Page 49

FORTY-EIGHT

Alex doesn’t know how long she’s been slumped on the floor of Francis Keen’s kitchen. She can hear the faint ticking of a clock somewhere. The night has turned deep and black, covering the room, removing its contours, and erasing the visible signs of her injuries. She squints up, trying to make out the outline of the window, and winces, the slight motion of her head giving her a dizzy feeling. The bleeding seems to have stopped. She can feel the sticky mess forming on the back of her head, the dried blood tugging uncomfortably at her hair.

Alex can’t believe that she has been so naive about Lucy. Looking back, it all makes total sense that her assistant was a fraud. The way she skittered through the halls afraid to be seen, avoiding the elevator; the alarm on her face at every mention of Howard Demetri. There were so many obvious warning signs that Lucy was not to be trusted, and yet, after all this time running from the slightest shadow, Alex had given in to her completely, had trusted her.

A door opens and shuts somewhere far away in the house. Alex’s wrists throb at the scars, where they push painfully against the zip tie. There are two voices now. Lucy’s, higher-pitched than normal, frantic like it is explaining something. Alex’s ears prick nervously as someone replies. The voice is a murmur that she can’t make out, but she recognizes the timbre. He is here. She struggles to move, to escape, rolling herself onto her knees and lifting herself partway off the ground, but the ties tear at her wrists and she loses her balance, falling onto her stomach and knocking the wind out of her.

They are coming toward her. She can make out the patter of Lucy’s steps, light and eager, and others, his, plodding and deliberate. There is nowhere for Alex to go, no more time to escape. The door opens and a beam of light scurries around the floor, finding her there. She tries to raise her head. To see.

“There she is.” Lucy’s voice is proud, like Alex is something she’s brought to show-and-tell. “I didn’t want to have to tie her up. But she would have left.”

From her position on the floor, Alex can only see his feet, clad in dark work boots. They come closer to her. She can see a spray of paint on their soles. They are the same kind he wore to jobsites even back then. She remembers how he brought her with him once to his big project, the factory he’d been converting. He’d worn a pair just like these, coated in the red dust from the brick. He was so attractive to her that day, showing her around. Just months later she’d listen, her heart in her throat, to the sound of those boots clunking up the stairs of his condo. She’d watch on high alert as he silently and slowly untied the laces, trying to read his body’s cues to see if he was mad at her or not.

“Why is she on her stomach?” His voice sends a vibration of fear through her entire body.

“She must have tipped over,” Lucy says. “She wasn’t that way when I left her.”

“Sloppy, Lulu,” he admonishes, kneeling next to Alex. A hand brushes hers and she quivers. His hands are on her shoulders now, lifting her from the floor. She is helpless to stop herself.

“Stop squirming or I’ll drop you on your face,” he says. Brian, the man who left her for dead. There is a grit to his voice that wasn’t there before. He sits her upright, propping her against the cabinets. Alex watches, horrified, as the man she has hidden from for eight years rotates into view before her. He is thicker than before; his once taut and muscular body has filled out into something more solid and terrifying. His muscles contract as he crouches in front of her. His eyes narrow as he examines her, scanning her body, her face. He brings his face close to hers and her throat constricts. A scar. She hadn’t expected it. An ugly rope of raised tissue that runs from his forehead to the bridge of his nose and picks up again on his cheek. Despite the years, it is red and angry-looking. Making his once beautiful face something that no one could help but flinch at the way she does now.

She smells something acrid as he comes closer. He’s taken up smoking, she realizes, her stomach roiling from the sour smell as he leans in close enough that she can feel the vibrations of his voice next to her ear. “I was always going to find you.” Without her even meaning to, her body jerks away from him, her shoulder coming to her ear trying to block him out.

He draws back quickly. “Lulu, what is this?” He must see the blood in her hair.

“I didn’t hurt her, she fell,” Lucy whines.

