Chapter Fourteen
Sasha
Drew slouches over his phone, which he should be grounded from, and eats a piece of toast in two bites while Sasha pours a
cup of coffee for Regan and then one for herself. She sits at the kitchen counter, where the girls are giggling over pancake
faces—Tom is getting a thrill out of making a show of cooking for them. He has the cuffs of his dress shirt rolled up and
engages fully in the impromptu game of breakfast caricatures before he’s off to meetings with a prospective new “craft vinegar
supplier” so he can make their new sauce even more amazing and perfectly balanced.
Sasha always finds it funny the things he does—like sampling new beer and sauce ingredients in the middle of the day on a Tuesday—compared to most people she knows.
Like poor Carson, who is in some sort of corporate sales job that has him traveling and in a constant state of stress and dread about his work.
Free steak dinners and booze are the only things he seems to enjoy about it.
Sasha’s lucky . . . most of the time . .
. that she has such a cozy little life, and then she catches herself thinking, Why is Drew trying to ruin it? Why can’t he just be happy?
She watches him stand, pull his coat from the back of his chair and say “see ya” before making his way out to his car for
school . . . which, of course, she knows he isn’t going to because she knows he’s suspended. She notices Regan watching him
exit through the front door and walk past the front window, and she has a furrowed brow—a disapproving look. Odd. But Sasha
isn’t going to overthink it; Regan’s mind is probably just elsewhere.
“Okay, let’s get going,” Sasha says, hurrying the girls off for their bags and coats so she can get them dropped off and start
tracking Drew’s movements. In a flurry of putting plates in the sink, grabbing bagged lunches and looking for rain boots,
they are out the door and dropping Chloe and Hal off in front of the school within thirty minutes. As Sasha drives Regan home,
she wants to offer to drive her to Windsor Locks to look for her dead husband, but she can’t. She has problems of her own
to contend with, and she probably shouldn’t get involved. After all, everyone knows Jack is gone, and whatever Regan is going
through, it feels like more trouble no matter how much Sasha sympathizes.
“You sure you’ll be okay?” Sasha asks, pulling into Regan’s lot, wondering if she’ll make the drive anyway, to hell with the
doctors or concussions. She probably will, Sasha thinks. She seems fine, medically speaking . . . and very determined.
“Yes. Thanks. I really appreciate all you’ve done for me. I don’t know what I would have done.”
But Sasha knows Regan has tons of family she’s close to and friends.
She’s deeply rooted in the community and has the empathy of just about everyone after her loss.
Sasha wonders why Regan didn’t call any of them before her.
Yes, the three of them—herself and Andi and Regan—have been peas in a pod since Sasha moved in, but she’s still the newbie.
She can only assume this assault makes Regan think the bombing wasn’t a prank gone wrong but a very real threat to her life .
. . and she’s not ready to make that public just yet.
“The police are coming to talk to me, so I’ll be fine,” Regan says, exiting the car and stepping into the misty gray air.
Of course the police didn’t find any evidence besides the broken window and strewn boxes Regan already knew about, so Sasha
can’t imagine going back into that house on her own, police on their way for a chat or not. She offered Regan the option to
stay and rest, but she insisted on going home, so Sasha waves goodbye and reminds her that she’ll be back by three to pick
up the girls and head to Wild Roast Café.
When she’s out of sight from Regan’s house, she pulls over on the woodsy two-lane road just up the street and opens her tracking
app to see where Drew has gone. That absolute shit has driven himself all the way to Hartford. She zooms in and sees that
he seems to be stopped at a Carl’s Jr. So he’s suspended, in some deep, deep shit, lying to her and stealing photos of dead
people, but he’s popped in to treat himself to some bacon fries at a fast-food joint. She’s seething as she white-knuckles
the steering wheel and gets on the freeway, headed into the city.
The gray and drizzle are relentless. The extended forecast hasn’t a speck of sunshine in sight, and the constant gloom is mirroring Sasha’s mood as she becomes more and more certain Drew is turning unknowable and slipping further away from her into something dangerous.
She keeps the radio off and lets her thoughts bombard her as she tries to play out worst-case scenarios and potential solutions—because there must still be a way out for him.
If he made a bomb threat or even . . . if he—she can barely stand to let herself think it.
She’s been repressing the thought, staying in denial so it won’t really be a possibility in her mind, but it niggles around the edges, and then there it is.
The question she hasn’t wanted to ask herself.
What if Drew planted that bomb in Regan’s car that killed someone?
Will Sasha be visiting him in prison for the rest of his life?
Maybe she’d be able to protect him if he would just confide in her—because then she could believe it was an accident, a joke gone wrong, that he thought it would be a prank and never conceived it was powerful enough to really blow up.
Or . . . she doesn’t know, but there has to be a reason. Drew isn’t a monster.
When she gets into the city, she looks at her tracker again, and he’s just outside downtown. His car is parked in a lot, and
she doesn’t know the area, but she’s not far away, so she drives too fast over wet, cracked streets and her tires dip into
potholes as her heart speeds up, wondering what she’ll find. What could he possibly be up to?
