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It was ridiculous that she should react the way she did. Flushed hot and red like a teenager. And then hotter still, because she was embarrassed by her own reaction. For a moment she thought she’d be caught in an endless too-red feedback loop until she exploded—which would at least solve her problems.
But she didn’t explode. And Blue didn’t stop watching her in that same expectant way, as if he thought they could stay out on this deck forever until he pulled every memory she had straight out of her and slapped them all down between them.
She wanted his help. But she hadn’t really bargained on another interrogation. She could still remember the way her stomach had plummeted when she’d realized that the detectives were questioning her, not simply gathering facts—
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said here. Now. To Blue, who’d told her she didn’t listen to her body, which meanther bodywas suddenly the only thing she could think about. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Fear is a gift,” Blue said gruffly, a different sort of glitter in his dark gaze. “It’s your body telling your mind things it doesn’t want to know in terms it can’t ignore.”
“Yes,” she made herself say. Aware that she didn’t want to admit it out loud, for some reason—as if the admission would make this messmore realthan it already was. “I was afraid.”
“So you opened your door. Quietly.”
“Rebecca’s door is directly across from mine. Across the living room. The landlord claimed it was two separate master bedrooms, but that’s a stretch.” Her arms ached when she uncrossed them, which was how she knew that she’d been holding herself too tightly. She ignored it. She cupped her hands together, then tried to sketch the layout of her apartment in the air in front of her. “Bedrooms on either side, living room in the middle, kitchen on one end and bathroom on the other. Home sweet home.”
“Take me through it. You open your door. You’re already scared, but you don’t know why. You’re telling yourself she’s moving furniture, but somewhere inside of you, you know it’s something else.”
It wasn’t until then, until he said those things so matter-of-factly in that gruff, unfaltering voice, that Everly truly understood how desperate she’d been for someone to believe her. It wasn’t until then she realized how worried she had been, all this time, that she really was as unhinged as the police had begun to suggest she was.
That he seemed to believe what she was telling him made her believeherselfagain.
Blue didn’t look at her as if she was a lunatic. He didn’t look at her with that flat suspicion all over his face. On the contrary, Blue looked at her as if he wanted nothing more than to dig out each and every detail of what she was telling him and look at it in this strange Alaskan light, which might have been uncomfortable but suggested that he really, truly believed what she was telling him.
Everly felt a hard, stiff knot inside her release. It was some kind of relief, she thought. Some brush of hope when she’d almost given up on it.
She knew not to get ahead of herself. Blue believing her wasn’t the same as Blue helping her through this or Blue saving her—but God knew, it felt the same tonight.
It wasn’t hope that had spurred her on across all those lonely, chilly miles. It wasn’t hope that had gotten her over the one-lane dirt track that was barely a road and barely big enough to fit the compact wagon she’d rented. That had been fueled by sheer desperation.
Desperation, acrid and thick.
Hope was smoother. Lighter. An intense relief pooled behind her eyes, like the tears she refused to cry. She blinked the moisture away as best she could, but she held on tight to the relief.
“I could see into Rebecca’s room,” she told him. “I could see her. She was lying on the floor, except she wasn’t.... Her body was crumpled....” She shook her head, those same hideous images tumbling through her all over again. As if they were new and just as impossible, just as horrifying. “She was bent in ways she shouldn’t have been able to bend. I don’t know if I actually saw blood or just think I did.”
“Whatever happened to her had already happened, then.”
She remembered Rebecca’s leg. It had taken her too long to understand what she was seeing. Why everything was wrong, as if she’d been looking through a kaleidoscope and everything was fractured and fusedback into the wrong shapes. Her stomach twisted, sharp and hard.
“Or it was still happening—I don’t know.” She forced herself to breathe. “There were two men inside her room with her. One was squatted down beside her. But I had the impression it was the other one who had done... whatever it is he did.”
“They didn’t see you.”
“In my mind I stood there for a very long time. But I couldn’t have. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I don’t think I did.” She shook her head. “Maybe I just felt like screaming inside. I still do.”
“Did they look up?”
“Not for that first moment.” He didn’t ask another one of his rapid-fire questions, so she kept on, trying to break down a bad memory into its parts. “I just stood there as if I couldn’t move, because it didn’t make sense. What I was seeing, I mean. I couldn’t make it... come together.” She swallowed, hard, and hated that she was sweating again. Still as afraid and sickened as she’d been then. Maybe she always would be. “I must have made a noise then, because they both looked up as if they heard something.”
“There’s no doubt in your mind that they saw you?”
“They saw me. Clearly. Just as I saw them.”
“Could you identify them?”
“I think so.” She shrugged. “I drew them.”
Blue frowned. “Drew them? You mean, with a pencil?”