Chapter 8
Do you still love him?” asked Dr. Black.
“I don’t know if I ever did.” Another lie. Maybe I loved Julian too much.
In my memories, and sometimes in my dreams, I go back to that crappy motel in New Mexico, somewhere between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, miles from anything. The Sleep Tight Motel, sitting beside a deserted rural road, dilapidated and nearly empty, just a single car in the parking lot.
Julian had been waiting awhile when I arrived. He stood up from the chair where he’d obviously been watching out the window. He looked disheveled, tired.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said. I felt a pulse of sadness but also relief. I thought he was ending it. But then he swept his arm wide to indicate the seedy room. “I want a home with you, a real life.”
“What does that mean to you?” I asked. “How do we make a real life in the context of what we are.”
He shook his head. “We’re more than this, aren’t we? More than what we do for a living. I can be better. Do better. You’re right. About so many things.”
“Are we? Are we more than this? It’s not like we’re accountants or lawyers, looking for a better work-life balance.”
He smiled at that, moved in. God, I could never resist him. His arm looped around the small of my back. He pushed a strand of my hair behind my ear. Those eyes, that kiss. I let myself melt into him. In our most intimate moments, I knew there was no one else on this earth for me but him.
We made love on a squeaky bed, the flashing neon sign washing it in yellow.
“You know what I think the truth is,” he said as I lay in the crook of his arm afterward. A semi roared past the motel, and everything shook. “You don’t want to be happy.”
“Maybe we don’t deserve to be happy,” I told him. “Look at how we live.”
“See,” he said sadly.
We made love again. Holding me, he wept. Then he fell into a deep sleep. He was still sleeping when I woke again after drifting off in his arms.
I moved from his warmth, slipping from his embrace carefully. Pulled on my clothes, watching him. His beauty. His power. His love. I didn’t deserve any of it.
I left him there, drove away down that dark highway.
The truth is that Julian is not the asshole.
I am.
Now, I stand to the side of the walk-in closet door, out of sight. My breath is measured. I wait, gun in hand. There’s the whisper of movement in the bedroom.
I’m trying to decide if it’s better to rush out shooting or keep my position and wait for him to enter the closet. Here I have the advantage of surprise but no exit. If I rush out, I make myself vulnerable. My heart is a drum.
Another shuffle.
Then the darkness of the doorway morphs, and a large masked figure moves into the closet. I’m surprised. It’s an amateur move to walk into a space where you know someone is hiding, not checking your blind spots.
I put the gun to his temple. “Drop your weapon.” He does so, and I back him out of the closet and into the bedroom.
He lifts his hands, eyes trained on me through the balaclava.
I recognize him just as, with several swift movements, he unarms me, sweeps my legs out from under me, and straddles me.
A single blow to the face has me stunned, the room spinning.
As a woman, you have to hope it never comes down to hand-to-hand combat.
His weight is crushing my chest; his knees pin my arms. If it comes down to strength and weight, a woman in a fight is fucked.
I lie beneath him thinking about my mother, my father, Nora.
I turn my head toward the closet and see Apple staring at me from the darkness, eyes wide with fear.
I use my last ounce of strength to mouth a single word.
“Run.”
She does. Swift and silent, tiny legs pumping, clutching her tattered bunny, she’s past us and gone.
He doesn’t seem to notice her. I hope she doesn’t see her father, but at the moment I’m just glad she won’t have to watch a person die before her eyes.
I feel a release of all the things outside my control.
This life. It’s so much work.
“At least take off your mask, Drake.”
He hesitates a second, then peels it back.
“Nothing personal,” he says, breath ragged.
“I never liked your cooking,” I say. “I faked it.”
He smiles at that, then closes his hands around my throat. I see something I haven’t seen in him before. A terrible blankness, an abyss in those eyes. And I disappear into their darkness, wondering what’s waiting on the other side. I let the peace envelop me, don’t even offer a final struggle.
Then he freezes, hands release, and air rushes back as his head explodes, a horrifying viscous spray of blood and brain matter. He lingers in time, the top of his head gone, one blank eye staring; then he topples over heavily.
Standing behind him is Julian.
“You really need to start answering your phone,” he says.
I cough violently, my throat aching. Try to wipe the gore from my face. Then I roll onto my side and vomit.
“You didn’t train him to watch his back?” he says, helping me to my feet. We’re moving toward the door, my eyes scanning the space for the kid.
“Apple,” I croak. “The baby.”
He looks around. Her door is closed, and I wonder if she’s hidden herself in there.
“We can’t take her,” he says with more gentleness than I would have imagined. “The police will come. She’ll be okay.”
She won’t be. I know this for a fact. But he’s right that we can’t take her. That she’ll have to survive in whatever way she can after this night. Already in the distance I hear the sirens.
“Let’s go,” he says, tugging me from the house.
The night is frigid, sky full of stars. I look back; the Christmas tree glitters. I see the slumped form of Bryce’s body cast in glimmering lights. Above, a shooting star tears the sky. Santa’s sleigh?
“Where?” I manage, my voice painful in my throat.
“You still have the go bag? The safe house?” he asks.
I nod.
“All right, then,” he says. “That’s what we do until we can figure out a plan.”
I grab the bag from my car, and we climb into his SUV, parked outside the gate. In the car, we drive, take the dark back roads north, silent. What plan? I wonder. She’ll hunt us both down. She’ll never give up.
“How did you know?” I ask finally.
He nods toward the back seat, and I see the file. Inside, my image, a shot snapped as I left another job. I hardly recognize myself, deathly pale, all in black. That same blank stare I saw on Drake. There’s a red stamp across my photo. It reads: Armed and extremely dangerous.
I am exactly what she made me.
“She wanted you to do it,” I say. It hurts to think that Nora would end me. That she would ask Julian to do it. It seems extra personal, mean spirited.
“But I wouldn’t,” he says, shifting his eyes to me. “I couldn’t.”
“So now we’re both dead,” I say.
He reaches for my hand, and I take it. His grip is strong, warm.
“I don’t want to live in this world without you in it, even if you don’t want us to be together,” he says.
I haven’t cried since the night my mother died and I slept in a police holding cell until Child Protective Services came to take me to my first foster home.
But I cry now, for the child I was, for Apple.
Because Julian and I are both probably going to be dead before morning.
Because I’ve loved him since that first Vegas kiss and I never let myself really feel it—or anything.
“We’ll be okay,” he says.
We both know it’s a lie. But like so many of the lies I’ve been told, I let myself believe it.