When she spots his car, it’s at a Dave and fucking Buster’s. She can’t believe she’s letting him get away with this when he
should be grounded with his phone and computers locked up for a year. At minimum. But she is certain this is a better strategy
if she actually wants information. So he’s playing pinball and dicking around, and she just has to swallow down the absolute
fury over this Ferris Bueller shit and wait it out.
After an hour, she finally decides to walk over to the Starbucks across the street and order a cup of coffee.
She keeps her eyes on the parking lot where his car sits just a couple rows over from hers, and watches even though she has the app.
There is still a tiny part of her that hopes—what?
She doesn’t even know—maybe that his friend took his car for the day and Drew is at the library studying and feeling guilty for whatever it is that got him suspended.
She’ll call the school about that later this morning to find out. She dreads that, too.
She drops her coffee when she spots him. She’s mid–Stevia pouring when she takes a glance out the window and sees him walk
to his car with the hood of his sweatshirt up, looking shifty as he keeps his gaze down and hurries to his car. She apologizes
for the spill as she runs out the glass doors in time to see his taillights glowing in the dark haze of the day, turning onto
Sixth Street. She jogs back across the road, almost slipping on the wet pavement, pissed off and breathless from the unexpected
spring, and then she jumps in her car and goes. She opens the tracking app because she doesn’t want to tail him too closely,
and anyway, he’s already too far ahead.
The next time he stops, it’s at a smoke shop called Vapors. Great, now I probably have to deal with vaping on top of everything else, she thinks, but she quickly brushes the thought away and tries to stay focused. She sees his car parked in the small gravel
parking lot. The place is a brick building with no windows and a metal door. It has a hand-painted sign with a poorly illustrated
pink pot leaf on either side of the shop name, and it all looks as shady as it can possibly manage.
She parks next door at a Mexican grocer so her car won’t be recognized, and she doesn’t see him anywhere.
He must have already gone inside. She is trying to imagine what he would drive all the way to the city for if all he wanted was video games and vapes.
There’s plenty of that sort of thing in Cloverhill Lakes.
He’s not in there more than fifteen minutes, but when he does emerge, it’s from the side door of the building.
An older man stands in the door frame and they shake hands—the man stands very close to him, saying something, holding Drew’s elbow with his free hand and leaning in like whatever it is, it’s something very important.
She even sees the older man look around, subtly down the street right then left, to make sure nobody is around.
Then he pats Drew’s arm a couple of times, and Drew gets in his car and drives off.
Sasha doesn’t notice him carrying anything—she can’t detect a look of distress or fear.
It’s like this is a totally normal thing to be doing.
Once Drew is long gone, she knows what she has to do.
She has to find out who these people are and what they want with her son, because he didn’t come all the way here for smokes.
She needs to get to the bottom of what he’s involved in, and that means finding out who he’s secretly meeting and why.
She tries the front door and fully expects a little bell to ring indicating a customer and to be greeted by sickly sweet tobacco
scents and a young, stoned cashier, but none of that happens. The door is locked. She planned to pretend to be a customer
and ask some casual questions to see if she could garner any information at all, but it’s closed—it looks as though it’s often
closed and probably a facade for something far more sinister.
She walks around the side door and climbs the three brick stairs to the steel door and tries to pull it open.
To her shock, it swings out at her and throws her a little off balance, but she steadies herself, already a little rattled, and steps inside quickly and closes the door behind her, then freezes in the dark hallway she finds herself standing in.
A few yards in front of her, she sees stairs that lead down to a basement, where there’s a light on—and she hears the rumble of men’s voices talking.
To the right is a closed door that leads into the vape shop, which is dark inside.
To her left, there’s a dark hallway that looks like it leads to a small office or supply room as far as she can tell.
What could he have been doing here? Sasha can’t understand it—she can’t even come up with one scenario that makes sense. Maybe
if she can silently move down a few stairs, she’ll be able to hear what the men are saying and maybe then she can figure out
what’s happening, who they are, what this place really is.
She tiptoes down the first stair and strains to listen, but before her foot touches the third stair, suddenly, she can’t breathe.
She can’t scream. Someone has grabbed her from behind and covered her head in a plastic bag, and she can’t even gasp for a
breath. The plastic sucks into her mouth and nostrils and she’s never been so terrified in all of her life. She claws and
kicks, but the man who has her in his grip is strong, and no amount of fighting is helping—it only rips the small amount of
air she had left in her lungs out of her more quickly, and then she starts to see stars and her body feels tingly and weak.
Just a fraction of a moment before she loses consciousness, the bag is pulled away and she drops to the floor in a heavy thud.
“Wanna tell me what the fuck you’re doing in here?” a voice asks, and she sees three men she doesn’t recognize standing over
her. She opens her mouth but nothing comes out because she still can’t catch her breath to speak. She tries, but he asks again
and she only makes a small squeak, and then she lets out a gasp as tears run down her face.
Then one of the men lifts his booted foot and smashes it down on her hand so hard she actually hears the bone in her pinky finger crack.
She finds her breath and a guttural scream of pain and terror escapes her mouth.
She curls up into a ball on the floor, holding her head, protecting herself for the next blow, knowing this is the end. This is how she’ll die.