CHAPTER SIXTEEN #3
“I like it here,” he says, the light breeze stirring his hair. “I mean, you know. When it’s just a city and not the serial killer capital of the world.”
“Which isn’t often,” I say, handing him his phone. “Murder season runs March through February in London. That’s why all the movie villains are British.”
“Ah,” says Grant, nodding. “With a brief Love Actually break for Christmas?”
“Of course.”
Our walk back to Lesley’s is a long one, made longer by several detours in wrong directions before we finally give in and look up the route.
Still, when the house’s warm lights come into view, we hesitate to go inside.
Maybe it’s because it’s such a nice night, quiet and unseasonably warm.
Or maybe it’s because when we walk through those doors, we’re back on the murder clock, and we’d rather savor a last few moments of whatever tonight has been.
A lifetime of normal, Grant said back in Boston. It sounded bleak to me at the time. But if this has been an evening of normal, maybe normal can be nice. Even a little bit wonderful.
So, hanging on to normal a little longer, we decide to take advantage of having the keys to Lesley’s kingdom and go explore the private garden across the street.
“I’ve always wanted to sit in one of these gardens,” I say, settling onto a bench to admire the serene park.
Its evergreen hedges buffer us from the surrounding streets, bare trees cutting spindly shapes against the town houses.
“Ever since I watched Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts break into one in Notting Hill.”
“And?” Grant asks, sitting beside me. “Everything you thought it would be?”
I tilt my head, considering. “It’s nice. A little anticlimactic, I think. Not as fun without scaling the fence.”
He nods, the shadow of a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah. That sounds like you.”
That last email he sent Anna Matthews whooshes back to me. Vibrant. Funny. Sharp. He also said I was chaotic and pathological, but still. A question that’s been gnawing at me since the bridge comes to the forefront.
“Why did you stop emailing Anna?”
He’s quiet for a second, studying the grass at our feet. “Well, first of all, we were about to meet her,” he says. “She wasn’t responding anyway. There wasn’t much point in continuing to try.”
I nod, not sure if I should ask the obvious question but unable to stop myself. “And second of all?”
He looks up at me, his silence stretching longer this time. Even in the darkness, I can feel how his eyes are fixed on mine, like he’s choosing his next words carefully.
Finally, he looks away and says, “I think it’s been good for me, being here. I kind of think I needed it.”
He has that face again, like there’s more to say. This time, I wait.
“My dad liked to say Those who can’t do, teach,” he finally says. “Specifically, about me. My mom always claimed he was joking, but there was more to it than that. He had other plans for me and I disappointed him.
“But I wanted to prove him wrong. I thought I could, if I just landed on an achievement that was impressive enough. Getting into a good college, or getting hired with my so-called useless degree. Writing the Great American Novel. Eventually, he’d have to admit that I wasn’t a failure.”
Even in the dark, I can see the pain lining his face. The tightness of his jaw. The weight he carries.
“Anyway, then he had a heart attack, and that was it. And I had never changed his mind. It was like the clock ran out and everything he thought of me got locked in. I couldn’t remember why I was doing anything, why I was writing.
So I stopped, and then he was right. I was just …
there. Barely participating in my own life, like everything was grayed out. ”
I think of the anguished, exhausted Grant I met in Boston, word-vomiting his life at me from the back seat. A cry for help that I didn’t really understand. Maybe he didn’t either just yet.
He meets my eyes again. “The past ten days have been the most terrifying of my life. But at a certain point, I found myself asking which was scarier—staying here or going back to the way things were.”
“And?” I ask. My voice feels small, a marble in my throat.
He shrugs. “I have no idea. But I think the fact that I even have to ask says a lot. And I do know that for the past ten days, at least, I’ve finally been doing something.”
I wish I knew what to say. I’m glad to have heard it all, to have this color-by-numbers picture of Grant painted in bit by bit.
There’s an ache in my chest for his loss, and a flicker of anger at how unfair it all is.
To think that anyone could consider him a disappointment.
Those who can’t do, teach. Those words had to cut deep if they pushed him this far.
“It’s bullshit, you know,” I finally say. “Teaching is doing. And it’s hard, and terrifying. Uri’s been trying to talk me into teaching at the gym for years now. At least once a week he asks me to get certified, and every week I give him a new reason why I can’t. Honestly, it just freaks me out.”
“And here I thought you weren’t afraid of anything,” Grant says.
Fearless, I recall from his email to Anna, warmth tingling in my cheeks again. If only he knew.
