Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Aspen was driving like the car was made of glass.
She was going ten miles an hour, both hands white-knuckling the wheel. Every few feet the tires dropped into another pothole, the crates of fireworks rattled in the back, and Aspen sucked a breath through her teeth like she was the one taking the hit.
She hadn’t said anything in a while. That was just fine. Preferred, actually.
Maddy kept her eyes out the window, watching the pines pass by. Because the only other thing to look at was the woman in the driver’s seat, and she’d gone eight days without looking at that and saw no reason to ruin her streak now.
Eight days since the soccer game. Eight days since she’d walked into her own mother’s living room and—no. She wasn’t going there.
The point was, she’d been very good about it.
Aspen had been at the house every day that week for Bunny’s PT, and Maddy had not come downstairs once.
Not for coffee. Not for a glass of water.
Not to work from the kitchen where the WiFi signal was the strongest. She’d wait at the top of the stairs until she heard the front door click and the familiar sounds of Aspen’s SUV pull away from the curb, and then she’d come down and go about her business as usual. It was a good system.
Aspen had texted three times during those eight days.
The first two she’d left sitting there, because nothing said I am not thinking about you like a message marked read and ignored, and Maddy was fluent in that particular dialect.
She had intentionally turned on read receipts on her phone when the feature first became available years ago, occasionally as a power play, mostly to give Bunny proof-of-life without having to respond.
This week it had been doing a little bit of both.
She’d spent a long time contemplating Aspen’s third text.
The one that came in yesterday afternoon asking if the road trip was still on.
It was a question she had been mulling over all week.
She weighed the pros and cons. Driving down a series of unmarked dirt roads, in remote locations, to meet with creepy people who built and sold explosives, by herself—vs spending all day in a car with Aspen, which although not ideal, was perfectly safe and had always been the plan.
So finally, she’d typed back Yes. Not only was it the more sensible option, but canceling would have meant today was a big enough deal to cancel, and it wasn’t.
It was a chore. A job. They were on joint-Cup planning duty, and the fireworks display was integral to the production.
She would just ignore Aspen whenever the conversation was not for purely logistical communications at the sites.
She wasn’t sulking. She was done. There was a difference.
That was the part she kept landing on this past week.
She wasn’t even angry that Aspen hadn’t told her about Bunny and Olly.
She’d thought she was, for about an hour.
But if Maddy was going to hate every person who’d known about one of Bunny’s schemes and made the choice to safely opt out from getting involved, she’d have to hate the whole island. That wasn’t it.
It was that Aspen had used her. She hadn’t opted out of Bunny’s scheme, she’d been an accomplice.
The whole night. Knocking on the door. The jersey.
You look nice, delivered with no smirk, which should have been the first clue something was off.
Buying her drinks. Extending their time together with the after-party invitation like it was some random idea that had just popped into her head at that moment.
Maddy had sat in that first-row seat and let her guard down for the first time in fifteen years and actually thought, huh—maybe there’s actually something here.
And the entire point of the night, start to finish, had been to keep her across the bridge and distracted so she wouldn’t come home and find her mother… canoodling with Olly on the sofa.
She’d been handled by Aspen St. Claire.
Maddy handled people for a living and she knew exactly how it was done, and she had sat there in a borrowed jersey and let it happen to her like an absolute amateur. That was the part that stung. Not the lie. The fact that she’d fallen for it.
Yes, she had been attracted to Aspen at the game, and even now, that attraction hadn’t entirely gone away.
More than once today she caught herself staring at Aspen’s muscles as she’d squatted, lifted, and carried—in perfect form—heavy boxes all day long.
She was an objectively attractive person and that was just human nature.
Maddy had almost cracked when Aspen had reached over Maddy’s head for something on a high shelf and gotten close enough that Maddy was breathing in her intoxicating coconut scent—with her face four inches from Maddy’s.
That one she could admit, for about half a second, had nearly overridden the carefully maintained distance she’d maintained all day. Personal space was the fastest thing she could grab and shove between herself and a genuinely terrible idea.
Then there was the joke Maddy had made to Rita about how Aspen got shy around beautiful women.
