365 Days, Zero Missed Calls novel · Chapter 1 of 16
Chapter 1: Six Names
Rory leaves home on her eighteenth birthday after a year of being ignored, finds zero missed calls, then hears a stranger at the pumps report her to a man named Fitzgerald.
For three hundred and sixty-five days, my family didn't say my name.
Tonight I stopped saying theirs.
I pushed my bike down the gravel drive with the engine off.
Past the gatehouse. Past the cameras my brother Hudson put up and never watched.
At the bottom of the drive I turned around.
Greyhaven had twenty-two windows across the front, and every one of them was lit.
Nobody stood in any of them.
"Bye," I said to the house. "You won't notice. I'll notice for both of us."
Then I kicked the Ducati awake and let it roar.
My name is Rory Halston.
I'm the seventh child of Garrison and Giselle Halston, and the only girl.
Six older brothers, and a father who used to call me his last good thing.
A year ago, on my seventeenth birthday, my mother did the ballroom in indigo and oxblood because I won't wear pink.
Asher, my oldest brother, dragged me out to the drive with his hands over my eyes.
The bike was sitting there under a bow.
Matte black. My initials on the tank.
Dad pointed at me with his glass.
"You don't touch it until Asher teaches you."
"I won't," I said.
I'd been taking Asher's bike out at night for six months.
I hugged all eight of them that night, one after another.
A week later, my mother looked straight through me at breakfast.
"Morning, Mom."
She kept talking to her assistant, Audra, about linen samples.
I asked Dad if he needed me at his nine o'clock.
He went into his office and shut the door.
The next day was the same.
So was the next month.
I tried being louder. I tried being perfect.
My mother walked past the dining room and didn't turn her head.
One night I dropped a mug at Dad's feet on purpose.
He stepped over the pieces and kept reading.
By the fourth month I'd moved my things into the old boathouse on the north edge of the property.
One room, a woodstove, a window full of water.
Nobody asked where I slept.
In the eighth month, Dad hosted the Maritime board for dinner.
I wore the green dress Mom bought me before she stopped looking at me.
I sat in my chair, the seventh one.
Dad stood and lifted his glass.
"To my children," he said.
"Asher. Fletcher. Hudson. Landon. Declan. Colton."
He sat down.
I was holding a fork.
I walked outside and threw up in the hedge.
At two in the morning I went down to the archive under the house.
Every Halston has a file there.
Mine was the thinnest folder in the third drawer.
The last page was in Dad's handwriting, dated my seventeenth birthday.
"R. turned seventeen today."
That was all of it.
I walked out with it under my jacket.
That same night I applied to the Vanguard.
Every House on this coast answers to the Sterlings, and the Vanguard is their private corps of spies and fixers.
They take fifty recruits a year, at eighteen.
Eleven days later a black envelope came to the post office box my family didn't know about.
Silver crown on the flap. Three lines inside.
"R. Halston: accepted. Report on your eighteenth birthday. Tell no one."
I laughed in the empty boathouse until I had to sit down.
Four nights ago, at 11:03 p.m., a woman started singing inside my head.
"Happy birthday, Rory," she said.
"You're a week early," I said out loud, to nobody.
"No. You were born a week late. They wrote down the wrong day."
She told me to call her Echo.
"How do I know I'm not making you up?"
"Because you're not the first," she said, and wouldn't say more.
By the second night I could hear the housekeeper's radio four hundred yards away, through stone.
Once, just once, I heard a thought that wasn't mine.
It came from the groundskeeper as he walked past my window.
"Poor kid. Nobody's allowed to feed her, and it's killing the missus."
Tonight, Echo asked me for one thing.
"One dinner. Sit at their table and let me look at them."
So I did.
The housekeeper set my plate down without blinking.
My family came in and sat down.
Six men and one woman, all bent over their phones, all typing.
Nobody spoke to me for fifty-eight minutes.
At minute fifty-eight, my mother looked up.
Her eyes stayed on my face for one full second.
Something in my chest lifted off the floor.
Then she said, "Colton, tell Asher the west clearing's booked," and looked back down.
I got up before dessert.
"I'm sorry," Echo said, as I walked out into the dark. "I looked. I still don't understand them."
I packed in nine minutes.
I left the green dress, my crest ring, and a note on my mother's pillow.
"I waited a year. Don't look for me. R."
I crossed the county line at 12:14 a.m. on my real eighteenth birthday.
Two hundred miles later I pulled into a gas station under a buzzing yellow light.
I checked my phone.
No texts. No voicemails.
Zero missed calls.
I laughed so hard a trucker at the next pump asked if I was all right.
"Never better," I said.
A black sedan rolled in behind him and stopped at the far pump.
The driver stayed in the car with the window cracked.
I could hear his heartbeat from forty feet away.
I could hear his phone buzz on the dash, and him pick it up.
"Yes, sir," the driver said. "She's here. The girl. You were right, Mr. Fitzgerald. The Halstons have a daughter."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend