“She was killed, wasn’t she?” He pauses. “Was she killed by your father?”
His accuracy makes Nomi’s hackles rise immediately. “Why do you say that?”
“You said your mother died. You said you escaped your father’s religious community when you were a child. You refuse to use his surname.”
Now she does feel herself stiffen. “So you’re going to psychoanalyze me about it?”
He sighs, shoves at his hair. “Nomi, I don’t even understand the contents of my own head—I’m hardly qualified to examine the contents of someone else’s.” He squints. “But cutting yourself ... Where’s the benefit in it? Do you get a high from it?”
She’s not answering that. “I feel better afterward—calmer, more focused. You’re a cutter, too, you should understand.”
“I cut different things.”
“Apparently so.” Her voice is dry.
But now he’s thought about it, his eyes narrow. “And I take a lot of Vicodin.”
“Well, I have a lot of scars. So we both have something we need to deal with.” She glances away, back. “You just have this ... other something.”
“The other something—right.” He rubs his face with both hands. “Jesus Christ. I feel sick. So now what? Are you going to turn me in?”
As Irma would say, that’s the million-dollar question.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out.” Nomi leans and puts her own beer on the table. “You’ve done some helpful things. And apart from wailing on Claude Ameche, and a little light breaking and entering, you’ve been mostly law abiding.”
“But you don’t trust me.”
How can he evensaythat? She wants to laugh, but this is his life, and her safety, and neither of those things is actually funny. Not to mention that there’s so much other shit going on—an abducted girl she needs to find, mafia on her doorstep, local cops determined to make her life miserable. Taken in context, his statement is almost like parody. Once again, she’s acutely aware that she can’t read him, doesn’t know him. That he’s not the person she was starting to find tolerable, companionable even.
“Simon, you literally just broke into my apartment. On Tuesday, I saw you stab a guy. And I barelyknowyou—you introduced yourself to me on the stairs out there just last week.” She waves toward the world beyond her door, trying to make him see sense, before gesturing back at herself. “I mean, do you trustme? I’m a fucked-up ex-cop, making a living investigating the most sordid shit imaginable—”
“And you don’t trust anybody,” he says flatly. “Let alone an amnesiac serial killer.”
“Can youblameme?” She stands abruptly, grabs their bottles and takes them to the kitchen to dump them on the benchtop, buckles her belt over the wound dressing on her stomach.
This whole thing feels bizarrely unfair—she’s uncovered all these horrifying details about Simon Noone’s life; now she’s supposed to make a call on it? Condemn a guy to life in prison, when he can’t remember anything about his existence before his catastrophic head injury? She didn’t sign up to be judge and jury.
But the uncertainty is pressing on her. Is he safe to leave in the community? She knows about his past, but how much does she understand about his state of mind now? If his behavior at Big Mouthis any indication, that switch inside him can flip with very little provocation.
And on a purely selfish note, what’s been biting her all day is how she’s back to going solo. Part of her feels resigned, because that’s the way it’s supposed to be, but another part of her smarts. This isn’t his fault; it’s her own fault for letting her guard down. She still feels weirdly ripped off.
Her new wound chafes under the belt buckle; she presses a hand over the dressing as she turns to face him. “Look, when I first agreed to help you, you said you were hoping to find a way to make both halves of you join up.”
His expression is arid. “Well, obviously that’s not what I’m hopingnow—”
“I kept my side of the bargain. I helped you figure out who you are.”
“Do you think I’m dangerous?” he asks.
For god’s sake.“What kind of fucking stupid question is that?”
Now his eyes are electric. “I think it’s a very pertinent question, so I’ll ask it again—do you think I’m dangerous?”
“Yes!” Her hands are fisted by her sides, and she’s yelled the word. Now it echoes in the room around them. Simon’s face is tight, but she can’t put her reply back in her throat, shouldn’t feel like she wants to. “Maybe not consciously—I don’t know. But you have all these violent skills. You have no guardrails. And so far as I can see, you don’t have any control over which fragments of your old life come back—”
“So now you’re going to educate me on self-control.” He glances toward her yellow kit bag as he stands up stiffly from the lounge chair.
“Fuck. You.” The temptation to throw a bottle at him is almost overwhelming. “It’snot my job, by the way, to help you figure out how to keep this serial-killer side of you on a leash. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have enough problems of my own.”
