Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
STEVIE
The car is offensively normal.
Like the factory went out of its way to scrub it of personality.
Silver sedan, government plates, the kind of vehicle that disappears into a parking lot and quietly contemplates death.
It smells like pine air freshener and coffee that gave up hours ago.
Saul’s coffee, probably. It’s definitely gone cold, and somehow I know he’ll drink it anyway.
There’s a GPS mounted on the dash, but Saul doesn’t use it.
He knows where we’re going.
I don’t.
I sit in the passenger seat with my new blonde hair and my folder of fake documents and watch the city dissolve into suburbs into something smaller.
Saul drives like a man with secrets, a clean conscience, and excellent stamina. Hands at ten and two. A public safety PSA, but the kind of hands you just know could also hold your hips down while giving a safety briefing.
His fingers are relaxed but present. Ready to react if something happens.
Nothing happens.
The road stretches out flat and gray and endless.
“Beth Taylor,” I say to the windshield.
It sounds like someone else’s name. Because it is.
“Again,” Saul says. Not unkind. Just practical.
“Beth Taylor.” I try to make it sound natural. Casual. Something you’d say while offering banana bread at a book club. “Hi, I’m Beth Taylor. Nice to meet you.”
Wrong. All wrong. Too bright. Too performative.
“Beth Taylor,” I try again, flatter this time. “I’m Beth. I work in data entry.”
Saul glances at me. “Better.”
“Beth Taylor, I definitely didn’t watch a man die and get wet about it. Beth Taylor, I am extremely normal and definitely didn’t orgasm on a witness stand while thinking about a mobster who could ruin my life and my cervix.”
The corner of Saul’s mouth twitches. Almost a smile, which feels like winning the lottery and also possibly edging.
“Maybe save that version for the mirror,” he says.
I melt into the seat like a girl who’s just been rebranded against her will. The landscape is a blur of billboards and bad choices, and I want to make at least three more with the man beside me.
“How long until it feels real?” I ask.
He’s quiet for a moment. Considering.
“Depends on the person. Some people adjust in a few weeks. Others take months.” He shifts lanes smoothly, checks his mirrors. “Some never do.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It’s honest.”
I look at his profile. His jaw, his scruff, the scar in his eyebrow that keeps showing up in all my intrusive thoughts. I want to ask what made it. I want to touch it with my tongue. I want to not want that, and I fail.
“Have you ever lost someone to this?” I ask, like I’m not halfway to Googling how to fake your own death in the witness protection program.
“Once,” he says. “She couldn’t let go of her old life. They found her.”
Translation: Don’t text your ex. Or your cat. Or your trauma therapist.
“What happened to her?”
“Nothing good.”
I wait for more. He doesn’t offer it.
“Is that why you stay?” I ask quietly. “The first week. To make sure we don’t do something stupid?”
“Partly.” He glances at me. Those faded blue eyes, soft and serious. “Partly because the first week is when it hits hardest. And nobody should have to go through that alone.”
Nobody should have to go through that alone. Which is exactly what someone says right before they accidentally become the main character in your trauma rebound fantasy.
I think about my apartment. The one I’ll never see again. How many nights I sat in that kitchen by myself, stress-baking at 2 AM because loneliness has a texture and I was trying to cover it with butter and sugar.
I’ve been going through things alone my whole life.
I don’t know what to do with someone who thinks that’s wrong.
The miles blur together. One hour. Two. The landscape flattens into something that could be anywhere, every strip mall and gas station interchangeable with the last.
“I was married once,” Saul says, like he’s delivering plot development in a romance novel I’m trying very hard not to live inside. “She said being married to me felt like living with a ghost. Like I was home, but part of me was always somewhere else.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just stare at him and think ghost dick and what if I volunteer as haunted.
“I’m not telling you this for sympathy,” he says, as if he didn’t just hand-deliver a backstory hotter than it should be.
Brooding federal grief is not supposed to be this fuckable.
“I’m telling you because I know what it’s like to lose a life.
Not the same way you’re losing yours. But I know what it feels like to look around and realize nothing looks familiar anymore. ”
His hands relax on the wheel. He glances at me again.
“So when I say the first few weeks are hell, I’m not just reciting a handbook. I’ve been somewhere adjacent to where you are. And I came out the other side.”
Something loosens in my chest. Not all the way. Just enough to breathe a little deeper.
