23. Delphine #2
And Kendall started to cry. Standing in her cream coat on a concrete floor with a woman tied up eight feet away, she started to cry, because he had said thank you to her.
“Ask me where,” she said thickly. “Go on. Ask me where she is.”
“Where is she?”
“If I tell you.” She wiped under her eye with one careful knuckle, not smudging anything, still Kendall. “If I tell you, will you choose me?”
The silence went on so long I thought the line had died.
“Kendall.”
“No, don’t. Don’t use that voice.” Her own voice was climbing.
“You want the address. That’s the whole reason you called, that’s the only reason you’ve ever said one word to me in twenty years, so pay for it.
Everything has a price, you people taught me that.
If I give you the address, do I get you? ”
“Tell me why you think you want me.”
And that was it. That was the hook, and she went straight onto it, because it was the only question anyone had asked her in her entire life.
She talked for four minutes.
She talked about being fourteen. She talked about a boat in July and a dance and a remark he had made to her at somebody’s wedding in 2009 that I’m absolutely certain he did not remember making.
She talked and talked, and every time she started to slow down, his voice came out of that phone, low and steady and terrible in its gentleness, saying tell me about that, or I didn’t know that, or go on, and she went on.
She was crying properly by the end of it. She had forgotten I was in the room.
And I understood, listening to my husband murmur to the woman who had taken me, exactly what he was doing.
He was keeping her talking.
“So you’ll come,” Kendall was saying. “You’ll come here, and you’ll see, and then you’ll know. Say you’ll come.”
“I’ll come,” Heath said. “Tell me where.”
And she told him.
She said the name of a boathouse at the end of a dead pier, and she said it the way a bride says a date, and the moment it was out of her mouth I heard the room change on the other end of the line.
Not his voice. Underneath his voice. A chair going over.
Somebody shouting a word that was not part of any conversation about love.
Kendall heard it too.
She went absolutely rigid. I watched her face come apart in pieces, the girl at the window falling away and an older, blanker creature coming up behind it, and she looked down at the phone in her hand like it had bitten her.
“Who’s that?” she said. “Heath. Who’s that in the room with you?”
The line clicked.
For a moment she did not move at all.
“Four minutes,” she said, to nobody. “He kept me on for four minutes.”
Sound reached me from the distance. A car engine. Then another. The sound of doors slamming, voices shouting.
Sirens. Faint but getting closer.
Kendall’s head snapped toward the sound, her eyes widening.
I ran.
I scrambled to my feet, my legs cramped and unsteady, my ankles still bound but loose enough to shuffle forward. I made it three steps before Kendall’s hand closed around my arm.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
I twisted free and kept moving, stumbling over debris, crashing through the door and into the gray morning light. The boathouse was at the end of a pier, water on three sides, and I could see police cars in the distance, their lights flashing.
“Help!” I screamed, my voice raw and desperate. “I’m here! I’m here!”
Kendall caught up to me at the edge of the pier. She grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked me backward, wrapping her arm around my throat.
“One more step and I’ll push her in,” she shouted at the approaching officers. “I’ll drown her and that bastard she’s carrying.”
“Kendall!” A new voice, raw and desperate. “Let her go!”
Heath. My husband was stumbling toward us, one hand pressed against his side, his face pale and drawn with pain. There was blood on his shirt, so much blood, and he was moving with a limp that made my heart seize in my chest.
But he was alive. He was alive and he was here and that was all that mattered.
“Heath.” Kendall’s voice changed, becoming soft, almost tender. “You came for me. I knew you would come for me.”
“I came for my wife.” He stopped a few feet away, his hands raised in a gesture of surrender. “Let her go, Kendall. It’s over.”
“It’s not over.” She tightened her grip on my throat, cutting off my air. “It’s never going to be over. Not until you see. Not until you understand what I’ve done for you. What I’ve always been willing to do for you.”
“I understand.” Heath took a careful step forward. “I understand that you’re hurting. I understand that you’ve been hurting for a long time. But this isn’t the answer. Hurting Del isn’t going to make me love you.”