Page 56

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I’m in the living room, on the phone with Becky, and we are discussing what has become a favorite topic: Blake and whether he is losing his mind.

“I’m just worried about you, Krista,” Becky says.

But she’s not worried about me in the same way that Elijah is worried. She’s worried about me in exactly the way I want her to be worried about me.

“You shouldn’t worry.” I say it in a way that sounds like I’m reassuring her even though I’m actually worried. “Blake is…well, he’s definitely going through something, but he’ll be okay. He hasn’t… I mean, he isn’t threatening me. He’s never hit me.”

“Do you really want to wait for that to happen though?” Becky presses me.

Amanda comes in through the front door. She looks exhausted from work. She gives me a half-hearted wave, then stumbles up the steps to the second floor.

“If you want,” Becky says, “you are welcome to stay with me and Malcolm for as long as you want. We’ve got that extra bedroom…”

“That’s very sweet,” I tell her, “but you don’t need to do that. I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t you remember what that psychic said though? What if he really does stab you to death?”

I almost laugh out loud. “That won’t happen, Becky.”

Except I say it with a nervous edge to my voice. Like I think there’s a chance that Blake might hurt me.

Becky says something else, but I don’t hear it, because an ear-splitting scream suddenly rips through the air. I grip the phone tighter, looking up at the ceiling.

“Becky,” I say. “I have to go.”

“Okay,” she agrees. “But if Blake does anything violent, you get out of there ASAP. Malcolm has the car, and we can be over there to pick you up in five minutes.”

“Thank you,” I say tearfully. “You are a good friend, Becky.”

I hang up and then start up the steps to the third floor. Amanda hasn’t screamed again, but when I get closer to her room, I can hear her sobbing. What now?

I knock gently on the door. “Aman—er, Whitney?”

There’s a long pause before she answers, “What?”

“It’s Krista. Is everything okay?”

She yanks open the door. Her pretty face is streaked with tears, her eyes red and puffy.

“Whitney, what’s wrong?” I ask.

“Blake threw rotting fruit covered with maggots all over my bed,” she manages in a whimper. “That’s what your boyfriend did.”

My eyebrows shoot up to my hairline. Blake did that? Wow, he really is losing it.

Maybe he’s not as harmless as I thought.

I clasp a hand over my mouth. “Oh my God, how awful! Do you have any idea why he would do that?”

“Because he’s out of his mind!” she sobs. “He’s horrible . He’s always leaving me these nasty notes, and he looks at me like he wishes I were dead.” She looks over her shoulder at the bed, where there are indeed rotting apples covered with writhing maggots all over her blanket, which will probably now need to be thrown away. I never thought he’d do anything once he found the fruit bag. “I don’t think I can take much more of this. I…I might have to move.”

This is not good. Amanda wants to leave, and Blake has been talking about selling the brownstone. I’m going to have to accelerate the timeline.

“Where will you go?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” she says helplessly. “I burned out all my friends staying on their couches before I moved in here. I feel like I can’t ask again. And…I don’t have much money.”

Amanda is confiding in me. This might be a good time to admit what I know to her. I want her to be able to trust me, and this is an important step. But most importantly, I need her to admit what she did. Because I have to be 100 percent sure.

“Listen.” I slip into her room and close the door behind me so that we’re alone. “I wanted you to know that…I know.”

Fear flickers in her eyes, but she tries to maintain her composure. “What do you know? What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean…Amanda.”

She gasps and takes a step back. “I… I don’t…”

“I have a friend in IT who told me your driver’s license looked fake, so he did some digging,” I say. “But don’t worry. Blake doesn’t know. I didn’t tell anyone.”

Her brows scrunch together. “You didn’t tell anyone ?”

Bingo.

“Not a soul.”

Amanda drops down onto the edge of the bed, avoiding the apple and the maggots. She buries her face in her hands. “I don’t know how this happened. How did my life become this ?”

“If you want to talk about it…”

She raises her face from her palms. “You swear you won’t tell anyone?”

“I swear on my life.”

And that part is entirely true.

She squeezes her eyes shut, and a pair of twin tears roll down either cheek. “My mother had cancer. Stomach cancer. The prognosis was horrible, especially without treatment. But the treatment… It wasn’t cheap, and her insurance didn’t cover it.”

“Oh,” I murmur.

