“So let me get this straight. Your plan was to keep me at the party somehow. And Daniel was the one who spiked my drink. And neither of you knew about it beforehand?”
They both nod.
“I could have killed him when he told me,” Kenya says.
“What did he tell you happened?”
“Nothing. He didn’t say anything until the next day. Then he said you were fine. We just assumed you got home safe. We had no idea what happened until you told Yumi.”
“When I got that text from you Saturday night saying that you were calling it a night, I didn’t know he was the one who had sent that,” Yumi says. “I thought that was from you. But when you told me your story, Kenya and I confronted Jo and Daniel. That’s when they told us the truth about what happened.”
“Which was?”
“That he followed you as you walked Kugel. He said that you fell and hit your head. He said he panicked. He didn’t know what to do.”
“Umm, call an ambulance?” I don’t try to hide my disbelief. “Drive me to the hospital? Or at least help me get home?”
Yumi tears up. “I know. It’s crazy that he didn’t do that. I feel so horrible knowing that happened to you, but you have to believe me—I didn’t know until after the fact.”
“He told us that when you blacked out, it was in front of their rental house,” Kenya says. “So he walked you into the basement to rest and then went home to get his car, but when he came back, the next-door neighbors had a firepit going in their driveway. He said he couldn’t just, you know, walk into an empty house under construction and then walk out with an unconscious woman.”
“So he left me there. All night.”
“If I had known—” Yumi starts, but I hold my hand up to stop her. I’m not ready to shift into forgiveness or pity for Yumi.
“Neither of us knew until later on,” Kenya says. “You have to believe us, Caren. You can’t think we’d let you lie bleeding in some basement.”
“I don’t know what to think.” But my mind is racing ahead to the worst-possible scenario: that the people I trust the most in the world have conspired against me. My stomach churns with nausea.
“It was Daniel who did that,” Yumi says. “Not us.”
I let out a dry laugh. “That’s convenient. Daniel’s to blame for everything, huh?” My voice cracks, betraying my hurt. “And Jo? Funny how they’re not here to tell their side of the story.”
“They would tell you the same thing,” Kenya says. “They feel terrible.”
“I saw Jo a few days after it happened. It didn’t seem like she felt terrible. In fact, she implied I had a drinking problem.”
“No one wanted to hurt you,” Yumi says. “We wanted to protect you.”
“If that weren’t such a pathetic attempt at self-deflection, it would be funny.”
“We didn’t want to drag you into all this.” Kenya leans forward. “We thought we’d get the bracelet back, return it to Holly Stone, and that would be the end of it.”
“What about the Millie’s takeout? The wine?”
Kenya winces. “Jo’s idea. She told us that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. She said that when Daniel told us he put something in your drink, she went to your house to make it look like you’d spent the evening at home. She thought you’d wake up and see the wine, the Millie’s, and you’d think,Oh, I drank too much. I got home safe, I ordered dinner, opened a bottle of wine. That it might make you feel better to know you’d been at home the whole night.”
“Feel better? Do you hear yourself?”
“It wasn’t my idea!” Kenya smacks her hand on the wrought-iron table, making the glasses jump. One tips over and she grabs it before it spills onto the table. “I’m sorry. I’m upset. We didn’t know what happened until later. It just got so out of control so fast. The plan was just to keep you occupied for like an hour so Yumi could slip in and out. That’s it. No one talked about drugs or wine bottles or ordering Millie’s. We would never have gone along with that.”
“If Miguel had been here last weekend, none of this wouldhave happened,” Yumi says. “We would have just asked him for the bracelet. But he was away. And we needed it that night. Holly Stone said if she didn’t get it by Sunday she was calling the cops.”
“So you try to steal the bracelet from my house, drug me, screw that up, don’t steal it, then you do steal it but you have to give it back to me because Holly Stone emails me. Do I have that right? Freaking idiotic. You are terrible criminals.”
“We’re sorry,” Kenya says. “In retrospect, we should have just told you.”
“You think? What about Miguel? How much did he know about this plan? To stall me at the party? To sneak into the house and take the bracelet?”