“Oh, but you’ve messed up Bess’s head, haven’t you? That’s no good at all,” he says, pulling his hand away from Alex, disgusted. “Or should I say Alex ?” He smirks. “What a funny choice for a pseudonym. It took me a long minute to understand why you chose it. Then I went and paid a visit to your old friend. Saw the name of the place across the street, all boarded up. Alexander’s Market. Alex Marks. Pretty clever.”

“Sam?” Alex’s heart thumps. “You, you didn’t hurt him?”

He cranes his neck, looking down at her. “You really do think I’m some sort of monster.”

Alex doesn’t say anything. She knows better than to say yes but doesn’t have the strength to deny it.

“It didn’t help that the old man told the whole town I was the reason you disappeared.” He spits out the words. “He couldn’t leave anything alone.”

Sam had never trusted Brian. He’d always had a good sense for people. Alex should have listened to him, she thinks.

“You tried to ruin my career. Telling Sam all those lies about me. And then I think maybe you died, but imagine my surprise when I find out you lived. They wouldn’t let me see you in the hospital. Wouldn’t even confirm you were there, but I knew you had to be. Do you know how hard that was for me? To have you just disappear. To never see my girlfriend again, the love of my life.”

“It devastated him,” Lucy interjects, shaking her head back and forth, stepping forward from where she’s been watching in the shadows. “You were gone, so you didn’t see the way he was forced to leave his beautiful apartment. He lost everything. He had to come back to grieve at our parents’ house. He cried.”

Brian raises a hand, silencing his sister. Alex remembers the tears Brian was so fond of producing, how well they worked to sway people. To manipulate her. “You completely fucked my life up,” Brian agrees. He was always good at feeling sorry for himself, and she can see it hasn’t changed. His face has gotten puffy, his stubble fuller now, with flecks of gray in it. His lips twitch. “It was terrible. A horrible time. But I got help, I healed myself. I did the work, Alex. More than you can say.”

Did the work? Healed himself? She’d spent so much time hiding from Brian that she’d forgotten what he really was, an unbelievable, pathological narcissist. She isn’t going to get anywhere by accusing him of anything, Alex thinks, reminding herself of how to stay safe. She has to go along with it.

“That’s really great, I am so glad you found something—”

His laugh is sharp. An act to cover up the anger that she can tell by the clenched palms and snarling mouth has already begun to take hold. He hasn’t changed at all. “Oh, are you? I couldn’t find you to tell you how much I’d changed though. You can imagine how that would make someone crazy.”

“What do you want from me?” Alex asks, unable to sit there listening to him lie.

“I would like an apology, to start. I’ve had to live with some pretty horrible things said about me for the past eight years, you know. The speculation in a small town, it can be quite intense. The way you just disappeared made it hard to set the record straight.”

“You want an apology? After what you did?” Alex says quietly.

“Funny. I remember trying to help a young girl out of a very tricky home situation.”

“Tell her what you told me, Brian,” Lucy steps in, prodding him.

Alex had only met Brian’s Lulu once during their time dating. It was on an incredibly awkward weekend with his parents at their huge, austere lake house. She remembers the mother, vacant-staring, and the father with his face like a brick, how he would slap Brian on the back a little too hard for it to be affectionate. Lulu was there, too, a withdrawn eleven-year-old wandering around the house like a neglected pet. The entire weekend she followed Brian, her eyes round and adoring. It’s the same way she looks at him right now. And just as he did then, he ignores her. He looks down at Alex from his full height now.

“Tell her, Brian. About how bad you felt,” Lucy nudges again. She is standing behind Brian, so only Alex can see his face and the irritation on it, how his neck goes tight, the tendons pulsing.

“Enough,” Brian yells. “Fuck, Lu. Why did you put me in this situation?” From the ground, Alex watches his fists clench. She remembers those hands. They are strong and slightly stubby, the thumbs curving inward. They repulse her.

