“Sort of. I’d recently begun to get letters from the husband of the woman who jumped in front of me. They were,” she pauses, her lips twisting, “not nice, I guess you could say.”
“How not nice?”
Getting up from the bed, she walks to the dresser and opens the top drawer, coming back with a stack of envelopes.
“Here,” she says, climbing back into bed and setting them between us. Instead of lying back down she sits cross-legged. I sit up, doing the same, and reach for the first envelope.
By the time I’m through them all, I can barely see straight. Fury clouds my vision. This man is delusional. Brynn isn’t safe. No wonder she was so mean when she met me. Anybody in her position would protect themselves the way she did.
“Brynn, do the police know about this?” I hold up the last letter, the worst of them all.
She shakes her head.
“They need to.”
She shrugs, defeated. “I can’t. I just can’t bring myself to report him. I already took his family, whether I’m innocent or not. It happened.My car.Am I supposed to hurt him further?”
“If he’s going to hurt you, then yes, you need to nail that fucker to the wall.”
“He’s not going to hurt me,” she says, but it’s without conviction. She wants to believe he won’t, but deep down she’s not certain.
“He doesn’t know where I went. And”—her eyes are timid, but she forges ahead—“Brighton is only a stop along the way. I needed a safe place, a job, and anonymity.”
Her revelation hits me like a bullet, piercing my flesh and ripping through my insides. “You’re not staying in Brighton.” The words leave me hollow.
She shakes her head. “The plan has always been to make as much as I can until my parents can help me. They have their fishing business, and the high season starts now.”
“And then?”
“My end destination is Brazil. On a beach, renting out lounge chairs to vacationers.” She takes the last letter from my hand and stacks it with the other ones. “Somewhere I can fade into the background, and watch everyone around me live.”
I hear what she’s not saying, and I wonder if she hears it too. She’s not just running from the crazy husband and father who wants to hurt her. This is some sort of penance. I have no idea what it feels like to be involved in the death of someone else, especially an innocent baby. Or to have my name smeared in the media. It sounds like she should be suing them for slander.
“You weren’t part of my plan, Connor.” She runs her fingers down the length of my arm. Her lips twist.
I nod, trying desperately to recover from the proverbial kick in the nuts she just delivered to me. “You’re still planning to leave?”
She nods, but it’s so small, so imperceptible, it makes me think she doesn’t want to go through with it. “Every day takes me a little farther from what happened. One step closer to a semblance of normalcy. I want a life where I don’t need to use door alarms anymore. Where I don’t have to fear recognition. For that, I need distance.”
I wish she weren’t right. I wish I didn’t understand. I wish I had it in me to guilt trip, manipulate, and coerce her into staying.
I slip a curled finger under her chin and tip it up. “Promise me something?”
“I can try.”
“Don’t leave without telling me.”
Her eyebrows pinch. “Wouldn’t it be easier if one day I was gone? If neither of us had to go through the heartache of a goodbye?”
“I don’t think so.”
She sighs and looks at me. The pain in her eyes hurts me too.
She doesn’t mention the promise again. Neither do I. We’re different. I want to put myself through the experience. She wants to avoid it altogether.
I stay with her that night. It’s not only that I want to protect her. Now there’s an invisible clock, ticking away every second we have together. I want to bury my head in the sand and forget about it, want to bury myself in her and pretend her problems don’t exist. I settle for curling my body behind hers and slipping into her in a luxurious and unhurried pace.
At the crack of dawn, I leave to go home and change. I take a shower, dress, and go to my parents’ house.
