CHAPTER 71

Strangers and secrets

Pov: Maddison

I woke up to Kat shaking me awake.

"Maddie," she called me, her voice, a little too loud and a little too fearful for this time of the day. "The apartment landline was blowing up and I picked the call. There's someone on the line asking for you."

I roused into consciousness and looked at her in annoyance for waking me up from a perfectly good dream.

She was wearing a loose sweater, the collar stretched and falling down her left shoulder and she was wearing her reading glasses and a giant accounting textbook was stuck under her armpit, in between the side of her arm and the side of her torso and I remembered that she and Olivia took night and evening classes in NYU, three times a week, trying to get their master's degree.

She was handing the phone to me and it was shaking in her grasp. The cold, unadulterated fear etched in her eyes made me sit up, albeit sleepily, and take the phone from her hand, groggy and sleepy eyed. I sat up, resting my back ag