Chapter 58
Marin
The flight takes forever. Everything takes forever when you’ve finally decided something.
I have a job. A real one. Remote, Texas-based, with a man who trusts me enough to let me build something from the ground up.
I have a farmhouse. I have a plan—not the old plan, not the basement plan, not the kidnap-your-boyfriend-and-love-him-into-submission plan.
A real plan. One that doesn’t require restraints or cover stories or prayer beads.
I have a future that doesn’t include Charles.
That sentence should hurt more than it does.
I land at nine. The drive from the airport takes forty minutes.
Dark roads. No traffic. The kind of Texas night that makes you feel like the only person left on earth.
I drive with the windows down because the air smells like nothing—no exhaust, no garbage, no eight million people stacked on top of each other pretending they have enough room. Just heat and grass and distance.
I pull into the driveway. Luke’s truck is there. Parked like it owns the place. Which, in a way, it does.
He’s on the porch. Sitting in the chair I bought at Foster’s last week. He stands when I get out of the car, the way he stood the first time I opened the door—filling the space, quiet, waiting.
“How was New York?” he says.
“Loud.”
He nods. Doesn’t smile. Luke doesn’t smile when things go right. He just absorbs it, the way he absorbs everything.
“How’s Charles?” I say.
Something crosses his face. Fast. Gone before I can name it.
“He’s fine.”
“Fine how?”
“Fine as in alive. Fed. Watered. Medicated. Your list was thorough.”
“My lists are always thorough.”
I grab my suitcase. Walk to the porch. He takes it from me without asking. Sets it inside the door. We stand there—the two of us, on a porch he fixed, under a sky full of stars neither of us is looking at.
“Luke.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to let him go.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t react. Doesn’t do any of the things a normal person does when someone says something that changes everything.
“When?” he says.
“Tomorrow. I’ll drive him to the airport. Let him go.”
“And if he goes to the police?”
“He won’t.”
Luke looks at me. Measuring. The way he measures everything.
“You’ve thought about this,” he says.
“Yes, a lot.”
He doesn’t ask what that means. He will. Later. But not tonight. Tonight we’re standing on a porch and I’m telling him I’m letting Charles go and he’s looking at me with something I haven’t seen before.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
I go inside. The kitchen looks the same.
The table. The counter. The prayer beads.
Everything in its place. Everything exactly as I left it except for the feeling—something in the air, something in the way Luke’s shoulders are set.
Not tension exactly. Something closer to a man who’s been sitting with a decision for too long.
I notice it the way you notice a picture frame that’s slightly crooked—not enough to fix, just enough to notice.