper’s hand into mine as we went to meet them on the front porch.

“Before you go inside, we want to ask that you don’t touch anything to avoid tampering with potential evidence, unless you clear it with us first.”

“Evidence?” Harper asked, trying to catch a glimpse of the living room.

One of the officers turned to address me.

“This is going to be treated as a crime scene. If you could go through the home and look for anything you think is missing before letting us know for our reports, we’d appreciate it.

We’ll have some questions for you afterward to see if you have any idea of who could have done this. ”

My eyes settled on the open door as I prepared myself to go in. Harper squeezed my hand to grab my attention, “Do you want me to go in with you?”

“Please,” I replied. “Maybe you’ll see something I don’t.”

The officers stepped aside to let us enter.

It was strange crossing the threshold into my own home, the one place I considered a sanctuary from the rest of life, only to see it devolved into chaos.

The entry table had been overturned, every drawer in the kitchen had been yanked open.

The living room entertainment center was ransacked.

There wasn’t a cabinet or drawer that had been missed as Harper and I worked our way through the house.

Each room making my heart drop even further.

I wasn’t even sure where to start on a list of things that could have been taken based on the state of the place.

At first glance, all the larger valuables had been passed over.

The television still hung on the wall in the living room, the more expensive appliances were on the counter in the kitchen, and the art that I had imported was still there.

“This feels like they were looking for something very specific,” Harper told me, noticing much of the same as we walked toward my bedroom. “This wasn’t a smash and grab. They left too many things of high value.”

The bedroom looked like the rest of the house. Both nightstands had been left open, the contents thrown all over the bed. All my clothes in my closet had been tossed in a pile in the middle, every shoe box overturned, and every drawer emptied.

I felt numb as I looked at the place I loved coming home to, torn apart like a war zone. The only thing keeping me grounded was Harper’s hand in mine. It wasn’t until I saw the painting next to my dresser that covered my safe that I had an inkling of what had happened.

The painting was on hinges and had been thrown open, along with the safe it was hiding. I normally kept a few thousand dollars of cash in there for emergencies, along with some of my more expensive watches. Now I was staring at an empty safe with nothing inside of it.