“Work with him? Honestly, I don’t know if I can right now.”
“It wasn’t just him. I fucked up too.”
“But not as bad.”
“No, not as bad.”
He pulls out his phone, sending a text. A minute later, he gets a reply. “They won’t be back in time.”
“We need to start to fix this. If we stand a chance of getting out of this mess, we’ll have to work together.”
Pushing off his bed, he moves to his chair, pulling himself to his monitors, his jaw tight. “That might be true. But not yet. I can’t forgive him yet. And you shouldn’t either.”
I flop back onto his bed, just like I had on my own. “I’m not even angry. It’s like the ice took all my fire. There’s none left.”
“All the more reason to protect yourself.”
“But I still care. I don’t know how not to.”
He works for a while and I puzzle out a bit of my code in my head, wondering if cursive Spanish backwards with pig Latin style sentence formations might work for some of it.
“It’s not that you shouldn’t care, Clara. Only you can decide what feels right to you. But, in my book, what happened is unforgivable. And if he wants anything like forgiveness from me, he’s going to have to earn it. And it will not be quick.”
“What if we can’t get out of this?” I ask, needing his perspective.
“Then I’m stealing you away before you’re tied to him forever.”
A weary smile flits across my face. “And if that doesn’t work?”
“Then you’re married to a guy who almost killed you. And that’s not okay. Not by a long shot.”
The sound of his keyboard picks back up, and I’m curious about what he’s working on. But there are too many thoughts in my head to focus on anything else.
“When he proposed, it felt real.”
The tip-taps stop for a moment, then return with a sharp bite to them.
“He’s a mess Clara. More than the rest of us. But he cares for you. Even if he’s not safe.”
“I know.”
Eventually, my curiosity has me sliding off his bed and sneaking into his lap.
“What are you working on?”
“Evie’s stalker. I can’t fix yours, but maybe I can find hers.”
“How long has she been dealing with him?”
“Almost six years.”
“That’s too long.”
“Yeah. It is.”
I watch him digging, pulling up social media profiles from people neither of us will ever know, checking people off ona master list of yearbook photos and names, a database of graduates of a small-town high school.
“How can she be in a band and still be invisible to this guy?”
