CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Oliver had been gone for nearly two hours before I stepped outside.
I told myself I had waited to be certain he wouldn’t return. I had watched from the bedroom window because the white sedan remained parked across the street, and I didn’t know whether it belonged to a detective, one of Oliver’s colleagues, or someone who had nothing to do with us at all.
But the truth was, I had been afraid. Every time I stepped out I was risking everything. But Tristan— I couldn’t resist him.
I walked quickly through town, carrying only my purse and the words Tristan had given me the day before.
Then come back.
I had. I stood in front of room 333 and knocked. There was no answer. I waited outside, listening hard for movements. The television. Running water, footsteps—anything.
Nothing.
I knocked again.
“Tristan?”
My voice sounded small in the empty hallway.
I pressed my ear against the door. There was only the faint hum of the air-conditioning and the distant ding of an elevator opening somewhere below.
Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he had drunk himself into a state not even my knocking could disturb.
I knocked harder.
“Tristan?”
Still nothing. I stepped back and stared at the number on the door as though I might have gotten it wrong. Three-three-three.
The same damn room.
I paced to the elevator and returned before it could arrive. Then I knocked again, using the side of my fist this time. No one answered.
A housekeeper appeared at the far end of the hall, pushing a cart piled with folded towels and tiny bottles of shampoo. I immediately moved away from Tristan’s door and pretended to search through my purse.
She smiled politely as she passed.
I waited until she disappeared around the corner before knocking once more.
“Please be here,” I whispered.
Nothing.
I returned to the elevator and rode down to the lobby. I considered asking the receptionist whether Tristan had checked out, but the question felt dangerous. It was too official, to get an answer—maybe I wasn’t ready for the answer.
Instead, I walked outside.
The parking lot stretched along the side of the hotel, half full beneath the morning sun. It was brutally hot, but I didn’t feel a thing. I wandered between the row of cars, searching for the older camper van he’d told me about the previous day.
It was gone.
I stopped walking and took deep breaths. Dots formed in my vision. I inhaled sharply, held it in my lungs, and let the air slowly out of my lungs. For several seconds, all I could hear was the traffic beyond the lot and the hard pulse of blood rushing inside my ears.
He left.
The thought struck with such force that my knees weakened.
Maybe he’d grown tired of waiting—grown tired of me. I wrapped my arms around myself. It had only been a few days. That was all. Just a few days ago Tristan had been a stranger singing with his eyes closed on a restaurant patio.
I went back inside.
The woman at the front desk glanced up when I crossed the lobby again, but I avoided her gaze. I rode the elevator to the third floor and returned to room 333.
Still no answer.
I sat on the floor with my back against the opposite wall and waited. Stubborn, almost defiant—I felt like he ought to be here. Why did my heart keep telling me to stay? I didn’t want to leave. I came all the way here. It was a short distance to anyone, but to me, it was a dangerous odyssey.
People came and went. A couple emerged from a room arguing about directions and what to eat.
A little girl skipped ahead of her father while he struggled with three suitcases, his wife trailing behind, arguing to someone on the phone.
An elderly man stopped outside the room beside Tristan’s, stared at me curiously, then let himself inside.
I eventually stood and paced. From Tristan’s door to the window at the end of the hall.
Back again.
Door.
Window.
Door.
I knocked twice more.
When he still didn’t answer, I forced myself to leave.
There was this horrible energy in my legs. I didn’t know where I was going. I only knew I couldn’t return to that fucking prison.
The streets were crowded, and for a while, I followed random people. I walked past souvenir stores and coffee shops, past a bakery that smelled like warm cinnamon, past a woman arranging flowers outside a little market.
No one knew me or looked twice. For those few blocks, I was simply another woman walking through town on a summer morning.
Near tears. Heart on her sleeve. But shit, I looked part of them.
Even when that fucking cord that was tethered to Oliver pulled savagely inside of me, filling me with terror, I kept going.
I followed the hill toward the waterfront.
The ocean appeared between the buildings, blue and vast beneath the sun. People crowded the walkway. Couples moved slowly with their hands linked together. Children chased seagulls while their parents shouted warnings about that damn fucking railing I knew too well.
An ice-cream stand had been set up near the park.
The sight of it stopped me dead.
