But these sounds, they’re coming from the direction of the garage. Or one of the bedrooms between the bathroom and the garage.
Both her arms are tingling the same way her leg does when it goes to sleep. And yet some instinct is kicking in. Some instinct that tells her it’s best to pretend she hasn’t heard anything. Best to act as if nothing’s amiss. Then, as if she’s about to begin preparing dinner, she’ll make a beeline for the kitchen and the gun under the sink.
Everything is fine, she tells herself as she washes her hands. Her trembling hands.
She’s had physical responses to fear before, but never this strong. The tingling in her arms is almost painful now. Her hands shake as if there’s some disturbance inside the bones of her wrists.
Everything is fine, she tells herself again.
She opens the bathroom door, head bowed, as if she has no urge at all to look in either direction, as if all she wants to do is stroll into the kitchen and fix herself something to eat.
Everything is not fine, but you’re going to pretend it is until you can put a bullet in this bastard. Then things will be fine again.
It takes all the effort she has, but she forces herself to go to the fridge and take out a Diet Coke, because women who are afraid they’re about to be murdered don’t get themselves a Diet Coke. They don’t stand over the sink, taking a leisurely sip of their favorite soft drink while secretly gauging how many seconds it will take to pull their Beretta from under the cabinet at their legs. And this charade, she hopes, will give her an element of surprise.
She hears the footsteps behind her only because she’s listening for them. They’re soft enough that she would have missed them otherwise.
And then she realizes she’s made a critical mistake.
She forgot to turn on the light in the kitchen, and now she’s standing in almost total darkness over the sink, which looks about as natural as if she’d just hit the linoleum in a downward dog.
In the window above the sink, she sees his shadow. She sees his curls. Just their silhouette, backlit by the garage light.
Jason Briffel’s curls.
Her hands have stopped shaking, but the tingling has moved from her arms, across her back, and up the back of her neck. It’s even touching the sides of her face.
One shot, she tells herself. Shoot him and make a break for the living room and the front door. No talk. No negotiation. He’s in my fucking house. If he wants to die here, he made that choice when he broke in. I moved to a Stand Your Ground state for a reason.
She imagines herself doing it before she’s done it. Imagines pulling the gun from the holster attached to the cabinet’s ceiling, turning, and firing off as many shots as it takes to drop him. She imagines it so clearly, she doesn’t realize she’s just tried it.
And nothing happened.
She’s pulled the trigger twice and the only sounds in the kitchen are their combined breaths. Jason has raised his hands, not in surrender but to calm her. He approaches her slowly, as if she’s a hysterical woman, and he’s broken into her house in the middle of nowhere because he’s the only one in the universe who can reason with her.
How how how how how, she thinks, the word like a mad bird’s cawing in her brain. How did he get here? How did he get in my house?
Her new name’s not even on the deed. Kayla helped her set up a trust after they won the case against her dad. No one else knows she’s out here. No one except . . .
“Put the gun down, Trina.”
“That’s not my name.”
“It is your name. It will always be your name. Now enough of this game playing. Enough of the denial. We’re grown-ups now, and it’s time for us to talk about grown-up things.”
From the back waistband of his pants, he pulls a gun. One of her guns. No doubt this one’s fully loaded. It’s the one from her bedroom or under her desk in the living room. It has to be. But he keeps it pointed at the ceiling. The gesture says he doesn’t want to use it on her, but he will if he has to, which seems as sick and condescending as the words he just spoke with oily certainty.
“You need to leave,” she hears herself say. “You need to leave my house.”
“This isn’t a house, Trina. This is a shack, a prison. I hate to sound so judgmental, but it’s pathetic. I mean, you’re out here in the middle of nowhere. It’s not safe.”
She wants to believe he’s taunting her, but he isn’t. He genuinely believes the things he’s saying. And he’s lost a considerable amount of weight. That fact terrifies her almost as much as his presence here. When she last saw him, there was something infantlike about his portliness. Now he’s lean and ready to pounce, and this suggests he’s been preparing for this moment, transforming himself into a more efficient predator.
He aspires to be a serial killer. She’s known this from the moment she read his letters. But his behavior has always been more stalker than murderer. Can she appeal to the former side of him? Can she soothe and seduce him?
“You scared me, Jason. The things you did . . . they scared me.”
Feed his ego. Make him feel as if he’s the center of my world.
“Well, that’s ridiculous, Trina,” he says, with a great pained smile that almost looks like a grimace. “I’d never hurt you.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To bring you back,” he says. “To bring you back to your life, your real life. Your destiny.”
“With you,” she says. She tries to keep her voice as neutral as she can, to not betray her disgust at these words, and apparently she’s successful because he nods fiercely as he takes another step toward her.
“You made the first step yourself, and that’s good. You cut yourself off from your birth father and got him out of your life. And that was the best thing you could have done. And then . . . well, the universe stepped in and handled the rest.”
“The rest?”
“Your grandmother.”
“What about my grandmother?” A mistake to ask this; there’s a tremor in her voice now.
“It was for the best. She was in your way, too. I know you were sad when she died, but it was the only way for you to be free.”
“Did you hurt my grandmother, Jason?”
“No!” he whines. He sounds like a child. And he’s so genuinely wounded she knows he’s telling the truth. “I can’t cause heart attacks. I’m not God. But if there is a God, he took her away when he did because she wasn’t your real family, Trina. Abigail is. I am.”
She runs for it.
There’s a few feet of space between the sink and the door to the living room. As soon as she bounds in that direction, she hears him erupt. “No, no, no, no, no,” he says like a man whose dog has just jumped from the back seat of his car.
He crashes into her from behind, arms around her waist suddenly. He still holds the gun in one hand, which is stupid. Stupid and untrained. The two of them careen into her desk, and at any moment he could fire wildly by accident.
Her head slams into one of the computer monitors, then the solid wall behind it. She feels no pain. None of the bone-rattling, stomach-churning agony that should follow such a double blow. It’s shock; it has to be. But even as she tumbles amid the wreckage of her desk, the tingling she felt earlier is all over her body, along with another sensation. It’s utterly foreign, utterly without precedent in her experience. The words that leap to her mind to describe it are just as strange: bone music. It feels like the bass line of some song is being played inside her very bones.
The desk gives way beneath them as they struggle. Her arms flail. She feels her fingers close around the stand of one of the wide-screen monitors as it falls along with her.