I stood across from the glass, but all I saw was my face in the reflection. My hair that was falling in a mess past my shoulders. A girl disappearing in a too-large shirt, with too-wide eyes staring back.
Ryan’s reflection appeared behind me, and I felt his hands move to my arms. “Hey,” he said. “I got you.”
His eyes met mine in the window reflection, and I sank back into his chest, let him wrap his arms around me, felt his breath on the side of my face, his fingers trailing down my arms.
I shivered, and he stepped back.
“Sorry,” he said. He took another step, cleared his throat. “I’m gonna watch some TV. Over there. On the other side of the room. And you can take the bed. And try to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “I can’t close my eyes.”
“You can,” he said. “I’ll be right there. Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody.”
I wasn’t sure whether I should take that as a comfort or not.
—
In my dream, I saw his face. The shape of his mouth, his eyes, the way he looked straight into me. In my dream, like in reality, I knew exactly who he was. The poison in his voice, my name dripping from his lips.
He was the mirror from which I came.
I woke gasping for breath. There was a hand on my arm, and I jerked back.
“Hey, hey,” Ryan said, hands held up. “You were having a nightmare.”
I stared at the walls, the shadowed corners. The dark window, the sloped ceiling, trying to orient myself. You are sleeping in Ryan Baker’s bed, because you have nowhere else to go.
“You’re safe,” he said. “We’re safe.”
I stared into his eyes, trying to latch on to his compassion. But I felt a tear roll down my cheek, and he pulled me closer. The nightmare existed whether I was sleeping or awake. My mother was gone, and I was alone.
No gates or bars or alarms would change it. No words or promises.
He repeated the words “We’re safe” until I felt them in my head and in my body, but what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t know, was that the words weren’t real. It was a temporary sentiment. All pretend. Nothing more than a beautiful illusion.
I woke before Ryan, who was sprawled on the bed beside me. I wasn’t sure exactly how that happened, or what that meant, but he was here, and I was okay, and the world kept turning, despite the fact that my life would never be the same.
The first thing I thought was: My mother. But what could I do, except wait to hear? Who could I call, and where could I look? I had never felt so helpless—not when I was trapped in the safe room, and not when I was hanging over the edge of the cliff in my car.
There was a bird on a branch outside the window, and it quickly took flight—a beating of wings in the crisp air. My body shuddered as it disappeared from view.
I stared out the window, the glass cold against my bare hands, and wondered if anyone was out there. If they knew where I was. If they were watching me back. From Ryan’s window, I had a good view down the driveway, and I could see the top of a house somewhere next door, but much of the yard was hidden in trees.
Surely the fact that nobody had come for me in the middle of the night was a good sign. Surely there would be answers today. Jan would know what to do and would convince the police how to find my mother, and we would be okay. We would be okay.
An alarm began faintly buzzing beside the bed, and Ryan stirred beside me. I felt my face heating up as he reached an arm over to the bedside table to hit the clock. He was slow to wake, which surprised me, based on how much energy he seemed to have in class and at the Lodge.
He rolled over, grabbed a pillow, placed it over his head and moaned. Then he froze. He slowly lowered the pillow and tilted his head to my side, staring directly at me. “Hey,” he said.
“Hi.”
I decided Ryan-in-the-morning was my new favorite kind of Ryan. Vulnerable and unsure, a small smile as he reached a hand over to mine, on top of his comforter.
We heard a noise downstairs, and my first thought was, Them. They’re here. They’ve found me. I searched for alternate exit strategies: the bathroom, the phone, this window—
But Ryan cursed, bolted out of bed, and was running toward the stairs.
I heard the door at the bottom open just as a woman’s voice said, “Oh, I was just coming to see if you wanted breakfast before school.”
School. As if I could do something that normal. As if my life would ever be that simple again.
“I’m not feeling so hot,” Ryan said. “I was coming down to tell you.”
“Okay,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if…Well, I’ll be home after dropping Jay at school, so if you need anything…”
When I heard the door for the garage close, I crept out of bed and checked my phone, but nothing. Nothing from the police, or Jan. No news of my mother.
Ryan stood just at the entrance to his room. He didn’t come any closer. “You can go ahead and use the shower,” he said. “She’s taking my brother to the middle school. She’ll be gone for a while.”
“Okay.”
I was standing in Ryan Baker’s bedroom in his T-shirt and nothing else, and he was looking at me like…
“Hey, Ryan?”
“Yes, Kelsey?”
“I’m not going to break.”
“I know you’re not,” he said.
“So you can stop looking at me like I might.”
“That is definitely not why I’m looking at you.” He gave me that same small morning smile, and continued, “You’re in my clothes and you’re in my room and I’m thinking, Don’t be a dick, Ryan, she’s having the absolute worst day of her life and this isn’t the best time to tell her you like the way she looks in your clothes, in your room.”
My face heated up. “You’re thinking all of that?”
“I am.”
“Oh.” Oh. “Well, I’m thinking, You’re standing in Ryan Baker’s room, wearing Ryan Baker’s clothes, and you really shouldn’t be thinking about anything other than the fact that your life has gone to shit and you don’t know where your mother is, but Ryan is there and he’s making it better.”
