Lie To Me

52. Ryan

NOAH WHITE

I couldn't take her off my mind. Ava was consuming my every thought and not being able to hear from her was killing me on the inside. How was she feeling? Did her wound hurt a lot? When was she being released from hospital?

I glanced over at my phone, my hands itching to search her number, call her and ask her all those questions myself. It's been days since I last heard her voice, since I last saw her face, and if it weren't for Leah's brief text messages reassuring me that Ava's recovery was looking good and that she was slowly healing, I would be panicking over her condition. Even more than I already was.

I was still mad at her, but that anger I felt was slowly turning into nostalgia and yearning as days passed by. I missed her incredibly. Sure, Ava lied to me, Ava betrayed me, but Ava also gave me some great moments and, most importantly, she offered me endless chances to be myself. She's one of the very few people I feel truly comfortable with; she felt like home. And, no matter how much I told my heart to ignore that, I simply couldn't. The hope that the Ava I had met over the past months and that not everything was an illusion still lingered.

I turned my gaze away from my phone and tried to focus on my half-done essay instead of pondering on whether calling her or not. I knew that if I kept thinking about it, I would end up dialing her number. But I couldn't; not only it wasn't the right moment, but her family's words were still very much present in my mind too. Well, her brother had already left it pretty clear that he didn't want me anywhere near his sister back at the hospital, and I'm sure her father's opinion won't be much different.

A small knock on my door interrupted my train of thoughts. I lifted my head up from my laptop and muttered a 'come in', one of our maids entering my room right after.

"Sir." She lightly bowed her head down. "Your father wishes to see you in his office. He said it's an urgent matter."

My heart stopped beating for half a second, the apprehensive look on the maid's face —as if she too sensed that there was something wrong, very wrong, going on at this house— not helping my thoughts. I nodded my head almost by instinct, but my mind was going over the thousands of reasons as to what had happened for my father wanted to call me so urgently.

Despite all my hesitation, I had told my father about what happened a few days ago. Not in full detail, I left a few things out like where it was —I still don't want him finding out about my cabin— or the fact that Ava was there. I always try to keep as much information as possible from my father —I've learned that it's for the best—, but this issue was much more serious and bigger, something I couldn't handle on my own. I knew nothing about the attack, who was behind it or what they wanted, so I just needed someone to figure all that out and prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. The only person I knew that had such power was my father.

However, ever since I broke the news to him, he's been acting weirdly. He's always tense and with a scowl on his face, and he seems to get mad more and more easily. At every little thing, he snaps and there's no calming him down.

With shaky hands, I walked through the empty hallways of the mansion until I reached my father's office. Being in this side of the house was quite unsettling. My father always hated us coming approaching his office because it was his workplace here at the house and he claimed that noisy children would only disturb his business. He used to get so furious whenever he got to know that Charlie or I had stepped a foot in this hallway. Even now that we've both grown up and are teenagers, we still have to either ask for permission or be called in by our father in order to come here.