75. Now
SEVENTY-FIV E
now
11:06 , my watch says.
“And you had no prior knowledge of Mr. Stryker’s activities?”
My mind moves sluggishly. I blink at the detective standing opposite me, on the other side of Ellie’s blue Formica counter.
“No,” I finally reply. “I didn’t.”
My voice sounds like a stranger’s. Thick and halting. I’ve cleared my throat a hundred times, but it doesn’t help.
“Not even?—”
My eyes snap to the officer’s, quelling his question. “None of it. If I’d kno wn what he’d done,” I tell him slowly, “I would have killed him.”
The full extent of his crimes remains elusive, though. Now I know what he did to Ella and that poor girl from his prep school. But how many other women has he turned into victims?
“Grayson!”
My father’s voice lashes across the room. He darkens the doorway for a moment before crossing to stand between me and the detective, cutting the officer a dismissive glance.
“My son and I will be conferring with our legal counsel before anyone answers any further questions,” he states, then turns his back to the other man and faces me. “Are you hurt? There’s an ambulance downstairs.”
“It’s for Ella,” I murmur, sick to my core. “She is unconscious. I don’t know what he did to her before we got here.”
I held her the entire time we waited for paramedics and police to arrive, huddling in the corner of her living room while Marco single-handedly restrained Ted and Daniel. Danny didn’t pose much of a threat, though, considering he shot himself in the leg the moment we charged at him.
Marco’s idea to use Ted as a Trojan Horse worked brilliantly. Right as we got off the Brooklyn Bridge, Barnes called to inform us that he was on his way to provide the backup we requested. When we told him the address, he informed us that, moments before, Ted Stryker had also requested a ride to that address.
Barnes picked up my uncle and drove him to Ella’s borough, where Marco and I intercepted him. Unable to offer another explanation for why he was there, Ted admitted that Daniel called him to tell him to come. We forced him up the stairs and made him knock before rushing Daniel and knocking him out.
The second the gun went off, Ellie collapsed.
“They took her on a stretcher. They won’t let me go to her,” I rasp, “I’m not supposed to leave the scene until they clear it. They’ve threatened obstruction of justice.”
“It won’t be long now. They have Ted in a squad car. Daniel’s on his way to the hospit al, but I’ve sent Barnes there to be sure he doesn’t somehow evade the police. Marco is speaking with the lead investigator now,” Dad reports. “He knows him; they worked together. I’m sure he’ll convince him to clear the scene shortly.”
He slants a pointed glare at the detective hovering near us. “Perhaps you could help with that?”
The officer makes for the door, leaving us alone in the cozy apartment. Everything about it makes me ill, now—the little pieces of Ellie I would normally adore, all the glaring evidence of our struggle. The blood on the floor. The yarn on her desk. Yellow, like the first day we ever locked eyes. Like the crocheted Big Bird purse I used to tease her about. It looks like she’s knitting something larger now.
Will she ever finish it?
“He drugged her once before,” I whisper, voicing my greatest fear. “What if he gave her something again, and it’s too much? She wouldn’t wake up.”
My father is a serious man, but I’ve never seen him so solemn. “I’ll go and check on her.”
Just as he turns, though, Marco sails back into the room. With Ella right behind him.
I don’t think. I just react. A second later, she’s in my arms.
“Gray!” she cries, clinging to my neck while I fight for breath. “Are you hurt? The gun went off! There was blood !”
I can’t get my lungs to stop shuddering long enough to reply.
Sobs , I realize. I’m sobbing.
I take her to the only piece of furniture not covered in crime scene tarps—the overstuffed tangerine armchair—and sink us into it, tucking her against my body before pulling back to examine her face. My fingers follow my feverish gaze, searching for any hint of injury.
“Did he touch you?” I ask tightly. “Did he harm you?”
“Just my arm. He grabbed it and dragged me across the floor pretty hard, but I’m okay.” Her hands run over my face in a similar fashion. “What about you? Where did this bruise come from?”