Alex watches Lucy’s face when he turns on her, how she flinches, hurt, then rearranges her features back to the way they were before he can even see. Alex remembers doing it herself. “You always said you wanted to have a chance to do it right. Remember you said you wished you had been there to help her deal with whatever happened. You told me once how it ate you up inside. I thought if I found her for you, that you could both have a chance to say you’re sorry.”

The audacity of Brian to confuse the story like that, to twist it and misrepresent it as if he hadn’t been there at all, like he wasn’t the one in control of things the entire time.

“God, Lu, you really are a fucking idiot.” Brian rakes his hands through his hair in frustration. He spins back angrily toward his sister. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Well, I thought you two could talk. Alex, she really isn’t so bad, Brian. She is just confused. Tell her what happened that day, how you wanted to save her, to protect her from harm, but she ran away.” Lucy is shrinking into herself.

“Yes, tell me, Brian,” Alex croaks from the ground. “I hadn’t realized.”

He looks back and forth, caught between the two of them. “That’s not going to happen. And anyway, what do I even care? The thing you don’t understand is that I’ve moved on.”

Alex’s terror is displaced by her anger now. He has moved on? While she has spent the last eight years running from him, looking out her apartment window thinking that every shadowy figure is there to kill her? She bites her lip to keep from saying something that will cause him to hurt her.

Lucy seems to be trying to salvage the situation. “Well, if you don’t want to have an apology and talk, then we can just let her go. Pretend it didn’t happen. I’m sure she won’t tell anyone.”

Brian turns and looks Alex over, hunched up on the kitchen floor. Not the way he did then, with love or anger or a combination of the two, but perhaps even more terrifyingly with no emotion whatsoever.

“Oh, Lulu. You really aren’t very smart, are you? Of course she’ll tell.”

“I won’t,” Alex says, desperate to convince them. “I’ve gone years and years without telling a single soul.” He looks confused for a moment, as though he might actually be considering it. Alex feels hope flutter up in her chest. She pictures herself escaping, running across the lawn to the neighbor’s house like she should have done to begin with.

“We’ll just deny it,” Lucy agrees, her voice full of panic.

“I can deny it, sure. I have nothing to do with it, nothing anyone can trace to me anyway. But not you. You fucked her up, Lu,” he says, wrinkling his nose as he surveys Alex. “She’s a mess. All covered in blood, look at her.” He waves a hand at Alex like she is a shattered jar of mayonnaise at a grocery store.

“That was an accident.” Lucy’s voice wobbles. “She fell. I didn’t do it.”

“Doesn’t matter. Now she’s tied up. You know what that is, Lulu?”

She shakes her head, eyes wide. He’s enjoying this, Alex thinks suddenly. He’s taking pleasure in tormenting Lucy just like he relished torturing Alex when she was young. Brian whistles, shaking his head as Lucy quivers next to him. “The way you messed her up, held her against her will. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s a felony. This kind of shit can ruin a person.”

“What do I do, oh God.” Lucy looks like she might be starting to hyperventilate.

“Let me fucking think,” Brian says sharply. They move to the far side of the kitchen to discuss Alex’s fate. Their voices blend together in a low murmur. It’s incredible to Alex that she once thought of that man as cosmopolitan, that he seemed like any sort of ticket out of her misery. How hard it is to know anything about love when you are young and have no examples to follow, how easy it is to be led astray.

“No! Brian!” Lucy’s sharp cry makes Alex’s blood speed up in her veins. The voices grow lower, and finally she hears Lucy’s mumble of acceptance. Brian’s boots scrape toward her. The light from his flashlight trails along the floor and then his face, that raised scar, appears once more in her frame of vision.

“I was not planning on hurting you. Remember that I had nothing to do with this. This time it is on my sister, not me.” Lucy goes pale behind him.

Alex screams but his hand clamps down over her mouth.

“Shut up or I will do it right now. I’ll be right back. I just have to get some things.”

Her chest burns as she squirms and fights with all the strength she has in her, thrashing her legs out but coming up against nothing but air.