“You did all of that for a stranger?”
“She had no one else. I’d just dealt with the deaths of my mother and older sister in quick succession, both from cancer.” She swallowed, avoiding looking at his face so he didn’t feel obliged to adopt the obligatory expression of shock or sympathy—or worse, pity. “Nika showing up on my doorstep like that, moving into my late sister’s room,” she continued quickly, before they could get into theI’m sorryconversation, “it felt like she’d been directed to the person she needed at that time, if that doesn’t sound too kooky. I’m not any kind of angel, if that’s what you’re thinking. To be honest, I don’t know if it was even all about her.”
“How so?”
“For me, it kind of filled a gulf. When you’re looking after someone who’s dying, like I had been, and you’re working full-time, things get hectic, and then it suddenly goes silent and you’re left alone, and that’s when the grief hits. If I kept busy, I could put that off… Between the book and the medicalappointments, it filled a lot of hours that would have otherwise been quiet. And hey, I had some experience that I figured could prove helpful to Nika. I guess I need to be needed—that’s what my other sister says, anyway. Sorry, I’m babbling.”
And he was staring at her in that super-intense way.
“No,” he said, frowning, “I, uh?—”
A hollow bang echoed around them, and Alice jumped up, with a squeak. Carter caught her hand. “Hey, chill, it’s just a garbage truck—a real one.” Sure enough, through the trees, she could make out its rectangular hulk. Not one of the town ones, but a parks truck, emptying a trash can beside the food truck. The driver looked their way, and she gasped.
“I think he saw us.”
“So what? We’re just some couple in a park. He’s a garbage collector, he doesn’t give a shit. He’s probably forgotten us already. Why so jumpy?”
“You need to ask?”
She shook off his hand, though she’d actually appreciated the connection. Of course, what she really needed was a reality check. Because somehow she’d become a character in her own book. Dove right on into the pages, without the necessary traits and skills to survive. And now this town she’d always been so comfortable in had been plunged into shadows, like a scene from one of the young-adult dystopian novels her students devoured. She really couldn’t have survived a life like Nika’s or Carter’s.
Carter stood, and picked up his helmet. “Pretty sure he’s not a Russian spy or an undercover FBI agent, but we should get moving.”
“There you go again with the ‘we’ thing.”
“You just said you need to be needed. Well, right now, I need you. Look, I’m not an idiot—I do know that at some time I’ll need to talk to the authorities. But if I get arrested, I don’t like my chances of getting bail. No permanent home, no wife, no kids, noregular job. And I’m pretty sure I could get out of the country if I wanted to, and they will know that, so as flight risks go… Not to mention that once they’ve got me, I can’t be out here putting that timeline together. For once I’m gonna have the whole picture, not just some random puzzle pieces that fit who-the-fuck-knows-where. Come with me, Alice. Just for a little while. Help me.”
Alice grimaced. Oh God, as if she could resistthat. “There may be an alternative to getting the computer.”
“What?”
“Those last recordings, the ones where Nika was confused, I got my sister to transcribe them. With all the time I’d been spending with Nika, I was behind on grading and lesson planning, and Nika had talked for hours. So Kimberly offered. She transcribed what little she could and gave me the transcripts on a flash drive, which is—was—in my house. But she still has the dictaphone—digital voice recorder, whatever you call them these days. You can connect it to the internet, but we never did, so what’s on the recorder is the only copy. There’s maybe ten hours’ worth of the last recordings sitting on it, most of which Kimberly couldn’t transcribe because she couldn’t make any sense of it, or it was in Russian. I assume you speak Russian, like your alter ego?”
“Da. Where is your sister?”
“In Oxford Falls, about twenty minutes north.”
“So that’s what you’ve been hiding from me. You weren’t gonna tell me about this voice recorder, were you? You were planning to make me drop you at the police station—and then what? Give it to them?”
“Uh…”
“Why did you change your mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was the thing about needing you, wasn’t it?”
“Not just that. Can I help it if I don’t like to see anyone hurting? I mean, sure, you need to clear your name, and I may have had a hand in landing you in trouble and all, but also … Nika would want me to help you.”
He stared at Alice with an expression she couldn’t decipher, despite her intense study of the fictional version of him. This version had so many more layers. “You say that like you thinkI’mhurting.”
“Well, yeah, I mean…”
“I’m not the one who died. And for the record? I don’t like people thinking they can see into my head.” He tossed her the helmet, and she scrambled to catch it. “Randolph can wait. We need to get to your sister before they do.”
“You think someone will go after Kimberly? And which ‘they’?”
But he’d already put on his helmet and started the bike.