“Did you?” I ask. “Come out the other side?”
“Mostly,” he says, like a man who still hasn’t learned how to use conditioner or emotional boundaries. “I still burn my coffee and forget to get haircuts. But I stopped feeling like a ghost in my own life. That took a while, though.”
I look at his hair. Too long, just like I noticed before.
“You really do need a haircut,” I say.
He laughs, and I add the sound to my ever-expanding file of Things That Make Me Wet For No Good Reason.
We finally arrive.
The apartment complex looks like every apartment complex I’ve ever seen.
Beige siding. Numbered buildings. A pool that probably hasn’t been cleaned since the Clinton administration. Parking spots with faded lines and one shopping cart that’s migrated from somewhere and made this its home.
Everything smells like someone’s last chance and cat piss in the summer.
Saul pulls into a spot near Building C. Cuts the engine.
“This is it,” he says.
I stare at the building. Three stories. Exterior stairs. A balcony with a dead plant someone left behind.
Home, I think, and the word curdles.
Saul grabs my bag from the backseat, singular, because everything I own now fits in one bag, and leads me up the stairs to unit 2B.
The key sticks in the lock. He jiggles it, a practiced motion that says he’s done this before. His forearms flex and I’m getting horny over locksmith skills.
The door opens.
Beige.
That’s my first thought. My only thought for a solid ten seconds.
Beige walls. Beige carpet. Beige furniture that came with the place and will stay long after I’m gone. A couch the color of nothing. A coffee table the color of giving up. Curtains that might have been white once but have aged into something closer to surrender.
The kitchenette has a coffee maker and a microwave and cabinets I already know are empty.
No stand mixer. No cooling racks. No smell of peanut butter or chocolate or anything that means someone actually lives here.
“I know it’s not much,” Saul says, setting my bag down. “But it’s safe. And it’s yours.”
Yours.
Beth Taylor’s.
I walk through the space because that’s what you do when someone shows you the apartment where your identity goes to die.
The bedroom is small. Bed with a mattress that’s seen better years. Dresser with nothing in it. Closet with three wire hangers.
Saul stands in the doorway filling the frame.
The bed is right there. He’s right there. My brain immediately runs the calculations on whether this mattress would hold up under investigative purposes. Stress testing. For science.
I turn away before I do something stupid like ask.
Bathroom: white tiles, a shower curtain still in its plastic, a mirror I don’t want to look in.
The shower’s small. Cramped. Saul wouldn’t fit.
Or he would if I was pressed against the wall with my legs around his waist and his hands gripping my thighs, water pooling between us.
Stop it.
I look in the mirror because I love emotional violence.
Blonde stranger. Still there. Still wrong.
“The fridge has some basics,” Saul says from the other room. “I’ll bring more groceries tomorrow. Help you get set up.”
I come back to the living room. He’s standing by the door, hands in his pockets, watching me with that expression I can’t quite read.
Concern. Kindness. Maybe guilt for leaving me here.
Or maybe he’s just wondering why I’m still not wearing a bra.
“Emergency numbers are on the fridge,” he says. “I’m first on the list. If you need anything tonight, anything at all, you call me. I’m ten minutes away.”
Ten minutes.
That’s close. That’s really close.
Close enough to come back if I called. Anything at all really has a lot of open space my hormones want to play in.
I nod because words are impossible.
He lingers.
Like he doesn’t want to leave.
Or maybe I’m projecting because I don’t want him to leave and my abandonment issues are showing.
He’s standing too close. Or not close enough. I can smell him. His eyes are doing that soft thing again. That thing that makes me want to ask if he does this for everyone.
The air between us is doing something. Thickening. Charging. My body is writing a formal proposal for him to stay. Just for safety. Just to make sure the deadbolt works properly. Just to test the structural integrity of every flat surface in this apartment.
I open my mouth.
Almost ask.
Stay. Please. Just tonight. Just so I’m not alone in this beige tomb with my fake name and my erased life. We can test the carpets plushness on my knees.
But I don’t.
Because that’s not what marshals do. That’s not professional. That’s just me being needy and inappropriate and unable to cope without collecting men like emotional support animals.
“Stevie.” My name in his voice. My real name. “You’re going to be okay.”
I want to believe him. Want to believe this is just the hard part and it gets better and someday I’ll wake up as Beth Taylor and she’ll feel like someone real.