Don’t be silly, Byrdie.
When I see where he’s heading, I hurry after him. “What are you doing?”
He takes a seat at the piano. “What do you think? Playing the piano.”
Drawn by my curiosity as I am by boredom, I drift closer.
We’ve all been a bit lost, wandering the house, bored, waiting for news that Nash’s attorney has gotten him out of jail.
“You play the piano?” I ask.
He presses five keys in an order that makes me scrunch up my face.
He takes one look at me and chuckles. “Maybe you could teach me.”
Shrugging, I curl my bare toes on the glossy hardwood floors. “I don’t know how to teach. I just play.”
I taught myself through trial and error, with a burning need for music to run through me. I don’t know how to play because I don’t knowwhyI play.
“Ask Nash when he’s back,” I suggest.
Nash offered to teach me how to read music, and I have yet to take him up on it. I want to, but something is still holding me back. Maybe not knowing how long those lessons will last.
No one has asked me whether I intend to stay here forever. I can’t remember the last time I cleaned, so am I even a maid anymore? And the tote bag with the money I earned is in myroom. So I could leave. Jeremiah will think I died in the desert, so I’m safer than I was when I ran away from him. I have hundreds of dollars to get on a bus or a train and go wherever I want.
But nothing is compelling me to leave.
“Nah.” He pushes himself to his feet and snags my hand.
I pull my palm out of his, and he stops, his expression going blank.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
I haven’t forgiven him for slamming a door in my face. Not yet. And maybe not ever.
“Weare going for a ride,” he says, shrugging off my rejection as if it never happened.
Nash has a bike that I used to clean until he threatened to fuck me on it, so I stopped. Back then, a tiny part of me was intrigued by the thought, and I spent more time than I should have imagining how he would do it. But I’m not the same girl I was before.
Being left to die in the middle of a desert would change anyone.
“Ten minutes,” Makhi says.
Blinking to refocus, I find he’s moved. He’s standing at the patio door leading into the backyard.
“Ten minutes to what?”
“Meet me in the garage so I can take you out for a ride.”
“And if I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t.” He slips outside, leaving the door open behind him.
I look at the open door, then at the piano I want to play, and walk away.
Nance is in the kitchen, busy cooking as usual.
I slump into a seat at the dining table, bored out of my mind. Vonn is working out, or I’d have gone to speak to him. I heardthe clang of heavy iron, a sign he was lifting weights in the home gym, a room I rarely entered. Nance or Lydia cleaned it, and I had no interest in going into the home gym until Nance told me that Vonn likes to work out there.
