“You just never cared, did you?” That’s the truth. I don’t yell the words or spit them at him; I simply state the facts and let him do with them what he will.
“When I took this job, I didn’t care about your mom or justice or anything,” Malcolm says. “It was a challenge, that’s all. I wanted to see if I could do it—find her when so many others failed. She wasn’t real to me. It was like a game, one that I got paid to play.”
Something slimy twists up from my stomach. He has no excuse, none. He wasplayingwith my life, mine and Mom’s, and we lost. It’s little consolation that he lost too. In fact, it’s no consolation at all. It’s justice.
At least now I know.
He’s still talking, though, which baffles me. Why would he think I want to hear a single thing more from him?
“Do you know how long it took me to find you after you uploaded that pic?”
Yeah, I know exactly, tired or not: two hours from post to pursuit. The consequences of that foolish decision blaze over my face before searing deep in my chest.
“About six minutes,” he says.
The hot blood coursing through my cheeks chills.
“That’s how long it took my program to flag you, trace you, and RAT your laptop.”
“What? You did what?”
“I saw you through the camera when you opened your laptop and pretended to be doing your homework,” he says. “You were smiling, happy, and I—it wasn’t a game anymore. I was supposed to send the location to the investigator as soon as I found your mom, and then he would send whoever was closest to grab her. But the bounty hunter decided to cut out the competition as soon as he heard I’d been brought on, by setting up a camera in my house. He was at my door within ten minutes of your mom’s face filling my computer screen, which is nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds longer than it would have taken me to send her location to the investigator.” His voice shifts into something quieter, as though he’s reliving the memory. “I was having doubts from the minute I found out that you existed. Not about your mom, not then, but about you and how I might be destroying your life. I refused to give him your address, and I held out as long as I could. It was only a couple of hours, but…”
Two hours. That’s how long it took for Mom to get home and for us to run. If they’d gotten to us even five minutes sooner, we’d have never escaped in time.
“It’s still my fault, but I wasn’t depraved about you.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Nothing,” he says, raising a hand. “I just—I’m sorry. For everything.”
I’m thinking about him getting beaten. I’m thinking about him living in a pitch-black trunk for three days. But I’m also thinking of him watching me through my laptop, and searching for Mom without a care until he was forced to stare at me face to face. I’m thinking about Mom, wherever she is, separated from me because Malcolm did point the way.
And he’s asking me to be better than him, to view his life alongside mine. Because he grew a conscience at the eleventh hour.
I don’t know what to do with that. With any of it.
I look at the direction his voice came from. “I hate that you watched me. That you spied on me. You cannot understand what that feels like.”
“Katelyn, I—”
“No,” I say. It’s a guttural whispered word. “If you’d told me back at the motel, it would have been just one more part of what you did to me, but you lied. You waited until I started to trust you, to care about what happened to you.”
“I should have told you about watching you, okay? I was going to at the gas station before the cop came. Not because I thought you’d find out, but because I wanted you to know, even if you reacted just like this. I don’t know how else to tell you I’m sorry. I don’t even know what’s true anymore.” He’s talking faster now, and I can hear the panic laced though his voice. He’s moving a lot, twitching again, and I’m pretty sure his hands are still outstretched, searching for mine so that a simple touch can remind him he’s not alone in the blackness.
“Katelyn?” He trying but failing to whisper. “Katelyn!”
“They’re going to hear you,” I say. My voice is watery, and I hate that.
I tell myself it’s just to keep him quiet when I lift my arm and allow him to seize my hand with an audible sigh. His breathing has steadied when he starts talking again.
“I wasn’t sure before, about your mom’s guilt, but now, I honestly don’t know. If Derek is your father, then everything the Abbotts said about the night he died is a lie.”
All the thoughts that I’ve held at bay since finding my grandfather crash over me. My back is already resting against a wall, but I push harder against it, not caring that it causes pain to flare out from my bruised ribs. I tug my hand free from Malcolm’s and wrap my arms around my chest.
I won’t break in front of him. I won’t. But my lungs fill and empty in rapid succession, and I know it’s not sweat dripping down my cheeks. If Mom were here, I wouldn’t be falling apart like this. I’d be raging, yelling, having the biggest, loudest knock-down, drag-out fight of our lives, worse than the time I found spyware she’d installed on my phone. Worse than the time I spotted her car outside my friend April Lancaster’s house during my first-ever sleepover.
Every part of my life might be a lie. My name, my age, even my father. I double over at that last thought. When I think about my dad, I don’t conjure up a beach-blond young man with a perfectly white smile and a sailboat bearing his name. I think of a man with perpetual coffee breath and a bit of paunch who carried me up to bed when I fell asleep watching TV.
