My Boyfriend and Brother Left Me in the Escape Room novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Please Get Help
Orin gives Veronica the loft for a week with terms, and the next morning Lyla's tearful video calls her mentally ill and tags her employer.
I did not kick the door. I called the number on the back of the card.
Orin answered on the first ring. "Where are you?"
"On my own landing, locked out of my own apartment."
"Send me the address. Don't move."
I knocked again, harder, and this time the keypad chirped green.
Darius opened the door six inches and no more. He had changed into a clean shirt.
"My laptop is in there," I said. "It's my whole job."
"Babe, you're upset."
"Give me my laptop, Darius."
He sighed and slid the bag through the gap. My charger came after it, and my purse.
Behind him, Lyla stood in my robe with a wine glass in her hand.
She did not even try to hide.
I lifted my phone and took her picture, then his hand on the door, then the time at the top of the screen.
"Ronnie." Darius's smile went thin. "That's not necessary."
"It's the one thing tonight I have decided is necessary," I said.
The door closed. The deadbolt turned.
Orin's truck was at the curb in nineteen minutes. He took my bag without asking and opened my door.
He did not ask what had happened. He drove.
The loft sat over Gaslight Escape, up a back stair that smelled of cut wood and glue.
One huge room, brick walls, a drafting table, a bed behind a bookcase. Every lamp was already on.
"I turned them all on while you were driving," he said. "I figured you would want it."
My throat closed. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Listen. You can have the loft for a week. I sleep at the shop downstairs on a cot."
"Why?"
"Because I built that room, and somebody used it as a weapon."
"That's liability talking," I said.
"It's about forty percent liability." He almost smiled. "The other sixty I'll keep to myself."
I sat down on the edge of the bed. My knees were still not mine.
"One week, then," I said. "I pay you. My job is medical coding. Your booking software must be a mess."
"It's a disaster."
"I'll fix it. No favors, no pity, and nobody owes anybody."
"No touching, either," he said, and his eyes held mine. "You've had enough hands tonight."
"Agreed."
He set a battery lantern beside the bed and a glass of water beside the lantern. Then he went down the stairs.
I slept in jeans and his hoodie with every lamp on.
I woke at seven to my phone shaking itself across the nightstand.
Forty-one messages. Then ninety. Then I stopped counting.
The first one was from a number I did not know.
*Is this you? Are you okay?*
The link underneath opened Lyla's page. Her newest video had been up for six hours.
She sat on a cream couch with no makeup and her hair pulled back.
"I need to share something hard," she said, and her voice shook on cue. "My best friend Veronica is not well."
"Last night, at an escape room for her birthday, she had a panic attack."
"She accused the people who love her of terrible, terrible things. She would not stop."
The picture cut to a gray, grainy clip.
It was the inside of the Hole, in night vision. A woman crawled across the stone floor on her hands and knees, sobbing, her mouth wide open.
The woman was me.
The captions ran along the bottom in soft pink letters. *Please be gentle with the people who are hurting. Veronica, we love you. Please get help.*
The clip did not show the screen on the wall. It did not show the red button, Orin, or the voices in the lobby.
It ended the second before I pressed the button.
Lyla was crying again as she finished.
"I started Glowkin because of her fear," she said. "I've held her hand in the dark since we were eight. I won't stop now."
"She has been afraid since she was eight, and I have been her light," she said. "That will never change."
Her followers poured into the comments by the thousands.
*You are an angel.*
*Poor Veronica, she needs a hospital.*
*Lyla, you're so brave for staying.*
Somebody had found my name. Somebody had found my face in a bridal shower photo, and my work profile with my employer's name under it.
The view counter at the bottom said one point four million.
An email slid in over the top of it all, from the human resources department of the company I had coded for since college.
*Veronica, you were tagged in a public post. Please call us before nine on Monday.*
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