I didn’t know I had one. In the heat of the moment, there were a lot of fists flying. I have no idea who landed a punch on me. But I know my uncle and cousin both looked like hamburger meat when Marco was finished with them.
“I’m fine,” I insist, gruff. The longer I look at her beautiful, ashen face, the harder it is to breathe. Everything I could have lost beams back at me—her wide sapphire eyes, the heart beating so hard against mine.
I clutch her closer, and she hugs me back, smoothing her hands over my head until my chest stops heaving. “Shhh,” she whispers, “It’s okay. We’re okay.”
The absurdity of her comforting me finally breaks through my dread. I turn to inhale the beloved scent of her hair, soaking it into my lungs. Once, twice—by the third breath, I feel more settled.
The hapless detective who questioned me wanders back into the apartment. “Miss Callahan?”
She shrinks back slightly, a shiver moving through her. My arms flex protectively, pulling her further into the overstuffed recliner. Her fingers curl into my blood-spattered T-shirt.
“Yes?”
“I need your account of each of your interactions with Mr. Stryker.” His eyes slide over to my face, then back to hers. “Uh, the, um, other Mr. Stryker.”
“So she can relive all of the shit he put her through?” I snarl. “For what? Your fucking paperwork?”
He liked me better when I was traumatized. Now, his features furrow into a frown. “If Miss Callahan wishes to press charges, we’ll need her statement. From all three attacks.”
Three attacks. Dear God .
He really did attack her three separate times. Because of me. Because I let him back into her life.
“I want to press charges,” she tells him. Then she turns to me, speaking softer. “I al ways regretted not doing it the very first time, but I didn’t know who he was or how to find him. And the second time… he threatened my family and you, so I missed that opportunity, too. I promised myself I would report him if he ever—if I ever got another chance.”
The lead investigator sits on Ellie’s desk chair. Marco hovers behind us, lingering by the kitchen area to listen along with my father.
“Do you want them to go?” I ask her, desperate to make what she has to do easier for her, somehow.
She shakes her head, whispering, “They all need to know the details, I suppose. If you want to make sure you can keep your company safe from Daniel.”
Stryker & Sons is the furthest thing from my mind. I haven’t even considered what we need to do to take Daniel’s shares back and dissolve Ted’s interests. Replace them both.
In the end, everyone stays where they are, and Ella begins talking. Listening to her confusion as she recounts the initial attack is heartbreaking, but the facts she does remember are worse. There are moments when I want to leap up and walk away. Times when I think I’ll surely wind up vomiting after all.
Details that shatter me. Fill me with a molten rage. Make my eyes sting.
And knowing she’s lived with this, every single day ? Well, that’s the worst of all.
Marco interrupts quietly a couple of times, letting her know that he has evidence to corroborate her claims. That seems to bolster her confidence. By the end of the first statement, as she relays the student resources available to her at the time and how each one failed her completely, her tone takes on an edge.
That anger bleeds into the next account. She tells us all about the day she came downstairs at the beach house, only to come face-to-face with the man who raped her. How she ran. How she came back to find me and tell me she needed to leave but instead wound up trapped in a room with Ted and Daniel .
Marco starts typing into his phone as she recounts Daniel’s story about seeing us in bed together and recognizing her—including the way he fled, hid in town, and lied about his whereabouts. I know my head of security is making notes. Leads to chase down later—again to help validate Ella’s narrative.
I hear my father’s knuckles pop as she recalls the threats they made against me and her family in order to force her to leave me. Our eyes meet across the room, and I read the lines of his face, knowing mine reflect the same abhorrence. The surreal dismay of realizing that our own flesh and blood could have so much hatred coursing through their veins.
“And when I came back from town, you were gone,” I say.
With a nod, she stutters through a deep breath. Tears fall onto her folded hands as she bows her head. “They paid the cabbie to drive me to the airport and gave me a stack of cash for a flight home. Probably in the hope that getting me out of town would help make the break-up stick. But I only made it halfway to JFK before I called you.”
