Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
EMMA
The blade pressed into my lower ribs before I heard him behind me. My hand was inside the SUV, reaching for my phone, and then it wasn’t because his fingers had closed around my arm and pulled me backward.
“Get in the car.” His voice cracked on the second word. He was young. And terrified.
“Who are you?”
“Shut up.” The car ran a stop sign and nearly clipped a tree as it careened out of the parking lot. I gripped the door handle and forced myself to breathe.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“Sean Thessen. Marlene is my mother.”
Everything I’d heard through the glass yesterday collapsed into one fact. Marlene had said she’d done all of it. The break-in, the device, the drone. She’d been lying to protect her son.
“You need to slow down,” I said. “You’re going to get us both killed before we get wherever you’re taking me.”
His foot eased off the accelerator. Not because I’d convinced him of anything, but because the adrenaline that had gotten him out of the parking lot was burning off and what he’d done was starting to hit him.
“Where are we going, Sean?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have a plan.”
“I had a plan. It ended when you got in the car.” His voice broke again.
The road narrowed to two lanes, and the traffic thinned. He wasn’t heading anywhere, because stopping meant deciding what happened next.
“Tell me why your mother stole the money.”
“Why? So you can use it to bury her?”
“She’s in custody, Sean. Nothing you tell me changes that. I’m asking because I need to understand.”
He was quiet for close to a minute.
“She’s all I have. My dad died when I was three. I don’t remember him. I don’t remember his voice or what he looked like. Everything I know about him, my mother told me.”
“Can you tell me what she told you about him?”
“He died when I was three. I don’t even…
I don’t have a single memory of him. Not one.
Mom told me he was a good man. She said he was funny.
She said he used to carry me around on his shoulders, and I’d grab his ears, and he’d pretend it hurt.
I don’t remember any of it. All I know is the VA was supposed to help him, and they didn’t, and he’s dead, and now, they’re going to take her too. ”
“I believe you,” I said.
He turned to me for the first time since we left the courthouse parking lot.
“My father was a Marine, Sean. I know how the system fails people, but it’s not something you can fix with a knife.”
His hand shifted on his thigh. Not tightening on the knife. Loosening.
“The brake lines,” I said. “That was you.”
His face crumpled for a second before he recovered. “Mom and Brad didn’t know.”
“And the other stuff? That was you too?”
He nodded once. “You wouldn’t stop. After the break-in and the fake bomb, you just kept looking.
I heard them talking. I was terrified that you were going to find out what they were doing and my mother would go to prison and I’d lose her the same way I lost my dad.
Not the same way, but the same result. I’d be alone.
” He wiped his eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife.
“I went to your house that morning and crawled under your car in the driveway and scored the lines. I didn’t know if it would work.
I’d found a video online the night before. ”
The car had slowed to thirty.
“You could have killed me, Sean.”
“I know.”
“You could have killed the man in the car with me.”
“I know.” His voice broke. “I think about it every day. When I wake up and when I try to sleep. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I needed you to stop.”
“Sean, your mother is in a courtroom right now. In a few hours, she’s going to find out that her son held a knife on the woman she was working next to this week. How do you think that’s going to go?”
He didn’t answer.
“She’s going to find out about what you did to my car. When she does, she’s going to carry that on top of everything else. Is that what you want?”
“No.”
“Then, give yourself a chance to make the next decision a better one. Pull over. Put the knife on the dashboard.”
He was shaking so hard the car drifted toward the shoulder.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“If I stop, it’s over. Everything is over.”
“It’s already over, Sean. It was over the moment you forced me into this car. The only question left is what happens next. You can end it here, on your terms, or you can keep driving until someone else ends it for you.”
He drove for another quarter mile, slowed the car, and pulled onto the shoulder. The tires crunched on the gravel, and the engine idled. He put the knife on the dashboard, placed his palms on the wheel, and lowered his head between his arms.
The sound that came out of him made me want to reach over and hold him the way his mother would have. Instead, I kept my shaking hands on my lap.
My ribs ached where the blade had been, and my legs felt like they’d give out if I tried to stand. I didn’t know how long we sat there before I heard the engines—more than one, coming fast. Then tires screeching to a stop and doors opening.
I heard Coleman before I saw him. He was shouting my name from somewhere behind the car. I looked in the side mirror. Luke and Atticus were with him, and all three had their guns drawn.
I shoved my door open and got out. “Don’t shoot! He’s unarmed! The knife is on the dashboard, and he surrendered,” I shouted.
Coleman ran to me. He grabbed my face with both hands and pressed his forehead against mine. I couldn’t speak; I could only cry. I sobbed out all my fear but also the pain I felt for Sean. A kid who could’ve been me if things had gone differently and I’d lost my father.
I looked over as Luke and Atticus pulled Sean out of the car, then turned away. If I watched, I’d try to stop them, to protect him, and I couldn’t do that.
I held the front of Coleman’s jacket with both fists and pressed my forehead into his chest. His arms came around me, and he held me.