Page 184 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Inexplicably, Laura had still loved him. Perhaps loved him even more.

Nick had let her live—that was what she kept telling herself while she went mad inside of her jail cell. He had left Paula at the farmhouse to guard her. He had planned to come back for her. To take her to their much-dreamed-of little flat in Switzerland, a country that had no extradition treaty with the US.

Which had given her a delirious kind of hope.

Andrew was dead and Jasper was gone and Laura had stared up at the jailhouse ceiling, tears running down her face, her neck still throbbing, her bruises still healing, her belly swelling with his child, and desperately loved him.

Clayton Morrow. Nicholas Harp. In her misery, she did not care.

Why was she so stupid?

How could she still love someone who had tried to destroy her?

When Laura had been with Nick—and she was decidedly with him during his long fall from grace—they had raged against the system that had so irrevocably exploited Andrew, and Robert Juneau, and Paula Evans, and William Johnson, and Clara Bellamy, and all the other members who eventually comprised their little army: The group homes. The emergency departments. The loony bin. The mental hospital. The squalor. The staff who neglected their patients. The orderlies who ratcheted tight the straightjackets. The nurses who looked the other way. The doctors who doled out the pills. The urine on the floor. The feces on the walls. The inmates, the fellow prisoners, taunting, wanting, beating, biting.

The spark of rage, not the injustice, was what had excited Nick the most. The novelty of a new cause. The chance to annihilate. The dangerous game. The threat of violence. The promise of fame. Their names in lights. Their righteous deeds on the tongues of schoolchildren who were taught the lessons of change.

A penny, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a dollar bill...

In the end, their deeds became part of the public record, but not in the way Nick had promised. Jane Queller’s sworn testimony laid out the plan from concept to demise. The training. The rehearsals. The drills. Jane had forgotten who’d first had the idea, but as with everything else, the plan had spread from Nick to all of them, a raging wildfire that would, in the end, consume every single one of their lives.

What Jane had kept hidden, the one sin that she could never confess to, was that she had ignited that first spark.

Dye packs.

That was what they had all agreed would be in the paper bag. This was the Oslo plan: That Martin Queller would be stained with the proverbial blood of his victims on the world stage. Paula’s cell had infiltrated the manufacturer outside of Chicago. Nick had given the packs to Jane when she had arrived in Oslo.

As soon as he was gone, Jane had thrown them into the trash.

It had all started with a joke—not a joke on Jane’s part, but a joke made by Laura Juneau. Andrew had relayed it in one of his coded letters to Berlin:

Poor Laura told me that she would just as soon find a gun in the bag as a dye pack. She has a recurring fantasy of killing Father with a revolver like the one her husband used to murder their children, then turning the gun on herself.

No one, not even Andrew, had known that Jane had decided to take the joke seriously. She’d bought the revolver off a German biker in the dive bar, the same dive bar that Nick had sent her to when she’d first arrived in Berlin. The one where Jane was afraid that she would be gang-raped. The one that she had stayed at for exactly one hour because Nick had told her he would know if she left a minute sooner.

For over a week, Jane had left the gun on the counter of her studio apartment, hoping it would be stolen. She had decided not to take it to Oslo, and then she had taken it to Oslo. She had decided to leave it in her hotel room, and then she had taken it from her room. And then she was carrying it in a brown paper bag to the ladies room. And then she was taping it behind the toilet tank like a scene from The Godfather. And then she was sitting on the front row, watching her father pontificate on stage, praying to God that Laura Juneau would not follow through on her fantasy.

And also praying that she would.

Nick had always been drawn to new and exciting things. Nothing bored him more than the predictable. Jane had hated her father, but she had been motivated by much more than vengeance. She was desperate to have Nick’s attention, to prove that she belonged by his side. She had desperately hoped that the violent shock of helping Laura Juneau commit murder would make Nick love her again.

And it had worked. But then it hadn’t.

And Jane was crushed by guilt. But then Nick had talked her out of it.

And Jane persuaded herself that it all would’ve happened the same way without the gun.

But then she wondered...

Which was the typical pattern of their six years together. The push and pull. The vortex. The yo-yo. The rollercoaster. She worshipped him. She despised him. He was her weakness. He was her destroyer. Her ultimate all or none. There were so many ways to describe that tiny piece of herself that Nick could always nudge into insanity.

Laura had only ever been able to pull herself back for the sake of other people.

First for Andrew, then for Andrea.

That was the real reason she had gone to the prison today: not to punish Nick, but to push him away. To keep him locked up so that she could be free.

Laura had always believed—vehemently, with great conviction—that the only way to change the world was to destroy it.