“Um, one. I came out the day before I met you just to see how much space I needed for the U-Haul. Then the day we met and today.” She felt like she was confessing to a crime. A naughty girl in the principal’s office.
Rampage nodded. Said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
"I shouldn’t have come back." She pressed her palms flat on the island. "He texted me and said he'd forgotten to include the hardware bag with the squat rack. I thought—" She stopped. "I thought I was being paranoid when I got a bad feeling. I went back anyway."
"If I was your Daddy, we’d be having a discussion about safety and keeping secrets and being too independent.” He paused. "But you're not at fault for someone else’s actions, baby.”
Did he say what she thought he’d said? She chose to ignore it, for now. "I know that." She did know it, more or less, in the rational part of her brain. The other parts were running a different calculation. "I just keep thinking about what would have happened if Chloe hadn't answered."
"She did."
"But what if?—"
"Emily." His voice was quiet, but it landed with enough weight to stop her mid-sentence. She looked up at him. "You called. She answered. We got there. What didn't happen isn't something you need to carry."
She held his gaze for a moment.
The thing was, she believed him. Not because he said it gently or wrapped it in comfort because he hadn't done either, but because he said it like a fact, the same way you'd saythe road goes northorthe sun came up.Like the world he operated in ran on what was real and not on what might have been.
"Okay," she said.
He nodded. Pushed off the counter. "I'll show you upstairs."
The apartment was on the second floor. He took her to a door at the end of a hallway, and then into a space that was small but clean, deeply, almost aggressively clean, with a bed that had been made with military precision and a window that looked out over the back of the property. There was a couch, a desk and a large TV. It reminded her of a nice hotel room.
"Bathroom's through there," he said from the doorway. "There are toiletries under the sink and Nicole came up ahead of us and stocked it. You need anything, you knock on the door right next to yours. That's my apartment, I’ll be there all night. I was going to put you up in there but then Lucky reminded me that this guest room was empty right now and it’s right on the other side of the wall.”
Emily stood in the middle of the room. She was tired. No, that wasn’t right. She was exhausted. The bone-deep, wrung-out exhaustion of a body that had run on fear for several hours. Her feet hurt. She wanted to brush her teeth.
She also, suddenly and without warning, did not want him to leave.
She didn't say that.
"Thank you," she said instead. "For tonight. For coming."
He looked at her from the doorway. Something moved through his expression, something she couldn't read, not exactly, but it wasn't nothing.
"Get some sleep baby," he said.
Then the door closed, and she was alone.
Emily stood there for a moment. Looking at the door. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and called Chloe, and they talked, and after she hung up she brushed her teeth with a toothbrush that had been sitting under the sink in its unopened packaging, and she changed into the spare shirt Nicole had left outside the door. She lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
Her car had been tampered with.
Marcus Delling had known her car, known her name, had her number and presumably her general location, and God knows what else.
This wasn't a wrong place, wrong time situation.
She'd been chosen.
The thought sat on her chest like something with weight and teeth, and she breathed around it, in and out, and reached for Clover before remembering Clover was downstairs, and the absence of something soft to hold onto made the thought heavier.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. She pulled the blanket up closer to her chin. “Who is it?”
“It’s Da…” he cleared his throat. “It’s me, baby. Can I come in, just for a second?”
“S-s-ure.” She said. Did he start to say Daddy? Did she imagine that?