He tilted his head, took a step closer. “You’re thinking all of that?” he asked.
“I am.”
“I’m thinking I want to kiss you now,” and I was nodding, but he was already walking toward me, and he backed us straight through the bathroom doorway until I was pressed against the sink, with both his hands cupped around the base of my neck, his fingers stretching up into my hair. And then he used one arm to help lift me onto the counter, his palm lingering where the fabric of the shirt met my bare leg, his hand circling the outside of my thigh.
“Oh,” I said when he pulled back.
“Oh,” he said, and then he kissed me again.
And then the buzzing of my phone on the table slammed me back to reality, his hands slipping, the distance growing as I skirted past him for the cell: Jan.
“Hello?” I picked up, my hand over my heart, my pulse already too fast.
“Kelsey, where are you? Emma said you’re not at home.”
“I sent you a message last night. I’m at a friend’s. Is Cole okay?”
“What? Yes, Cole will be okay. We’re on our way home with him as soon as the paperwork goes through. The police just called to let me know we’ve been cleared to go back into your house to pick up what you need.”
“Thanks, Jan.”
“Kelsey, come back,” she said. “We need to talk.”
I hung up the phone.
Ryan looked at me from the doorway of the bathroom.
“That was Jan. Still no word on my mom. But I can get back in the house.”
“I’ll take you,” he said. Then he grinned. “I’m just gonna take a nice, cold shower first.”
—
There was a police cruiser at the start of my driveway, blocking it off to traffic. And there were two other cars—no, reporter vans—hovering around outside.
/> “Oh God,” I said.
“Yeah.” Ryan reached out and grabbed my hand as he rolled down the window.
The police officer asked for our IDs, and Ryan held out his driver’s license. The cop looked from him to me.
“I left it in the house,” I said. And then I pointed for emphasis. “That one.”
He looked closely from me to Ryan and waved us through. I wondered if they had men stationed outside Annika’s place, too.
I tried calling Annika as Ryan navigated the driveway, but her cell went straight to voice mail. I sent her a text, in case she was grounded and couldn’t keep her phone on. Just checking in, I wrote. You okay?
There was another cruiser at the end of the driveway, and we parked behind it. The black iron gates were ajar, the light overhead still out, the system still down. Even the front door remained unlocked. The house smelled faintly of smoke, of chemical reaction, and there was a fine haze clinging to the walls, like we were inside a dream.
Everything served as a reminder: the pan on the stovetop; the curtains pulled back, revealing the bullet hole; batteries scattered on the kitchen counter. I saw shadows in my peripheral vision, something that didn’t belong, but when I turned to look, they disappeared.
There was nothing familiar about this house anymore. Nothing safe, everything ruined.
I walked down the hall toward my room, seeing everything anew, as an outsider might. Bars over windows, thick, tinted glass, cameras pointing at the outside, and a basement full of chemicals.
This was the home of someone mentally unstable. Someone who needed to agree to weekly visits with Jan in order to keep custody of her child. A person who was unpredictable. Someone the police could not begin to understand. I felt her slipping even further away.
Someone else had been through my room, my desk, and everything felt tainted and wrong. I pulled open the dresser drawers and threw piles of my clothes onto the bed. Ryan got a garbage bag from the kitchen, and he held it open as I randomly tossed clothes and toiletries and a toothbrush inside. And then I thought of the basement, the money, the passports. The things that were hidden—and that should be kept hidden. The police wouldn’t understand them—they couldn’t—if they didn’t understand my mother.
“Will you wait up here for me?” I asked.
“I can come with you,” he said.
But I shook my head. “I’ll just be a second.”
He didn’t argue, but he stood in the foyer with the garbage bag beside him, looking at that family picture again, of me and my mother with the light streaming through behind us, big smiles. Perfectly normal.
The stairwell was dark. The main power hadn’t been turned back on, but the generator was still running, and the battery-powered lights were still set up in the corner. The boxes that Ryan and I had searched through were still open and scattered haphazardly, in disarray. The door to the safe room was now open as well, and darkness beckoned. I stayed near the entrance, saw the shelves pushed back to their upright positions, the boxes and supplies now stacked into some semblance of order. The hole in the floor that we’d escaped through. And the darker spot on the floor, where Cole had bled and kept bleeding, until we’d found a way out.
I pushed a box aside with my toe, crouched down to search for the plastic envelopes, then heard footsteps on the stairs. “I’m almost done,” I called.
I looked over my shoulder, but it wasn’t Ryan. It was that other officer from yesterday—Detective Conrad, I thought—and he held the plastic envelopes in his hand. “Looking for something?” he asked.
He no longer looked at me as if I was the victim, with an expression full of sympathy and compassion. Something had shifted.
I was never supposed to give out the code, because it wasn’t safe. Careful. I was supposed to be careful. I was supposed to keep things hidden—and this, I now understood, was one of those things.
I was in the basement again, and I was trapped. I felt the walls closing in, his voice echoing against the walls as he gestured for me to follow him back upstairs.
