Chapter Thirty-Two
THE HOUSE SAT back off the county road at the end of a dirt track with no other house in sight of it, sagging and colorless in the half-dark, and I walked up to it the way you walk up to your own grave when you’ve made your peace, slow and already gone somewhere else inside.
I’d walked miles in the dark to get there.
I had a lot of time on that road to be afraid, and I used all of it, and by the time I saw the house I’d come out the other side of the fear into a cold silence that I recognized.
It’s the place I go. It’s the place he taught me to go, a long time ago, and there’s a terrible kind of mercy in how well it still works.
The front door stood open. He wanted me to come in.
Inside it smelled like mildew and cigarettes and something under it that I knew before my brain even caught up.
Him. The smell of him, of my childhood. Cheap tobacco, old sweat and that stale, shut-in smell of a man just out of a place with no windows.
It hit me the second I was in the hall and my body did the thing it hadn’t done in three years.
Went small. Went quiet. Hugged the wall.
And I hated it, I hated how fast I folded right back into the girl in that hallway.
He was in the back room. Concrete floor. One bulb. And Sawyer.
Sawyer was in the corner on the floor, wrists bound in front of him, a strip of tape half torn off his mouth like he’d worked it loose talking, one eye swelling shut and going purple.
When he saw me his face crumpled. “Amy,” he said, breaking, “no, I told you not —why would you— you have to go, you have to run, right now, please — ”
“Shut the fuck up,” my father snarled.
And he turned around, and I saw him for the first time in three years.
He was older than I remembered. His face looked harder, more lined, and for one stupid second I hated that I could still see pieces of myself in it.
The eyes were the worst. Same color as mine.
Same shape. I’d spent three years changing everything about myself I could, and those had come with me anyway.
But it was the way he looked at me that made my stomach turn.
He looked happy.
Not angry. Not surprised.
Happy to see me.
“There she is,” he said softly, and my stomach turned because Rune said that.
He’d said those exact words to me, and hearing them in my father’s voice made me wish he’d picked anything else.
“Look at you. All grown up. Purple hair.” He shook his head as he looked me over.
“You look just like your mama did, right before she gave up on the both of us.”
“Let him go,” I demanded. “That was the deal. I came. Let Sawyer go.”
“We’ll get to it.”
“That was the deal.”
“I said we’ll get to it.” Still gentle. That was always the worst of him, the gentleness, the way he could say the most terrible things in the world in the voice you’d use on a feral cat.
“You don’t give the orders here, baby. You never did.
Come here. Come let your daddy look at you. Been three years.”
He wasn’t going to let Sawyer go. I knew that as soon as he said we’ll get to it. There was no later, no deal my father intended to keep. He’d needed something that would get me through the door, and Sawyer had done that. Now he was a witness who’d seen too much.
If Sawyer was getting out of that room, I was going to have to get him out.
I looked at him again, closer this time, and saw his hands were tied in front of him.
The rope was loose. Not enough to slip out of, not yet, but Sawyer had been working at it; his wrists were rubbed raw and one loop had already started to give.
My father hadn’t tied him well because he hadn’t thought he needed to.
Sawyer was close.
Maybe one hard pull.
I looked back at my father before he could notice what I’d noticed.
He hadn’t.
So I did the only thing I had.
I gave my father the one thing he wanted more than anything in the world.
I gave him me. “Okay,” I said, making my voice small, I made it the voice from back then, the good-girl voice, the one that used to keep the worst nights from getting worse, and I watched it land on him like a drug. “Okay. I’m sorry. You can look at me.”
And I walked toward him, putting more distance between me and Sawyer with every step, keeping my father’s eyes on my face so he wouldn’t look toward the corner.
It worked. By the time I reached him, he wasn’t paying attention to Sawyer anymore.
He was looking at me the way he used to, like nothing else in the room mattered now that he had his girl back.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “That’s my good girl. Knew you were still in there.”
I got close enough to smell him. I kept my eyes on his so they wouldn’t go to Sawyer, so his wouldn’t either. And behind me, I heard it, the smallest sound, rope giving, a breath catching, and I talked over it, fast, kept my father’s eyes locked on mine.
“I thought about you,” I told him, and it wasn’t even a lie, and I let all of it into my face, every year of it, because true things are the most distracting things there are. “Every day. I never stopped thinking about you, not once, not for one single day — ”
“Go!” I screamed.
Sawyer came out of that corner running. My father turned too late and lunged for him, but I stepped into the way and he caught my jacket instead. Sawyer was through the front room before my father could get around me, and a second later the screen door slammed.
I heard his feet hit the dirt, a car door, then the engine of his little hatchback catching outside.
Thank God.
The tires spun on the dirt and then he was gone, heading for the county road and the compound beyond it.
My father hit me. I’d known he would, and I’d already decided I could take it if Sawyer got out. I hit the concrete hard enough to make my head ring, and through the noise I heard my father go to the door and stop.
For one second, I thought he might go after Sawyer.
He didn’t.
He shut the door.
Relief hit me so hard I almost laughed. He was staying here with me, which meant Sawyer was still running, putting more distance between himself and this house every second.
That was all I needed.
He came back and stood over me where I lay on the concrete with my ears ringing, blood in my mouth, he crouched down, and brushed the hair off my face almost sweetly, and he said, “You put yourself right in front of me so he could run. Look at you. Cost me a witness, but that’s alright.
” He smiled. “I didn’t come here for him anyhow. ”
I looked up at my father from the floor and I thought about Sawyer tearing down a county road toward a compound full of dangerous men who loved me.
And I let my father pick me up off the floor, and I didn’t fight him, because there was no fighting him, there never had been, because every minute I kept him here, calm, with me, was another mile of road between Sawyer and this house.
I could be small. I could be the girl in the hallway one more time, one last time, if it bought the people I loved enough road to find me.