“No, no, no,” I say, pushing the start button and pumping the brake over and over. “Why are you doing this? You’re a new car!”
Thunder roars outside as the rain turns angry. I grab myphone and start googling for everything I can think of.Car suddenly stopped working,Car lost power.
I’m just about to call roadside assistance when there’s a knock at my window.
Of all people, Bertram Casimir is standing outside in the rain, holding a sleek black umbrella that hardly shields him as the rain falls sideways. He gestures for me to get out, but I shake my head. He tries the handle and the doors are locked.
Did he do something to my car? I was with him all morning, but he could have hired someone to mess with the engine. Why, though? If he wanted me alone, he already had me there in his apartment. He’s the one who kicked me out.
He knocks on the window again, this time frantically. I shake my head. I’m not getting out. Not without knowing what his game is.
Seconds later, my phone rings. It’s him, holding his own phone pressed against his ear as he stands in the middle of the street.
“Margaux, goddamn it, you’re in danger,” he snarls at me. With his other hand he’s pounding on the glass so hard I think he’ll shatter it.
My heart is hammering, and I clutch at the hilt of the box cutter I keep in my pocket. If he tries anything, he may be stronger, but I know where the jugular is. “What are you talking about?” I demand into the phone.
“This is her doing, I know it.”
“Annie?”
“Yes—please. I’ll explain everything if you just come to my car where it’s safe.”
A pair of high beams floods my car as he says the words. There’s a car coming toward us, bright lights on and penetrating through the gloomy, cloudy day. It’s nobody important, I tell myself. Just someone trying to get a little visibility on their way home from the store. But it speeds through a stop sign, makes it to the end of the street, and then swings back around in a U-turn.
Muttering curses, I unlock my door and allow Bertram to rush me to the back seat of his car, and his driver speeds us away.
My wet hair is plastered to my face, and a bit of it slaps him in the face when I turn my head to look at him. “How did you know something would be wrong with my car?” I demand. “Did you have something to do with it?”
“N-no,” he says, more flustered than I’ve ever seen him. “I just had a terrible feeling, and with the weather, I—”
“Bad weather doesn’t make a car shut itself off!” I cry. “Bertram, what’s going on?”
The car is tailing us, and when I glance at the speedometer, we’re exceeding eighty miles per hour in a city grid, blowing through stop signs and swerving around the few cars that are out on the road in this weather.
“Don’t tell me this is your ex-girlfriend,” I say, turning in my seat to look at the black car with the tinted windows. It’s the same one that was in the hospital parking garage.
“I warned you to stay away from me!” he cries.
“Oh, not this again.” I grab his arm, my fingers digging tightly into his muscle. “Annie is dead, isn’t she? And this is all some sort of scare tactic to stop me from finding outabout it.” Being charming hasn’t worked. Being sweet, being romantic, and even being blunt. This has gone far enough, and it’s time to switch gears. “Admit it!”
The shock in his eyes is immediate. “What?” he rasps. “Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“Because Annie Clarke doesn’t exist, Bertram. I’ve looked. It’s the twenty-twenties;everyonehas some sort of social media profile. But there isn’t a trace, not even an embarrassing college Facebook photo from decades ago.”
Apart from the thunder and the splash of the car hitting the puddles as it speeds through the city, there’s silence. I crash into Bertram as we take a hard turn, and he steadies me.
“I never told you her last name,” he says softly.
“What? You must have.”
“No,” he says, with deliberation. “I know I didn’t.” He stares at me. “Oh God, she’s sent you, hasn’t she? That’s why she’s following me again, just when I thought she had finally eased up. Just when I thought I’d made my life so boring, stripped myself completely ofanypersonal relationships, made my lifenothingjust to get away from her, you’ve gone and brought her back.”
I’m so confused that I don’t know how to respond. He sounds so certain that I begin to wonder if he’s suffering from some kind of delusion. I’d almost think Annie Clarke didn’t exist at all, except that his own sister confirmed it when she asked me to look for her.
He pulls at his hair and then strikes out and hits his fist against the door. The sound of it makes me jump. “Why is this happening? I’m not the one who ended things. I lovedher!” I don’t know if he’s talking to me or to some painful old memory that keeps following him like an apparition. “After that day under the waterfall, I woke up the next morning and she had gone. Abandoned our whole vacation and flown home to her parents. They convinced her to go back to medical school, and she didn’t have the nerve to tell me, so she just left.”
I blink. “She’s the one who left you?”
