Die for You Read Online Free PDF Page A

appropriate for a professional friendship. In fact, my relationship to Jack had come up in my worse arguments with Marc. He thought that I told him too much, that we saw each other too often, that the way he touched me was too familiar.
    You don’t understand our friendship .
    An angry laugh. Then: I understand your friendship perfectly. I think it’s you who doesn’t understand. You’re too naive, too trusting .
    Please .
    Of course, since his sleazy affair, Marcus had less to say about Jack. His commentary was reduced to annoyed glances.
    B UT I WASN’T thinking about any of that now. I was just hearing that horrible scream, my mind alive with dark imaginings. As I’d dressed and gathered photographs, I tried to calm myself by thinking of explanations for the phone call—maybe he’d lost his phone, or it had been stolen, and what I heard had nothing to do with him. Maybe he had left, was curled up in someone else’s bed right now, had tossed his phone in a trash can on his way out of our life. Obsessively, I kept hitting Send on my phone, getting his voice mail over and over. Eventually, with the sun rising, I’d headed out to report him missing but I’d wound up at his office instead, standing outside, hoping for something to end this nightmare before it began.
    F INALLY , I WATCHED Rick strut up the street past the cute shops and trendy cafés, tapping on his BlackBerry oblivious to my waiting by the staircase. He was tall, lanky with a mass of black curls, a thin, carefully maintained beard and sideburns. He wore a pair of faded denims, a T-shirt that read Love Kills Slowly beneath a thick leather jacket hanging open in spite of the cold. He walked right by me, took the stairs easily, light on his feet.
    “Rick,” I said.
    He looked up startled from the slim black device in his hand. It took him a second to place me in this context. He didn’t look well, pale and exhausted, harried.
    “Isabel,” he said, a frown sinking into his forehead. “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?” He looked around, behind me, up and down the street.
    “Marc didn’t come home last night,” I said. I watched his brows lift in surprise, his eyes glance quickly to the left, then come back to me—thinking of a lie, a way to stall. Before he could come up with one, I asked, “Was he really here when I called?”
    Rick shoved the BlackBerry into his pocket and looked down at the concrete. I noticed the debut of coarse, wiry grays in his hair, of ever-so-faint crow’s-feet around his eyes.
    “No,” he said simply. “He wasn’t here. He never came back after his meeting yesterday. Never called.” I felt the cold wash of disappointment, a deepening of my fear. “Come inside, Iz. It’s cold.”
    I followed Rick up the stairs, thinking, trying to establish a time line. Marcus hadn’t phoned me after his meeting as he’d promised to do. I’d starting calling around three in the afternoon to see how it went. At that point I wasn’t even remotely concerned; he was so often absent-minded about our personal life, totally focused on business during the workday. It wasn’t uncommon for him to forget promises to call. My calls to him went straight to voice mail—not uncommon, either. I wasn’t even that concerned when he didn’t come home for dinner. But as Rick and I neared the top of the creaky slim staircase, I had the ugly dawning that no one had heard from Marcus since early yesterday.
    On the landing, I wrestled with the hope that we’d find him inside, having slept on the couch in his office, maybe hungover. Izzy, I’m sorry. Things went badly at the meeting. I went to have a drink and had too much. Forgive me . Even though nothing like that had ever happened before, I imagined it vividly as Rick punched in his security code, turned the key in the lock, and pushed open the heavy metal door. I imagined it so hard that for a moment it was almost true; I almost felt the flood of relief, the blast of fury.
    But