For me.
I’ve tried to avoid looking at it, remembering how the cold metal felt pressed against the back of my neck. I shudder, wrapping my arms around myself, but it does nothing to warm my goose-prickled skin.
I have never been so terrified in my life. Not even when I walked into my Nevada motel room after work, and Derek had been waiting for me.
I’d just emptied Winston’s nearly overflowing trash in the dumpster, and I’d been whistling as I hurried to get back inside to wash my hands and return to waiting tables.
Cold metal against my skin. My heart froze and then pounded. I knew instantly and without turning around that it was Derek with a gun, and he was in Rios to kill me.
“Move,” Derek had ordered, fingers digging into my left arm as he pulled me away from the back door of the diner and out to the street.
When I glanced at him, he had a hoodie on. Dark blue. The hood concealed his face.
He hooked his left arm around my right. Then he pressed the gun against my side and kept it there. A tangible reminder of what he would do if I even thought about screaming.
He had been about to turn left when a group of college-age girls walked out of the diner. They’d been laughing as they chatted with each other, but a couple had glanced toward us, and so Derek dragged me right instead of left, hissing, “Where’s your car?”
I’d shaken my head.No. My whole body had shaken as I pointed to my gray Honda. “There. But I don’t have my car keys. They’re inside.”
It was an ordinary mid-afternoon day in Rios as he marched me down the street. Everyone was busy going about their day, blind to Derek walking down the road with a gun bruising my ribs.
Outside, male voices move away from my old apartment, and Derek turns around to look at me.
His rage stretches across the room toward me, my skin prickling and my heart racing. I want to cower, but cowering never stopped a punch or a kick.
“You’re going to pay for what you did to me,” he hisses.
My eyes drift to the gun in his hand. If I were in any doubt about what he brought me here to do, I would know it now. Maybe he had planned to take me to his car—he’d been dragging me left before the people leaving the diner made him go right—and I’d be dead already.
Derekwillkill me, and he will get away with hurting me the way he always has. The certainty that nothing I do can change my fate makes it easier to lift my chin and ask, “How did you find me?”
“Put a tracker on your car in Nevada,” he says. “And it was easy enough to track you there when you used my credit card at the gas station to fill up. From Nevada to here, all I had to do was follow a little dot on my phone’s GPS. It led me right to you.” His smile is so smug, I itch to throw something at him.
It was our card, but he always saw everything as his, never ours.
I feel sick about the tracker, but I’m not surprised. Nevada had been a mistake, and so had using the credit card. But I’d spent the last of my money paying for a motel on the way to Nevada and thought I was far enough away from Oregon that he would never know where I was headed. It was stupid, and he was determined. I would have been better off letting my car break down on the side of the road.
“Why have you spent so many years hating me, Derek?”
A muscle pops in his jaw. His hand tightens around his gun, and the breath stops in my throat as he stalks toward me. His eyes, once I’d believed were the most beautiful jade green in the world, glitter with hatred.
Outside, the distant scream of a siren wails as it heads away from the center of town—and me. Below me, a floorboard softly creaks. The flower shop was closed, its lights off, when Derek dragged me through the door beside it. There is no one around to save me.
“I deserved better than you,” he sneers. “I was going to go to college, then go pro, and leave you behind. You were just a stepping stone to something better. My parents didn’t care what I did once I started dating you. They never knew about the girls I fucked and the parties I went to because they always thought I was with you.”
I’d braced myself for a punch. A kick. A slap to the face. We’re not in Oregon anymore, and I don’t have to hide my bruised face from his parents or people from church.
I hadn’t braced myself for this. I wish he’d punched me in the face instead.
A tear slides down my cheek. “You loved me.”
He snorts. “Get over yourself, Maisie. I could always do better. The only one who never saw it was you.”
He turns away from me as if I don’t matter. As if Inevermattered. He glances at the watch on his wrist and walks back to the same window to peer out of it.
I slide down the wall, wrap my arms around my legs, and stare straight ahead.
My entire life with Derek was a lie. All of it, right from the start. The love, the happy future I thought we’d have if he just got over his work stress. I was a shield he used to hide the real life he wanted. He wasn’t working late. Why else was his dad always complaining that he was behind on his work? He didn’t go away with the guys on weekends for fishing.