This too was an ambush of sorts. And I could already tell—it was going to hurt.
—
“That’s not yours,” I said. I stood in the kitchen across the island from him, the envelopes on the counter between us.
“I know that. Is it yours? Why were you downstairs looking for it?”
“It’s my mother’s,” I said. “And it’s not safe just sitting here in a house with no locks.”
He drummed his fingers on one of the envelopes. “This is a lot of money,” he said.
Ryan stood beside me, joined by a second officer, this one in uniform. “She didn’t trust anyone, let alone online banks,” he said, repeating what I had told him earlier. Believing me.
“Who is she, Kelsey?” Detective Conrad asked.
“Excuse me?”
He pressed his lips together. “We want to talk to you some more about your mother.” He slid the fake passport across the table, opened to the familiar photo. The one with my mother, and the wrong name, and I knew he had me.
“Call Jan,” Ryan said, his body tensing beside me.
“You’re not in any trouble. We’re trying to find her,” Conrad said.
“Someone took her,” I said. “I don’t know why she has this. Until yesterday, I’d never seen it before. But I know she was terrified, and she was ready to run if they found her again.” My hand lingered over the picture, the image seared into my mind. “That must be why.”
“If who found her again?” the second cop asked.
“Whoever took her the first time! She was kidnapped when she was a teenager. Maybe you remember it? Amanda Silviano?”
Detective Conrad narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, wait, wasn’t that the one where everyone suspected the dad, and then he killed himself, and then she reappeared?”
The horror of her entire life reduced to a single sentence. “That’s the one,” I said.
“Was it ever solved?”
“No,” I said.
“Wow,” the uniformed officer said. “So that’s why she’s living like this? She was terrified it would happen again?”
“It did happen again!”
There was a long pause, and they looked at each other in the gap. Detective Conrad lowered his voice, going for calm and compassionate once more. “We’ve spoken to Jan. We know that your mother has been living with this fear. We know she brought you up like this. This was what you’ve been raised to see, Kelsey.”
I shook my head, eyes wide, disbelieving. “There were men here, and she’s gone.”
He nodded. “She turned off the alarm, isn’t that right? All signs of forced entry happened after, correct? That’s what you told us yesterday. I think we need to consider the possibility that she left willingly.”
“She couldn’t,” I said. “There’s no way.”
“But she had passports. She was planning to one day.”
Or she was hoping to, and she couldn’t.
“Listen, we’ll be in contact with the cops from Atlanta,” the officer said. “See if we can’t dig anything else up. But it’s an old case, Kelsey. I’m not holding my breath.”
“Oh, one more thing,” the detective said. He tapped the envelopes on the table. “Where’d she get the money?”
“Inheritance,” I said.
“From who?”
“Her father?”
That pause again, and my heart sank. The men shared a look before the officer spoke, and I realized they already knew. They knew my mother’s story. They knew before I got here and told them. “I remember that case,” the officer said. “It bled him dry before he killed himself, isn’t that right?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t know, I wasn’t alive.”
My feet itched to move, to leave. I didn’t like where this was going. Everything about this conversation whispering Wrong.
“So let me ask you again,” the detective said. “Where’d she get the money?”
&n
bsp; “She works. From home. She does bookkeeping, you know.”
He looked around the house. “Pretty nice setup you’ve got going on here. How much do you think it costs to set something like this place up?”
I didn’t answer. I had no idea. But they didn’t seem to care. It was as if they were playing a part, and were working themselves up to something.
The detective turned to the officer. “What do you think?”
The officer whistled. “A lot,” he said. “A lot of money.”
“Is it possible she stole it?” Detective Conrad asked. He was looking at the officer, but he was really asking me.
“Kelsey,” Ryan warned. “Let’s go.”
“We’d like you to come down to the station, talk some more. But first, did you know about this?” Detective Conrad slid the other passport open in front of me, and I heard Ryan suck in a breath.
It was my face. With a name that was not mine.
I closed my eyes, willing it to disappear.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know. I swear.”
Me, but not me.
Ryan’s face was caught between surprise and something more. He was scared of me, that girl in the picture that he didn’t know.
And how could I explain? I was scared of that girl, too.
Ryan picked up the bag, and I stumbled after him. I was disappearing, my life in a plastic garbage bag, and the woman I thought I knew better than anyone was shifting before my eyes.
—
Ryan stopped just outside his car. He threw the bag into the backseat, had his hands on the hood of the car, leaning forward. He took a deep breath, turned around. “Who is she, Kelsey?”
I took a step back. Because he was staring at me like he was asking something more—not just who she was, but who I was.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. I shook my head, fighting back the tears. “I don’t know how she got the money, or what she was hiding from, or why there are passports…or why Cole says she remembers what happened. And I don’t know where she is. But I know, I know she’s not okay.”
“Okay,” he said, and his hands hovered between us, like he was debating. No, like he was waiting for a sign from me. I stepped forward, and he pulled me toward him. And I tried to keep my word to him. That I would not break.
The Safest Lies Page 18