Chapter Twenty-Two #2
His eyebrows lifted, delighted. "You remember the name.
Good. Yes. Dr. Sutter." He said it like a man fond of his own joke. "A colleague. A weak, indebted little man at the place I was sending you, the kind every hospital keeps and none of them look at too closely. He owed me. Years back I made a very large problem of his quietly disappear, and men like that never do stop paying for a thing like that. So I called the debt in. I asked him to accept a transfer, to sign as the receiving physician, and to ask me nothing at all. And he did. He signed for a woman he never examined, never met, never once laid eyes on, because I told him to, and because he’s afraid of me, and because it’s astonishing, Beatrice, what a frightened man will put his name to as long as you let him keep his hands clean of the rest of it. "
He smiled, and it was worse than any snarl.
"That is the beauty of it. He knows nothing, so there is nothing in him to find.
I don't build my walls out of lies, Beatrice.
Lies crack. I build them out of real men with real reasons to keep their mouths shut.
And then the plan itself was simple, and I was proud of it.
I'd drive you north myself, three hours, a long quiet road.
And somewhere along it, at some forgettable rest stop, a confused and fragile woman would wander away from her doctor into a thousand square miles of desert and never, ever be found.
Beatrice Keene, lost. So sad. So predictable, given her history.
And Dr. Sutter, three hours off in his clean little office, would be as baffled as the police, with nothing on this earth to tie the two of us together but one signature and a debt that lives in no ledger anywhere. "
"But my brother and Eli ruined everything for you," I said.
And there it was again, the only crack in him, the irritation, real and ugly under all that silk.
“Only for a time,” he snapped. "I was one day from having you on that road. One day. And your animals came over a wall in the dark a second time and took you out from under me.” He drew a slow breath, smoothed it back down, became the gentle doctor again.
"But waiting has never frightened me, Beatrice.
It's the one thing I'm better at than anyone alive.
I sent a man to keep your dogs barking at the gate.
And I went looking, the way I always look, for the loneliest person standing nearest the door. "
His eyes moved, at last, to Holly.
And Holly had stopped crying.
She was standing very straight now, her back against the wall by the door, and the horror that had been drowning her face for the last hour had finished its work and left something else behind, something I recognized, because I'd been growing the same thing in my own chest this whole time.
She'd gone past fear into the cold clear country on the other side of it.
"You said you loved me," she said.
"I said a great many useful things." He didn't even turn fully toward her.
"You were a door, Holly. A very good one.
You should be proud. You're the reason she's here.
None of the others could have walked her out.
It took the one woman in that whole house who hated her enough to believe she was doing her a kindness.
" He smiled, mild. "I chose you very carefully.
You were perfect. Try to take some comfort in that. "
"Oh, you sick thing," Holly breathed. "You sick, sick thing. I brought her to you. I drugged her and drove her out that gate and I handed her to you thinking you were going to help her." Her voice cracked clean in half and then came back harder, fierce, shaking. "I already called them."
He went still.
"I called the clubhouse. The second you started, the second I heard what you really sound like." Tears were streaming down her face but her voice held like a wire pulled tight. "They're coming. They’re already coming, and they’re going to walk in that door and kill you, and I’m glad. You’re just like every other fucking bastard to cross my path.
Do you hear me? Whatever you do to me now, I got one thing right at the end. I got her out.”
He picked up a syringe off the tray, and crossed the room faster than a man his age should be able to, and that it was quick, and quiet, the way everything about him was quiet.
And that in the last second of it her eyes found mine across that clean terrible room, and there was no fear left in them at all, only that fierce wet relief, the look of a vain unhappy woman who hated me and saved me anyway, who got one true thing right when it counted and knew it as she went.
She slid down the wall. And the room was very quiet.
But I wasn’t in the fog anymore.
Somewhere in her dying, the last of it had burned off me, grief and rage will scour out anything, and I lay on that bed with my whole body returned to me, every wire live and singing and mine, and three truths dropped into place at once, clean as struck matches.
He thought I was still under. He'd been so drunk on his own voice and so busy with his door that he had not once, in all that time, watched my hands.
Eli was on a road right now. Holly had bought that with her life, and I was not going to waste it.
And the man standing over her body with his sleeves still neat, the man who'd taken everything from me and the voice in every nightmare and now this poor brave stupid woman, had built his entire life on one thing.
On being the man who is never in the room.
The voice with no face. The name on a wall.
The nobody you can't point at, can't name, can't catch.
He'd told me so himself, proud of it.
But he was in the room now. He was right here, close enough to touch, with his back half-turned and his certainty wrapped around him like a coat, certain I was broken, certain I was a thing on his table, certain of the one fact he'd built four years on: that in all that time, across all those soft-lamp sessions, he had never, not once, knew the real me.
He thought I belonged to him.
I was the one thing he was never going to get.
I opened my eyes all the way. Quietly, with my whole body finally answering me, I began to move.