He hadn’t dressed smartly, like she’d suggested. He was in the same uniform he had been wearing since that day she had climbed the fence at his survivalist compound in the woods. Worn denim shirt, worn jeans, worn boots. Tartan jacket, with fleece innards and about a thousand pockets. Hair a tousled, tangled, ragged mess, stubble and sort-of beard and mustache even more grizzled than usual.
He honestly looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, even though she knew he hadn’t. And he didn’t say hello, either. He just stayed exactly as he was, body shoved deep into a seat, paper folded over to the story he wanted to read. It wasn’t even a decent paper, either. It was just some weird local sort of thing, probably fullof stories about people found with a thousand raccoons living in their basement.
But of course it meant he didn’t have to speak.
Or even really acknowledge her when she went over their schedule for the day. She told him what his fake beloved was going to do, based on everything Daisy had stressed to her. And he just shrugged. “Fine,” he said at the end of her carefully prepared speech.
But he didn’tlookfine once they got to the makeshift greenroom in the town’s convention center—plastic-covered couches, musty smell, a sad table loaded with jugs of orange juice and some wilting sandwiches—and suddenly there she was.
The pretend love of his life.
All glowing and golden, like some upgraded version of Daisy. Hair thicker and more lustrous, clothes slicker and more stylish, smile coated in glossy red and so perfect it made Daisy want to press her Vaseline-glazed lips together.
And of course she was already acting the part to perfection. She called himdarlingon seeing him. Pulled him directly into an embrace, of the sort that Daisy had warned him would happen. She had told him that Louisa was going to act the part from moment one, in case anyone was watching too carefully. And he had agreed, definitively. She had even asked him twice, to make sure.
Yet nobody would have ever known it.
He seemed to go completely rigid the moment she made contact. As if she’d stabbed him in the gut, instead of putting her arms around him. And even after he’d managed to get ahold of himself, he didn’t seem able toreciprocate. In fact, it looked like he didn’t even know what reciprocationwas.
His arms stood out stiffly from under hers, like a human forklift. As if he was about to lift her body and deposit it onto a warehouse pallet. Then he seemed to realize that was weird, and sort of curled his hands in the rough direction of her back. But for some ungodly reason, they couldn’t seem to make contact.
They just hovered there, five inches away.
Two bizarre claws, vaguely groping the air.
If the events coordinator—Lesley with aY, she had informed them both as she swept them through a very glassy reception area to some very functional hallways—had been able to see what she could, it would have been curtains, unquestionably. And she could tell by his eyes that he knew it. They were filled with a sort of furious panic—aimed at her, and only her, over the shoulder of the woman he was supposed to be in love with.
Then, even more startling, he mouthed two words very distinctly.Help me. Like he hadn’t agreed. Like he hadn’t told her he could do it.You promised me it wouldn’t be a big deal, she thought at him, but it was too late for that now.
The only way out was through.
So she bustled up to them, and did her best to smooth things over.
“Oh, these two lovebirds,” she said, as she oh-so-subtly separated everybody. And it worked, too. Lesley beamed, revealing lipstick on her teeth, and Louisa beamed back, revealing nothing but perfect blinding whiteness, and Miller hid his horror behind a drink he suddenly needed.
But even that wasn’t enough.
Because about ten minutes before he was due to go onstage—just after shaking the hand of the moderator of his talk, a cutie patootie called Joan something or other in a T-shirt with a quote from one of his books across the front—he said he needed the bathroom. And she knew exactly what needing the bathroom meant.
It was the reason she followed him five seconds after he had fled. The reason he went left, when he was supposed to go right. The reason he stopped in the middle of cutting across the stage and turned to her as she barreled toward him, then held up his hands like someone under arrest.
Not guilty, your honor, she could almost hear him saying.
But hewasguilty, and not just of wandering off.
“You’re going to escape out of the window, aren’t you,” she said, voice full of as much fury as she could pack into a hushed whisper. Because itdidhave to be a hushed whisper, after all. A lighting guy was clanking around the gantry, just above their heads. Lesley with aYappeared to be standing just off stage, yammering instructions about something into her phone.
And of course there were those curtains.
The ones that stood closed, not three feet from them. Heavy and lush looking, but not really blocking out what obviously lay beyond. A crowd, it sounded like. A big crowd, already assembling to see him. She could hear the hum of their excitement, like a background soundtrack to whatever this was going to be.
Something ugly, she thought.
Just as he dipped his head to hoarsely whisper, “Well, what do you expect? Setting me up like this.”
“You knew exactly what was going to happen. I told you.”
“Nothing you said suggested she would look so—that she would be—”
