All the lies. All the lies. Everything.
Malcolm may have doubts about Mom’s guilt, but for the first time, I’m no longer sure of her innocence.
I don’t push him away when he moves so that our shoulders are touching. The proximity to another person calms him instantly, whereas I feel like every part of me is fraying, splitting, disintegrating.
“We need to get out of here,” he says.
I don’t answer.
“Did you see anything when they brought us in?”
More silence from me.
“Katelyn? Come on. You can’t shut down now.”
But I can. I sink to the ground, and Malcolm has no choice but to follow me.
“No, no, no, no,” he whispers. “You still want answers, right? You still want to know what happened. You’ve got the sonogram and this”—I flinch when his fingers brush my neck and he lifts my necklace from inside my shirt—“which prove that the ‘infatuated teenager’ who supposedly turned homicidal when she was rejected never existed. At the very least, there was a lot more involved with your mom than the Abbotts let on. He was planning to marry her.”
There’s something strange about the way Malcolm says that last part, something I would have pounced on even a few hours ago, but now I ignore it. “She lied about everything and now you believe her?” I say. “Or not even her. She’s not the one standing here proclaiming her innocence. She left me, promised I’d be safe, and never came back. Maybe the truth is that she’s running, even from me, because sheisguilty.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know what I believe.” It hurts so much to say that, because it’s true.
“No,” Malcolm says. “I’m notaskingyou if you believe that. I’m telling you. Do you even know what you’ve done since she left? You outran a trained hunter. You basically took me hostage and extorted every dime I have to my name to get where you needed to go. You blackmailed me into sneaking you inside a surveilled building. Yeah, we got caught and locked up, but you wouldn’t have done any of that if you thought for a moment your mom was a killer. And even though it’s probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done to bring this up again, I watched you two together before any of this started. I’ve never seen love like that. Not with me and my dad. Not even with me and my gran, because she’s always still afraid that…well, that I’ll do something like I did with this job. Your mom didn’t have that with you. She lied about a lot of stuff, but not about loving you. And you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?”
I think about Mom wriggling out of her Spanx as we laughed over her terrible first date, the one she’d gone on not because she wanted to, but because I’d asked her to try. I think about the fear in her face when we ran from our house, when she tended my injured head at the motel, when she had to leave me there. She’d been afraid for me, not for herself—not because her past had finally caught up with her, but because it had caught up with me.
I think about hiking instead of going to Disneyland, about the survival “games” she taught me, like locating possible exits in every building we entered instead of playing Candy Land or Guess Who? like other kids. I think of the miles we ran together every morning—even when it was raining, even when I didn’t want to.
Because she knew that one day I might have to run, and hide, and escape.
“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” I say. “Tomorrow, I’m turning eighteen, not seventeen. Tomorrow, I’ll be a legal adult.” My heart pounds harder with every word. “She told me that when the time was right, she would be the one to pay for her mistake, not me. I think I know what she meant. Tomorrow’s the day her actions, past, present, or future, stop blowing back on me.”
Malcolm swears, and not quietly.
“Is she turning herself in?” I ask.
“I obviously don’t know her like you do, but I don’t thinkso.”
“Because you don’t think she did it?”
“Do you?”
I hesitate. “I know she loves me. That’s enough for now. And I know I’ve got to find her before she does something that will take her away from me for the rest of her life.”
Malcolm squeezes my hand and pulls us both to our feet. “If you can use all the stuff your mom taught you to get us out of here, I swear I can find her. But, you know, keep talking, okay? I’m trying to keep it cool here, but it’s like I can feel the walls and ceiling closing in.” I know he’s not faking the tremor that shudders through him.
“The man who brought me here said an investigator is coming to question me. How long do you think we have?”
He doesn’t answer, and my pulse skips.
“Malcolm, we can’t be here when he gets here.”
“Then how do we get out?”
I close my eyes even though I can see nothing with them open. I envision the room in the brief time I saw it before the door was shut. There was a futon and a small wooden chair with spindle legs. No windows. I tilt my head back, opening my eyes to no avail, trying to remember if there was anything beyond the bulb hanging above. I find the switch right away, but flipping it does nothing. I turn away from Malcolm and have to ignore the sound of protest he makes when I start shuffling forward. When my shins bang into the side of the futon, I scramble on top, standing with my free hand stretched to the ceiling while the other is being squeezed way too tightly by Malcolm.
