Now You See Her Read Online Free PDF

blame you. I sure as hell hadn’t seen it coming.
    I came down for spring break, and I never went home.
    “Fish don’t seem to be biting today,” Peter said, putting the beer bottle down next to his sea rod and grabbing my ankle. “But hey, wait. I think I got something.”
    For a scary second, I worried that I’d fall onto our concrete seawall or off it. But then I was on my back, across Peter’s lap, screeching ecstatically as he mercilessly tickled my armpits. Over the last two years in Key West, I was basically
majoring
in ecstatic screeching.
    “You honestly think I’d let you fall in?” Peter whispered as he caught my earlobe in his teeth. “After all we’ve been through? It took me my whole life to catch a real-life mermaid. I’d never throw you back. No way.”
    “In that case,” I said, sighing, as I lay back in the neighboring chaise. I smiled up at the merciless blue tropical Floridian sky. “I’ll just have to put up with you mortals for one more day.”
    What
hadn’t
we been through? I thought as I closed my eyes, remembering the night of the accident.
    It seemed like a million years ago.
    After we had pulled into Peter’s carport, he brought me inside and sat me down on his living room couch and told me to sit tight. About ten minutes later, I heard his boat start up. I fell asleep waiting for him to return and woke to the sun coming up and Peter, back from his night shift, in the kitchen making us breakfast.
    He’d taken care of everything, including delivering the Camaro back to Alex and persuading him to drop the car theft charge. It was as if the night before had never happened at all.
    When I went back to the hotel that afternoon, the only thing waiting in the lobby were my bags. My friends were gone. Not just Alex and Maureen, but Mike and even Cathy had left. They hadn’t left a message.
    I remembered singing “Could You Be Loved?” with them. The answer in my case was apparently a big fat no. Life wasn’t an episode of
Friends,
it seemed. Not one of them had “been there” for me, that was for sure. Not one of them had given a shit whether I lived or died.
    Driving me to the bus station, Peter had taken one look at my face and told me that he had a tiny room above his garage that he sometimes rented.
    “If you’re not ready to go back to school just yet, you could stay for a couple of days,” he said.
    A couple of days.
    Key West’s most famous last words.
    When two days turned into a week, Peter said he had a friend, Elena, a female cop, who was part owner of the island’s largest catering company and was always looking for people.
    I took the catering job the next day and withdrew from school the day after that.
    I knew it was a rash, probably borderline crazy thing to do. I also knew things were different now. That I was different. It wasn’t just the accident. With the break from my friends, the last vestiges of my old life had been cast away. One door had closed, and something in the Key West air told me to sit tight until the next one opened.
    And that’s exactly what happened.
    From the beginning, Peter was a perfect gentleman. Really more like a father or an extremely protective brother. He was always making sure that I used sunscreen and ate enough and got enough exercise and enough sleep. He was constantly leaving things on the rickety landing outside my door, videotapes, bags of fruit, books.
    By far, my favorite offering was a battered, secondhand copy of seventeenth-century English poets, Herrick and Marvell. At night I’d lie in my tiny bed and read, rediscovering why I’d become an English major in the first place. Rose petals and winged chariots, eternal youth and beauty. It was uncanny how well Peter seemed to know me.
    Peter actually stuttered the first time he asked me to cometo dinner. He served in the backyard with a tablecloth and china. He even wore a jacket with his Bermuda shorts. The lamb chops were burnt, the mashed potatoes were runny, but by