A little boy stood beside the counter holding a cone that was already melting down his wrist. His mother leaned over him with a fistful of napkins while another woman laughed nearby.
June?
The memory arrived so clearly that for a moment, I could smell her perfume.
Rowe had been four. Maybe five. He wanted blue ice cream because he was convinced it would turn his tongue permanently blue.
“It won’t,” I had told him.
“You don’t know that,” June argued.
I glared. “You’re supposed to be helping me.”
“I am helping. I’m encouraging my nephew’s scientific discovery. Rowe wants to be a scientist—”
“And fly to the moon!” he exclaimed, nodding solemnly at me as he wore half the blue ice cream across his mouth.
June bought chocolate but kept stealing bites from his cone. Worse than that, he kept encouraging her to. I loved their connection, but I liked teasing them about it more.
“You have your own,” I reminded her.
“His tastes better.”
“They came from the same freezer.”
“Yeah, but his has Rowe germs.”
I laughed and then Rowe began laughing too, though he had no idea what was funny. Blue ice cream ran over his fingers. June cleaned him up with a napkin, and when her ice cream dripped, she licked it off her hand.
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
“How could you say that to family?”
“Because it’s gross.”
Rowe held his other hand toward me.
“Mama, you do it from my hand.”
“I absolutely will not.”
He chased me along the waterfront with his sticky hand raised while June encouraged him from behind.
I could still hear our laughter. Oh, my God, we were loud and shameless. The three of us. Ridiculous and silly. Happy without knowing enough to appreciate it. My throat tightened. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
I moved away from the ice-cream stand and found an empty bench facing the water.
For a long time, I watched sunlight move across the ocean.
I had possessed a life once.
It had been small and cramped as fuck and exhausting. Rowe’s toys under the coffee table used to drive me nuts. June’s clothes were always mixed with mine in the laundry. We ate cheap meals—fuck, I hated June’s potato and onions, but damn, I’d give anything for it right now.
It had belonged to me. Oliver had convinced me he rescued us from it.
He hadn’t.
He had taken the little life I built and taught me to feel ashamed of it.
I pressed my palms against my eyes.
Tristan might have left.
The thought still hurt, but it no longer felt like the end of the road.
I had money hidden in the laundry room. No identification but I’d have to figure that out along the way.
I had Rowe’s pictures and the dragon he had slept with every night.
And the alarms were down and Oliver had done something very bad.
Maybe he would be more concerned with his troubles than with finding his wife.
I had enough to catch a ferry or a bus. Maybe not enough to disappear forever, but enough to begin.
I didn’t know where I would go.
I didn’t know how I would survive.
But I knew something with sudden, frightening clarity.
I could not walk back into Oliver’s house and continue pretending it was my life. My breathing quickened though as I thought of that lesson room. Of being trapped, chained—
I took a deep breath.
Even if Tristan had left, I still had to go. Somehow. Sometime soon.
“I’ll figure it out,” I whispered.
The ocean offered no response.
“I will.”
I sat there until the sun shifted and the shadows beneath the benches shortened.
Then I returned to the hotel.
The camper van had not returned. I went upstairs anyway. Room 333 waited at the end of the hall.
I knocked.
Nothing.
I waited.
Knocked again.
“Tristan?”
Silence.
I paced the hallway for nearly an hour, checking the elevator every time it chimed. Each time the doors opened and someone else stepped out, my hope collapsed a little further.
Eventually, the same housekeeper from earlier returned.
She stopped beside her cart and looked at me with open concern.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
I quickly wiped beneath my eyes.
“My friend.”
“Have you called him?”
“I don’t have a phone.”
The admission earned me a strange look.
“He might be downstairs,” I added. “Or out.”
She glanced toward Tristan’s door.
“Would you like me to contact the front desk?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
I collected myself and forced a smile.
“No, thank you. I’m sure he’ll be back.”
She lingered before moving on.
I waited another twenty minutes, but now every passing person seemed to notice me.
At last, I left.
The sun was beginning to lower when I returned to Oliver’s street. The white sedan remained across from the house.
I stood several houses away, watching for any sign of Oliver. His car wasn’t in the drive. The curtains hadn’t changed. Everything appeared exactly as it had when I left.
I walked inside cautiously.
The house greeted me with silence.
“Oliver?”
Nothing.
He hadn’t returned.
I went to the laundry room and shut the door.