“I love learning self-defense,” I say. “And if teaching it doesn’t work out … I don’t want to ruin a good thing.” I smile at him. “Maybe those who can’t teach, temp.”
I say it with a forced laugh, but it does nothing to dispel the uncomfortable sensation of oversharing, or the thoughtful look on Grant’s face.
“You’re a good teacher,” he says. “I’m still alive, right? That has to count for something.”
It means a lot, hearing him say that. I’m just not quite sure what it means. I have a precarious kind of feeling, like I’ve said and heard too much and this all needs to be walked back several steps until he stops looking at me like that.
“So your dad wanted you to do things,” I say. “Do you think this is what he had in mind?”
He snorts. “I’m pretty sure he was thinking more along the lines of me joining my brother Ted in the family business.”
“Ah,” I say, nodding. “So it was a Mafia story he wanted.”
“Sure, if that’s what you want to call a hardware store where the most dramatic thing to ever happen was Ted accidentally nail-gunning himself to a wall.” He huffs out a breath, that suppressed half chortle of his again. I wonder what it’s like when he really laughs.
“Still,” he says, “I think he might’ve liked this story. And if I’m completely honest … God, I am going to regret saying this, but—” He looks hesitantly at me, then lets out a sigh. “It’s possible that I haven’t hated every second, as of late.”
It’s like a weighted blanket has slipped off my shoulders. “I’m really glad you said that,” I say. “Because I’m sorry, but if I’m being honest—I think I’ve kind of been loving this.”
It still feels a little terrible to admit, and I half expect him to glare at me with a new furrow of betrayal. But he just nods. “Yeah. I know.”
“You know? How?”
“Because every time we’re in mortal danger, you get this glimmer in your eye. To the point that I now instantly go all fight-or-flight whenever you smile.”
A grin fights its way to my lips, and I clamp them between my teeth.
“So, what now?” I ask. “If we’re both not hating this, do we stick around? Danger and all?”
There’s a part of me that thinks he’ll change his mind, and I want to give him the chance to. But after a silent moment, he speaks decisively.
“We have one more shot at meeting Anna in about a week,” he says. “If the story hasn’t run its course by then and it’s really bad, we can try again. But maybe we won’t need to. Maybe it’ll be okay.”
I want to be happy about this, and I’m sure I will be.
But first I have to be bewildered by the fact that Grant, the man who spent the first several days of our acquaintance making sure I knew that he was in the seventeenth circle of hell, now thinks this serial killer story might be okay. He must see the skepticism in my face.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “A lot of this story has been really disturbing to experience up close. But from a reader’s perspective?
There’s some levity to it. The cartoonish villains, Lesley’s puns, Lissa’s …
everything. I’m not so sure it’s a straightforward crime-thriller novel.
It might be more like a crime-thriller-comedy. ”
Relief washes over me once again. Levity. I love levity. I can do levity.
“You can just say I’m very funny,” I say, bumping his shoulder. “I know you think so. I read your emails.”
He rolls his eyes, turning away. “I was just trying to sweet-talk Anna into letting us go.”
The idea of Grant sweet-talking anyone, ever, in his life, is so preposterous that all I can do is raise my eyebrows at him. He meets my gaze, as if in challenge, and then gives up. “Fine. You are sometimes mildly entertaining.”
“And very cool,” I add. “Especially when I’m Grand Theft—”
“On second thought, a walk into traffic sounds nice.”
He gets up from the bench and I can’t help but giggle at this stupid game we play, yanking at his sleeve to pull him back down.
I pretend to zip my mouth closed, lock it, and drop the key in my inside jacket pocket.
With narrowed eyes, he pulls the front of my jacket away from my body and reaches in, then mimes chucking the key far away.
I shrug. “It’s fine. I have a spare.”
He cracks a reluctant grin. “Good.”
So this is what it’ll be, then. Another week of this. My heart does a little somersault at the thought of everything we don’t have to give up just yet. The running, the hiding, the throwing punches. Lesley and Lissa. All the danger. All the intrigue.
And us. Me and Grant against a lawless fictional world.
Facing down peril as a team, getting backed into corners and finding our way out again.
And maybe, if we’re lucky, more nights like this one: Stolen moments of quiet, sitting side by side.
Closer than I ever would have thought comfortable, yet inexplicably easy.
Getting a little bit lost in another world, his world, and not particularly eager to find a way out.
It’s then and there in the moonlit garden, with nothing but the sleepy calling of birds and the rustling leaves and the perfectly ordinary stillness of nighttime around us, with Grant smiling to himself and sitting so close to me that I can just about hear his heartbeat, that I finally realize it:
I’m in trouble.