Page 79 of Playing Hard to Get

Frankie nodded. “I didn’t think much of it. I mean, it was only in passing. Like, I thought I saw him and did a double take, but he was gone.”

Vinny turned from the computer and looked at us. “I think he was following you.”

She shrugged. “He could have been, but really, I don’t know.”

“No,” Vinny said, motioning to his monitors. “I’m pretty sure he was following you. I tracked his credit card purchases over the past year. He’s been to every game you were at around the east coast and a handful of others throughout the year. I’ve got him at the same restaurants as you, the same hotels. All up until a few months ago, about the time Vivian got home from her trip.”

“You… You did what?” Frankie stammered.

“You think he picked up on her?” I asked before Vinny could respond to Frankie. “Switched to tracking her instead?”

“I think so,” he said, nodding as he turned to the computer. He leaned forward and studied his screens. “Near as I can tell, he was in New York every time she was. Although there’s a stretch at the end of April when he was here in the city when both Vivian and Frankie were out of town.”

Vinny glanced at me. Pulled the corner of his lip between his teeth and raised his eyebrows as he saw me shaking my head. That was when she was hiding. Pretending she was in New York when she was here the whole time. When I took her home with me, took her body in my bed, and lost myself to her.

The trill of a phone rang out through the room. Frankie jumped away from me as if she was going to run and grab it. But it was Vinny’s phone, and his hand flew to the headset at his ear, silencing the sound.

“Dad?” Frankie stilled as Vinny rocked back in his chair and swept his hair out of his eyes. “Yeah, that’s all we know.”

I leaned forward and cradled my head in my hands. Squeezed my eyes shut as Vinny spoke. Frankie’s hand smoothed across my back, rubbing at the stress that knotted my muscles.

“No, no,” Vinny said into his headset. “I didn’t know. I thought she just left. No, it was Mitch who brought it up. Said he hadn’t been able to get in touch with her for a while.”

Frankie’s hand lifted off my back at the same moment Vinny whipped around to face me. Wide, bright blue eyes stared at me as silence fell upon the room. Vinny took a deep breath and the muscle in his cheek twitched.

“Yeah, okay, Dad,” he said, his voice quieter than before. “I’ll let you know when I know.”

Vinny’s hand reached up to touch his headset. The silence that floated between us felt like an avalanche crashing down.

Frankie didn't look at me, didn't touch me. The chasm I was expecting dropped open faster than I thought possible, the friendship we’d had gone like a candle in the wind. Felt like an icy blast of air was shooting at me through the gap between her and me. Tension radiated off her like heat off a flame, all those fears Viv had of Frankie’s reaction to finding out we were involved suddenly coming true.

“Vinny,” Frankie said, all that hard showing through without an ounce of soft, “could you kindly explain to me how you knew Jason was in the same places as me?”

Vinny explained to Frankie what he told me in snippets as he was searching for Viv last night. That he was a self-taught computer whiz with friends all over the world just as smart as he was. Each of them were hackers, each experts in things that made my head spin. Tracking credit cards and hacking traffic cams was child’s play compared to the other things they could do.

Frankie sat in utter silence as he spoke. Before he was done, her mouth dropped open and she was hunched over like the weight of the world rested upon her shoulders.

“Does Marco know about this?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“Of course he does,” Vinny said, his shoulders shrugging as he looked at his computer. His hands swept over the keyboard as he spoke. “He’s known for a couple years. He had a security breach at one of his companies. My buddy, Thatcher, is the one who found it. He was screwing around one day and found a backdoor into one of Dad’s servers. He told me about it, and we got it shut down before anything serious was lost.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Frankie asked.

Vinny shrugged without looking at her. “I asked him not to.”

Frankie didn’t look like she liked that answer. But I got it. Because Vivian was the same way. Only wanted people to know what she wanted them to know. Didn’t live her life for other people’s consumption.

Hell, I did that, too. Put on that front of friendliness, people thought they knew me. When really, there was an iceberg of pain hiding under the surface. Pain that was eating me alive. Pain that only Vivian had been able to quiet. Pain that, without her, threatened to consume me.

Frankie got up and left the room. Vinny worked his screens again, pulling up maps and websites, taking phone calls that made as much sense to me as Greek. It was all too much. I needed a smoke. Needed a break. Needed to get my head on straight so I didn’t lose my shit and get distracted, lose my focus.

Because losing focus could get you killed.

* * *

We gathered in the living room of Vinny’s apartment. Beige shades covered the windows, blocking out the view and the early morning sunlight. Every light in the apartment was turned on, chasing shadows into corners and giving the whole place a sterile, unlived-in feel. Cael and I were in the matching leather chairs. Weston, Barnes, and Macevoy were on the couch, with Lee perched on the arm of the sofa. Frankie and Marco stood behind us, not part of the party, but not willing to be left out.

“Okay, so here’s what we know.” Vinny stood in front of his television screen, his hand on the remote as he looked out upon us. The eight of us stared at him, waiting for the show to begin. “It’s going on seven days since Mitch last heard from Vivian. Looking at her phone records, he and her friend, Jillian, were the last ones she communicated with. Security footage places her inside The Green Lady that night.”