Read Online The Third Lie's the Charm by Lisa Roecker - Free Book Online

beginning to understand why. So when his hand grabbed mine, I knew that it was an offer of friendship. Pure. Simple. No strings attached.
    â€œYou’ve already helped more than you know.” I squeezed his hand lightly.
    I did want his help. I wanted it so badly. But I wasn’t sure what to even ask him for just yet. I needed more time to get my head around this entire situation. Everything was happening too fast. I needed time to process.
    We lay there for a while watching puffy clouds shift and morph in the huge Ohio sky. And for a minute, I closed my eyes and tried to follow Dr. Prozac’s advice to just let myself live in the moment, to let myself experience the present instead of constantly getting dragged back into the hellish fires of my past. But Grace’s words were like lead in my pocket, pulling me back toward her, back toward the truth. No matter how hard I tried to move on, she was there. And now she’d been joined by Alistair, another casualty in the silent war that raged beneath Pemberly Brown.
    By the time I sat up, the sun had moved behind a cloud, and Seth was snoring softly next to me. I had to keep moving. I had to take action. My present, my now , was haunted, and I owed it to myself to put my ghosts to rest once and for all.

Chapter 13
    I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. There were only so many combinations of words I could plug into Google involving Sinclair’s name and his sordid past. I’d read all the articles, examined all the pictures, saved all the information. It was dark. It was late. I’d have to wait.
    So I paced. And my parents yelled at me to turn off the light. To sleep. They might as well have screamed at me to be normal. So I did what any other normal teenager with faded blue hair would do when there was entirely too much night left.
    I decided to go red. Blood red. The color of revenge.
    As I rinsed my hair, the water a watery pink and the strands bright between my fingertips, I felt whole again, completed by the promise of tomorrow, of uncovering new information with a new look. The shock of it all only added to the fire I felt in my gut.
    The red definitely worked.
    By the time light spilled into my room between my closed blinds, my hair wasn’t the only thing burning. My eyes felt scratchy and deprived, my head cloudy with exhaustion. But it was time to work.
    â€œYou look tired,” my dad said over his newspaper, trying to disguise a flash of wide eyes and failing miserably. I tried to tell myself he wasn’t trying to sound like one of the concerned parents on an ABC Family show. “And redder.” He tried to make a joke, but it fell about as flat as a bike tire with a nail in it.
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œNo, I just…what I’m trying to say is that I’m worried about you.” I looked over at him with his graying hair and his straight nose. He looked like the perfect dad. But a perfect dad wouldn’t keep his eyes trained on the words in front of him. The perfect dad would know how to talk to his daughter, or at least know better than to tell her she looked tired.
    When I sat with my cereal, he turned and looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time in as long as I could remember. My hands flew to my brand-new hair as if he wouldn’t notice it quite so much if it was covered by my fingers.
    â€œKate, I have no idea what you’re going through, but my guess is that it’s not easy to see another student at your school die so suddenly and under such tragic circumstances. Talk to me.” The look in his eyes broke my heart a little. It was the same way he’d looked at me after I skinned both my knees on my roller skates. The same look he’d given me when I’d cried my eyes out after I found out Grace and Maddie had a sleepover without me in fifth grade. It was the same look I caught through my eyelashes when I pretended to be sleeping in the days, weeks, months after