She swallows hard, turning to look at me. “I called you a lot for a long time. I’m sorry about that. Again.”
Like a reflex, my old bitterness springs up. “You didn’t call me , Ellie. I never got any calls from you.”
Ella swipes at her cheeks, nodding some more. “Yes, I did. I called you for weeks and weeks. Every morning, every night. I sent texts. Probably a hundred. Eventually, sometime after the New Year, I got a message back telling me that I had the wrong number, asking me to stop.”
Everything inside of me seizes. “You did?”
“Yeah,” she whispers. “I thought you changed your number because you were angry and didn’t want to hear from me anymore. That’s why I came back to the city on the day I thought you’d be moving into the apartment in Midtown. I wanted to apologize and try to warn you about Daniel. But you weren’t there… And when I went to your old place, you had already moved out. ”
A boulder sinks into the pit of my stomach. “How did you have the wrong number? I tried to call you a million times, too. Did?—”
Memories from the morning she disappeared streak through my mind. Including one of me handing Daniel my phone and telling him my passcode.
That son of bitch .
He could have looked at anything on there, and I wouldn’t have known. Could have been slipping it off my desk or whatever bar we chose for happy hour and checking it—for years.
“Give me your phone,” I whisper.
Her trembling hand extends the iPhone to me. I swipe it right open—she has never used a passcode, even back then. In a few taps, I find my contact. Unlike me, she never deleted the number. Even when she believed it was no longer mine.
But it isn’t mine. The number saved under my name is incorrect. Off by one number.
“He changed it,” I realize aloud. “He made you send that text to me, deleted the thread, and then he changed the number saved in your phone by one digit, so any messages you tried to send later didn’t go to me.”
Her voice quivers. “W-what? He—I knew he deleted the text thread, but I didn’t—” An agonized whimper slips from her lips. “So all that time, I really wasn’t calling you? You weren’t ignoring my messages?”
Again, my instincts spur me. “Never.” I reach for her free hand, grasping it between both of mine, bringing it up to my mouth. “I didn’t believe you,” I rasp, distraught. “You told me you tried to call me multiple times, but I just wanted to fight, like a jackass.”
Ella glares at her phone as fresh tears spill over her cheeks. “I thought you knew I was trying to get in touch with you and you just hated me too much to pick up. If I’d known you were waiting for me, I would have found some way to track you down at school or your parents’ house or your work… I only stayed away because you seemed hell-bent on av oiding me, and I couldn’t blame you. And, after a while, I was… scared. I wondered if you would really protect me from Daniel because I believed you didn’t care about me anymore.”
I shake my head, refusing to accept any of it. “This still doesn’t explain why you didn’t get any of my calls. Why is my real number blocked?”
Ella’s wide eyes blink at me. “I purged my contact info a couple of years ago—after graduation—but maybe he saved your real number under some other contact name and blocked that? I didn’t even think to check…”
Because who would ever assume some sick fuck had saved their ex-boyfriend’s real phone number under a bogus contact so he could also block said ex-boyfriend?
No one sane.
“What?” she frets, reading my black expression. “Do you think he did the same thing to you? Did he block me?”
“No.”
He didn’t need to. All he had to do was make sure she didn’t answer any of my attempts to reach out. And I did the rest with my stupid anger and wounded pride.
“After I couldn’t get hold of you over a few months,” I rumble, sick. “I deleted you.”
God . This is entirely my fault. Because I believed that text message. Even when everything inside of me railed against it, I believed. In her fear. In her doubt. In her past mistakes.
I believed the worst in her.
There were hundreds of moments when she proved her love. And I chose to accept the one instant I thought she let me down.
The beautiful girl with the radiant soul. I forced myself to replay all of her flaws just to protect myself from everything I lost.
I gave up on her.
The thought echoes through me as I stare into her luminous sapphire eyes. And something inside of me breaks.