“It’s not the kind of thing where you can go to a bank and get a loan for chemotherapy,” she murmurs, not meeting my eyes. “So I borrowed it from somebody else. Somebody who didn’t ask too many questions.”

“I see.”

I had assumed Amanda was on the run for nefarious reasons. Instead, it’s because she was trying to raise money to pay for her mother’s cancer treatment. Somehow this irritates me even more. She had a mother who loved her enough that she would do anything to keep her alive. That’s a hell of a lot more than I ever had.

“And then, of course, she died anyway.” Amanda laughs mirthlessly. “All that money and the chemo port and the vomiting and the hair falling out, and she didn’t even live as long as her prognosis without treatment. And then I was on the hook for all that money.” She winces. “It’s not the sort of thing where you can declare bankruptcy, you know? If I didn’t come up with it, they were going to kill me.”

“So you changed your name…”

“I used what little money I had to buy a new identity,” she explains. “Whitney Cross was some teenager who disappeared a while back, probably murdered or something. She wasn’t using her identity, and I needed it.”

I grit my teeth. I wasn’t murdered , for God’s sake. As if! I simply wasn’t using my identity for a little while. But that didn’t give her the right to take it. The fact that nothing has happened to her since becoming Whitney Cross means that it would have been safe for me to slip back into my old identity.

That is, if she hadn’t stolen it.

“So that’s my whole pathetic story,” she says. “If you tell anyone, I’m obviously dead. So I hope you don’t.”

I sit down beside her on the edge of the bed. “Your secret is safe,” I reassure her. “In fact, I think it’s wonderful how you tried to help your mother.”

“For nothing,” she says. “She was furious about how I got the money for her treatment. She didn’t want this for me. She worked so hard for me to get an education, and now…”

Oh, cry me a river. She borrowed money from a loan shark, and it backfired. What did she expect?

“Listen,” I say, “now that you’ve shared this with me, I’d like to tell you a little secret of my own.”

She looks at me with interest. “What?”

“I’m thinking about leaving Blake.”

Her mouth drops open. “Seriously?”

“Does that surprise you so much? You think he’s a psychopath.”

“Of course I do. But…”

“He didn’t used to be like this. He’s scaring me more and more lately.” I shudder. “I need to get away from him before something terrible happens. I’m worried that he might…might hurt me.”

Amanda reaches out to take my hand. I let her do it, even though I want to slap her.

“I need more time though,” I say. “I don’t have much savings, so I want to make sure that I have enough money and that I have a place to go.”

“I totally understand that,” Amanda says.

“Maybe,” I say, “the two of us can get an apartment together and share the rent.”

For the first time since she came home and saw what Blake did, her face brightens. “That would be great, Krista. I would really like that.”

I force myself to return her smile, even though it feels like plastic on my face. “Take a look at apartments. If you find something, let me know.”

She nods eagerly. “I bet you five bucks we can find a place as big as this for a quarter of the price in Staten Island.”

Staten Island? Is she kidding ? “Come on. Let’s get this mess cleaned up.”

I help Amanda clean up her sheets. For the record, I am so angry at Blake for doing this. What the hell is wrong with him? Why couldn’t he throw the maggot-ridden apples in the garbage like a normal person? It seems like the stress of everything is making his behavior a bit more unpredictable than I expected. Now I have to clean up another one of his messes.

It takes us a few trips and a lot of laundry detergent, but we end up getting everything clean. I rinse the last of the disgusting apple off my hands in the kitchen sink while Amanda is spraying her room with my air freshener.

After I dry off my hands, I wander into the living room, where Goldy is swimming around in her little fishbowl. Blake and I bought Goldy when we first moved in. She was our starter pet. We imagined that someday we would upgrade to an animal that required more responsibility and love, like a cat. And then maybe a dog. And someday, a child.

But none of that is going to happen. Not anymore.

Thanks to Blake.

I get close to Goldy’s bowl. I tap on it gently, and she looks up at me. She’s a good fish. She’s provided us with a lot of entertainment in the time that we’ve had her, although that time is quickly coming to an end. Faster than I thought it would.

“Goodbye, Goldy,” I say sadly. “I’m sorry about this, but you should know that it’s Blake’s fault.”

Goldy was a symbol of the life we were starting together. It only makes sense that now that our future is going down the toilet, she should be the first to go.