Bunny had given Maddy a whole monologue about Tinkerbell that morning before Aspen had arrived.
Oh, you’ll get to meet Tinkerbell! She’s this massive Doberman who looks dangerous but is an absolute marshmallow.
She’ll come barreling out to greet you but she’s just excited and wouldn’t hurt a fly.
So when the thing came tearing around the shipping container, all teeth and noise, Maddy had gotten out of the car without hesitation and let it sniff her hand.
Aspen—who spent a significant amount of time around dogs at her sister’s grooming salon—had gone white and used the car door as a shield.
And Maddy had made the decision not to say anything about what Bunny had told her, because watching Aspen be afraid of a dog named Tinkerbell was the first thing all day that had felt good and simple, and she was not going to hand it back in the name of being helpful.
So her joke had been fine. The joke was for Rita.
What wasn’t fine was how Aspen’s face had looked…
pleased afterward, like Maddy had handed her a gift.
And she’d had to quickly find something else to be irritated about.
That was the trouble with cracking the door even an inch.
Aspen was always right there on the other side of it.
She’d let Aspen in once. It had been a con. She was not doing it again. She’d decided that eight days ago, and she had been re-deciding it about twice an hour since Aspen picked her up this morning.
The tires found pavement. The rattling stopped. The car quit bucking and slid out onto a smooth two-lane blacktop, and Maddy’s shoulders dropped an inch. Ahead of them was ninety minutes of highway back to Coronado, then her own bed and a door she could shut.
The worst of it was over.
* * *
The car made it about four more miles before it decided to quit.
It started as a stutter, a hitch in the engine Maddy felt more than heard. Then it happened again, longer, and Aspen’s foot came off the gas.
“No,” Aspen muttered under her breath. “No, no, no.”
The car sputtered a third time, caught, and gave up. Something under the hood made a wet, coughing sound, and the burning chemical smell came a second later.
Aspen steered them onto the shoulder in a long dying coast that ended with a lurch and then went still. The engine ticked. Then it stopped that too.
If Maddy had thought the silence was bad when they’d had to turn off the radio on the way up the mountain, it was nothing compared to the silence now—with not even the hum of the engine and wind against the car as ambient noise.
“What the hell happened?” Maddy asked, even though the logical part of her brain knew that Aspen had as much information about the situation as she did. Still, she was hoping maybe this was just a thing Aspen’s SUV did sometimes and that it would start back up in a few minutes.
“I don’t know. Maybe it overheated from the extra weight when going over all those potholes.” Aspen picked her phone up. “Still no signal.”
Of course there wasn’t. Their bars disappeared the second they started the climb up the mountain.
Maddy checked her own anyway. Nothing. She held it higher.
She angled it at the windshield, then the roof of the car.
She had always thought the people who did this on TV were idiots. Turns out she was right.
Maddy dropped her phone in her lap. “Maybe it just needs a few minutes to cool down, right?” She tried to hide the rising panic from her voice.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Aspen’s tone was not at all convincing. She opened her door and climbed out.
Maddy watched through the windshield as the hood went up. She couldn’t see what was happening, so she got out too. Aspen was bent over the engine, hands braced on the frame, frowning down at it.
Maddy looked at the engine, then at Aspen, trying to read her face. “Do you know what you’re looking at?”
“No,” Aspen admitted, not looking up. “I was hoping it would be obvious. Like…a wire, just hanging there. Pointing at itself.”
There was not, apparently, a wire hanging there pointing at itself.
This was fine. Maddy was excellent in a crisis.
She prided herself on her problem solving abilities.
She racked her brain for solutions and came up with three options.
Keep trying the engine every ten minutes until it started.
Wait for another car to pass that they could flag down for help. Start walking.
They were in the middle of nowhere and daylight would be gone within an hour, so walking was out of the question.
She relayed the two realistic options to Aspen, trying to sound more confident and composed than she felt.
Aspen nodded and closed the hood.
After an hour of five failed attempts to start the engine and not a single passing car, neither of them was doing a very good job of maintaining their composure.