Chapter Two
I HAVE NO IDEA WHY he's speaking Italian and I don't want to know.
All I care about is ending this nightmare right now.
My phone's already in my hand even though I don't remember pulling it out, and all it will take is just one little slide on the screen. Just one wrong move, one wrong word, and I don’t care if I’m overreacting.
"If you're not out of my apartment in five minutes I'm going to call the police."
"You can try, but it won't work."
I don't even bother answering him.
I just want to scare him a bit, show him I'm calling 911, but...
It's not working.
I don't have a signal.
Any kind of signal.
The bars at the top of my screen—four bars at their strongest, even in the bathroom—are gone. Not one bar. Not the flickering one I sometimes get during storms. Nothing. The little airplane icon isn't on. The wifi's connected to my router. The data's on. None of it's doing anything.
And when my incredulous gaze flies to him—
"Signal jammer,” Nate says simply.
“Excuse me?”
Why would someone start jamming signals in this building, and how does he even know that’s happening?
"Sit down, per favore."
Oh, the gall of this man to bark out orders at me!
“No, I won’t sit down,” I retort, “and anyway, why do you keep speaking in Italian—”
"I have always been Italian, Juniper—”
Aha!
“Is that where you’ve been hiding all these years then? Are you some kind of fugitive—”
“I’ll start explaining if you sit down.”
I open my mouth to argue.
“Please sit down.”
His voice is gentle, and he’s even used the magic word.
Those are reasons enough for me to be reasonable, and so I do it.
I sit down.
Not because his words, when softly spoken like that, somehow feel like a threat.
I’m just sitting down because I want to prove that I’ve grown up, and I’m, you know, reasonable.
“Go on then,” I say with a shrug. “I don’t really care about anything you say, but if you insist on—”
“My real name is not Nate Simons.”
Okay, fine, he wins.
That one-liner is a killer, so of course I need him to explain, which he does, and unfortunately for me, everything he says...
He was under witness protection when we met?
The Feds called him on our wedding day?
Because El Carnicero had escaped and that put me in danger?
And that’s why it’s taken him eighteen years to come back?
Because he had to make sure El Carnicero wouldn’t be able to escape a second time?
OH, COME ON NOW.
Does he really think I’m still the same idiot he married? Does he really think I’m going to fall for that? What’s he going to tell me next? That he’s a mafia billionaire—
"My real name is Nicolo Sestini."
ARGH.
That...that does it!
I start typing on my phone, intending to look that name up on the Internet—
$%#@!&!
“Juniper—”
“Give me a second, please.” I grab the remote control from the console and nearly poke holes into it as I start pushing buttons.
I’m just so, so mad. I can’t believe how dumb he thinks I am, to really believe he’s the Sestini heir who went from missing to resurfaced just days ago.
He probably thinks I haven’t changed, that I’m still the girl who loves fiction more than reality, and it’s why he’s feeding me all this crap.
He doesn’t know that I work in the courthouse now, and so of course I make it my business to know all about the bad guys or, in this case, the sons of former bad guys—
“Nicolo Sestini is now stepping out with his lawyer...”
Aha!
I stop channel surfing when I finally find a news channel that will help me prove he’s a liar.
“Are you saying—” I point to the TV screen. “You’re that—” Nate looks at the TV, and so do I. “Nicolo...Sestini...”
No no no no no no no no no no no.
Why is my evil husband’s face on the TV?
I rub my eyes, hoping I’m just imagining things—
“It really is me, Juniper.”
But when I look at the TV again—
The man I married eighteen years ago...is the same man on the TV.
“Juniper?”
I look at him, but I’m not really seeing him because I’m still mentally reeling.
Nate Simons...is Nicolo Sestini.
“There’s something else I have to explain.”
But if I married Nate, and Nate isn’t real—
“That night you saw me—”
It’s my body that reacts first, jerking like it’s been hit, but it’s only after my heart starts aching, and my chest starts tightening, that my brain finally catches up.
No no no no no no no no no no no.
It finally realizes what he’s about to say and I'm not...I don't think I will ever be ready for it.
"D-Don't."
"I know how it may seem—"
"I said I don't want to talk about it!" It’s not like me to raise my voice like this, and I hate that he’s the one who’s making me do things that aren’t me.
It’s like the eighteen years never changed a thing.
He only has to show up, and I’m twenty-four again, and not forty-two.
I’m an idiot again, and all the things I learned from the past eighteen years are gone.
"Juniper—"
"Will you please just get out? I can start screaming—"
"It won’t make a difference,” he says quietly.
“What do you mean—”
“Because I own this building...and everyone who lives here. They’re all handpicked by me.”
Does he know how crazy that sounds? And does he realize how much crazier it sounds to someone like me, who still sees him as Nate the I.T.
guy? Nate who only earns freelance money, and so it’s just not possible for him to buy buildings and, oh, I don’t know, can someone be so rich that they can buy people, too?
Is he saying Morris is on his payroll? Morris, who’s in his eighties?
What about Eppie? Does he “handpick” all the pets, too?
I look at him, and I can feel it happening.
My sanity slipping farther and farther away, and I don’t...
I don’t want to go back to who I was before...when he left me.
“Why are you back?” I hear myself whisper.
“I already told you—”
I shake my head. “No, you didn’t.” He told me what he had to do for eighteen years. But he...he never told me...
“Why are you back?” I ask again. “What do you want?”
“You.”
I almost laugh.
“I want you back in my life—"
"No, thanks."
"That wasn’t a request."
"I don't care. I will never go back—"
"It wasn't real," he cuts me off abruptly. "What you saw that night—"
"I don't care because I already have someone else!"
Big mistake.
No, actually, biggest mistake ever, because the moment I say the words—
"Is that so?"
Three words. Pleasantly spoken.
But they're more than enough to unmask him completely, and I finally see for the first time who he really is. Who he always was, and always will be.
His hands haven't moved. He hasn't done anything a security camera would catch.
But the room has gotten smaller. The temperature has dropped.
The man on my couch who was, a minute ago, a man asking—please, sit down, per favore—is gone, and what's left in his place is the thing the Tribune has been writing headlines about for a decade.
Nicolo Sestini.
And he terrifies me to death.