Page 183 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Your life, Laura wanted to say, because she had known when she hid the razorblade inside her bandaged hand that she was going to kill Paula Evans for hurting her daughter.

Andy asked, “Back in the prison, when you were walking away, why didn’t you tell him about the earbuds? That everything he said in your ear was recorded? Like, a final fuck you.”

“I said what I needed to say,” Laura told her, though with Nick, she was never sure of herself. It felt so good to say those things to his face. Now that she was away from him, she had doubts.

The yo-yo snapping back again.

Andy seemed content to end the conversation there. She turned on the radio. She scanned the stations.

Laura asked, “Did you like the song I played?”

“I guess. It’s kind of old.”

Laura put her hand to her heart, wounded. “I’ll learn something else. Name it.”

“How about ‘Filthy’?”

“How about something that’s actually music?”

Andy rolled her eyes. She punched at the buttons on the tuner, likely searching for a sound that had the depth of cotton candy. “I’m sorry about your brother.”

Laura closed her eyes against the sudden tears.

“You did right by him,” Andy said. “You stood up for him. That took a lot.”

Laura found a tissue and dried her eyes. She still couldn’t come to terms with what had happened. “I never left his side. Even when we were negotiating the deal with the FBI.”

Andy stopped fiddling with the radio.

Laura said, “Andrew died about ten minutes after the plea agreement was signed. It was very peaceful. I was holding his hand. I got to say goodbye to him.”

Andy sniffed back tears. She had always been sensitive to Laura’s moods. “He stayed around long enough to make sure you were going to be okay.”

She stroked Andy’s hair behind her ear again. “That’s what I like to think.”

Andy wiped her eyes. She left the radio alone as she drove down the near-empty interstate. She was clearly thinking about something, but just as clearly content to keep her thoughts to herself.

Laura rested her head back against the seat. She watched the trees blur by. She tried to enjoy the comfortable silence. Not a night had gone by since Andy had returned home without Laura waking up in a cold sweat. She wasn’t suffering post-traumatic stress or worrying about Andy’s safety. She had been terrified of seeing Nick again. That the trick with the piano and the earbuds would not work. That he would not walk into the open trap. That she would walk blindly into one of his.

She hated him too much.

That was the problem.

You didn’t hate someone unless part of you still loved them. From the beginning, the two extremes had always been laced into their DNA.

For six years, even while she’d loved him, part of Laura had hated Nick in that childish way that you hate something you can’t control. He was headstrong, and stupid, and handsome, which gave him cover for a hell of a lot of the mistakes he continually made—the same mistakes, over and over again, because why try new ones when the old ones worked so well in his favor?

He was charming, too. That was the problem. He would charm her. He would make her furious. Then he would charm her back again so that she did not know if Nick was the snake or if she was the snake and Nick was the handler.

The yo-yo snapping back into the palm of his hand.

So Nick sailed along on his charm, and his fury, and he hurt people, and he found new things that interested him more, and the old things were left broken in his wake.

Jane had been one of those broken, discarded things. Nick had sent her away to Berlin because he was tired of her. At first, she had enjoyed her freedom, but then she had panicked that he might not want her back. She had begged and pleaded with him and done everything she could think of to get his attention.

Then Oslo had happened.

Then her father was dead and Laura Juneau was dead and then, quite suddenly, Nick’s charm had stopped working. A trolley car off the tracks. A train without a conductor. The mistakes could not be forgiven, and eventually, the second same mistake would not be overlooked, and the third same mistake had dire consequences that had ended with Alexandra Maplecroft’s life being taken, a death sentence being passed on Andrew, then—almost—resulted in the loss of another life, her life, in the farmhouse bathroom.