“Oh, please!” she exclaims with a bitter curve at her mouth. “Until five minutes ago you thought my parents and my godparents were the criminal nutters and I was the good egg. But now you know I’m worse than them.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“You’re lying.”
I shake my head. “Why would I lie to you?”
“Because you think you can sway me to call your friend Adam.” She looks me in the eye. “Tell me it isn’t so.”
“I won’t, and I believe you’ll call him, eventually. My only fear is that, by the time you do, it’ll be too late for me.”
“Why would it be too late?” She gives me a puzzled look. “You’re on the mend.”
I release a weary sigh. “I live on borrowed time, Stella. We both know that.”
“No, we don’t! I told you my parents aren’t murderers. Neither are Lana and Bertrand. I’m the worst of the lot.” She grabs my hand. “But I’m on meds, and I haven’t had any episodes in six years. I won’t kill you!”
“I know you won’t.” I curl my lip. “But that’s just not good enough. You can do better than that.”
“If I let you go, you’ll come after my parents. You’ll want them to pay for what they did to you.”
OK, so she doesn’t trust me enough to keep my promise to not seek retaliation. It’s because she doesn’t know me well enough. A fixable problem if I had unlimited time.Unfortunately, I don’t.
“If you won’t help me, get out,” I say, frustration building, “and if you don’t think your parents will kill me, then how do you think this is going to end? Do you think they’ll keep me here until I die of old age? Is that OK with you?”
“No, of course not!”
“What, then?”
“I’ll find a way to free you without endangering my parents.”
Before I can stop myself, I grit out, “What aboutmyparents, Stella? What about my brother and sister? They’ve been grieving me for a month now, while I’m alive!”
Her head jerks backward. “You have parents?”
“Did you think I was like the creature inThe Shape of Water?”
She smiles sheepishly. “Sometimes I did wonder if you were a time traveler from the past… It’s just that you never mentioned your family until now.”
“You never asked.”
“My parents don’t intend to kill you,” she says with conviction. “They just need you to help find their lucky charm. If they meant to kill you, why would they tend to your wounds, keep you clean and fed?”
“Underfed,” I add. “You heard them—they want me to want to help them. They’re quite rational in their folly. And that is precisely why I don’t see a scenario where they let me leave in the end.”
She shakes her head but doesn’t contradict my statement. We spend a few minutes in silence. Then something she said earlier rolls to the fore of my mind.
“Lana and Bertrand are your godparents?”
“Yes, why?”
“That means you were baptized?”
She squints as if unsure of where I’m leading with my questions. “Yes, I was.”
“In a church?”
“Where else? Yes, in our church, while we still had a priest.” She squints at me. “You seem surprised.”
