I can’t speak. I wish I could put him in his place with a snappy retort—as if someone like you could ever hurt me—but even that wouldn’t be true because right now I am hurting. A great weight presses on my chest. All I can do is stand here and hope I won’t break down in front of him.
How odd that the comment made by Darren, my disastrous whitewater rafting date, comes back now to haunt me.One day you’ll meet someone who won’t be cowed by your looks or your father.
Well, Ifinally met that someone.
“Let’s get through this,” Kane says now, his face tightly shuttered. “Then we’ll never have to see one another again. We can forget this ever happened.”
54
KANE
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I stalk out of the house and stop a short way down the driveway, drawing in measured breaths in an attempt to calm down. The late-afternoon air feels cool on my burning skin. So many emotions are charging through my chest I’m having trouble separating them. Anger. Longing. Desire. Bitterness. Fear. Guilt, most of all.
I think back to the words I hurled at Amy.I look at you, at your life, and I can’t stand you.There are grains of truth in that statement, but a big fat lie lurks there too. The lie rests in the fact that Amy is the first woman, since Mel, who lingers in my thoughts, who kickstarts my heart whenever I look at her, who stirs in me an insane and unwelcome desire to please her. Nolene never had that impact on me.
Whyher?Of all the women in the world, it has to be Amy, and I’m all kinds of stupid for falling for her.
I head back to the house, unable to shake the unsettling premonition I’ve opened up a door to something dark and dangerous, and now I can’t close it.
55
HEATHER
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Tuesday, July 20
[EXTRACT FROM HEATHER’S LOG NOTES]
The fifth day of dosing. When I enter room 220 and approach Turbo’s cage, he’s lying on his side, facing the door, not moving. My first thought is he died during the night. I open the cage door and touch him. He flinches and I breathe out a sigh of relief. Turbo is still alive. He didn’t die alone in the dark.
I stroke him as gently as I can, tears burning my throat when I see that the shine has gone out of his beautiful brown eyes. In his dull gaze is a question—why aren’t you doing something to help me?
And then his tail gives a feeble thump. With whatever strength he has left he wants to show me he’s still happy to see me. I feel like a traitor.
He looks so scared. He needs soft warm bedding to lie his aching body on. He needs medicine to ease the pain.
All I can offer him is more poison.
56
JUSTIN
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Tuesday, July 20
I’ve shut myself in my room, Chinese takeout and a sports drink keeping me company. My bodybuilding roommates have taken over the TV room, watching Schwarzenegger’sPumping Irondocumentary for the hundredth time. There’s no way I can stomach sitting through a repeat of Arnie’s rise to bodybuilding fame and deal with all the testosterone-charged worship in there.
My laptop pings. It’s the email I’m expecting from Heather. A glance at my watch shows it’s after seven. She must have typed up her log notes as soon as she arrived home from work.
I deliberately didn’t contact her today, worried that my interest in her is interfering with the job. Tomorrow though, I can’t put off meeting her at SolomiChem. I need to allay any suspicions Glen the Gaunt has regarding the whole boyfriend setup. Just thinking about the guy getting fresh with Heather has fury hemorrhaging inside me. If he tries anything with her, I’ll rearrange his face.
Realizing how hard I’m clenching the bottle, I relax my grip, shoving the anger aside.Focus. An assault charge won’t go down well with Kane right now.
I click on Heather’s email, reading what she’s written about Turbo and the other beagles in the chemopreventive study. As I take a sip of my drink, my laptop pings again. Another email from Heather. In the subject line, I read PRIMATE NECROPSY. She’s attached pics and a video. I outfitted her with the camera only yesterday and she’s making use of it already. Pride swells inside my chest.Good work.
