He hops backward, howling and crashing into the wall, where he leans and keeps making noise. Not down, but for now, out of the fight.
The two limpets locked onto my right arm stare at their friend in shock. All I have to do to shake them off is punch my left fist into the side of the first guy’s head, grab him by the hair, and introduce him to the point of my knee, which breaks his nose and sends him reeling back to fall in the corner.
One left. Nobody holding me back. I don’t feel pain right now. I feel a deep, almost sickening joy that I’m laying these guys out. And he can see it.
He holds up both hands and backs off.
I’m surprised that when I speak, my voice sounds pretty even. “Hey, fellas, let me ask you a question. Who put you up to this?”
The one with the broken nose tries to curse at me but breaks into a coughing fit that sprays blood. I wince, and also feel a savage rush of satisfaction.
Redbeard says, in a voice that sounds like he’s grinding rocks in the back of his throat, “Asshole.” He manages to give it the Tennessee twang even on two syllables. “Everybody knows you’re part of it.”
“Part of what?” I’m expecting it to be about this town, about Travis getting shot. But it isn’t.
“You’re Melvin Royal’s little errand boy,” he says. “Everybody knows that. You and her, together, helping him get those girls. You’re fucking dead.”
After he says it, I hear a white-noise buzz, like I’ve taken a blow to the head. I just look at him without any real comprehension. Then the sickness creeps in. Jesus Christ. I take a breath and let it out. I feel unsteady now. “Where did you hear this?”
“Bar,” says Redbeard.
The man still holding up his hands says, “Somebody said it on Facebook.”
I turn on him. “Who the hell said it?”
“Why?” The man whose nose is ruined spits blood and grins with pink teeth. “You gonna go fuck her up too?”
Her. My immediate, sickening thought is this comes directly from Miranda. This is the kind of thing she’d launch, pure propaganda with no truth in it at all. An accusation without backup, without merit, spreading fast . . . and one thing I know about people from deep personal experience: they’re happy to jump on the hate train if it makes them feel like fucking heroes.
I grab the uninjured man by the shoulder and say, “Show me.” He pulls out a surprisingly good cell phone and navigates with shaking fingers, then thrusts it toward me.
I read the post. It isn’t by Miranda. Or, at least, it doesn’t seem to be. It’s attributed to a woman who says her name is Doreen Anderson, and the picture is of a blonde, plump woman whose address is listed in Atlanta. Here’s Doreen at a bake sale with her kids. At a church social. Posing with two men, one of whom looks familiar to me, though I can’t immediately pinpoint why until I see the white panel van in the fuzzy background. They’re all beaming and giving the thumbs-up sign.
The circuit clicks. She’s part of the film crew. I check her employment details. She’s a bank clerk who’s been laid off, as so many have, by the advance of automated tellers. Current occupation is listed as “Documentarian.”
Her post strongly implies that I’m some acolyte of Melvin Royal’s, moving in with Gwen because we have that in common. But nothing is strong enough or directly stated enough to take to court, which I wouldn’t do anyway; it would only fan the flames. Lots of What if he and Maybe the two of them were kind of speculation. What passes for journalism in today’s world.
Tar sticks. If she meant to cause trouble, mission accomplished. And like Miranda told me: it’s just beginning.
I flip the phone back to the man, who fumbles and drops it. I hope the screen’s cracked. “You idiots spread the word at that bar you were talking about: you come for me, or for Gwen or our kids, and you won’t walk away next time. You’re lucky I didn’t kill all three of you. Now fuck off.”
“Faggot.” Redbeard spits at me. Misses, because my reflexes are still pretty good.
“Pretty pathetic that’s still your go-to insult, big man. That ligament’s fried, by the way. You’d better get it fixed if you ever want to walk without a limp.”
“My nose is broke,” the second man volunteers, like it’s not obvious. He doesn’t sound so much combative as sad. “It’s fuckin’ broke.”
I just nod. The three of them shuffle off around the corner, with the still-whole third man helping Redbeard hop along, and Broken Nose trying to stop the streaming blood with the sleeve of his denim jacket. Unsuccessfully. There’s a good chance they’ll go straight to the police and get my bail revoked, but I can’t help that. If the Wolfhunter police want to find me, nothing I can really do about it. At least I’ll cost Miranda her quarter of a million. That’s petty revenge, but hey. Revenge.
I’m starting to walk off toward the woods to find a place to piss when a white, boxy sedan I don’t recognize pulls into the motel parking lot; I don’t pay a lot of attention to it because I’m starting to feel the adrenaline wearing off and exhaustion setting in again, until it pulls in abruptly in front of me. I step back, reaching for a gun I don’t actually have anymore, and then I realize that Gwen’s driving the car. We look at each other for a long, telling moment, and then I glance into the back. The kids are inside. Quiet and subdued.
“Get in,” Gwen says. “Let’s get out of here.”
“There’s no place to go,” I tell her. “And we need to talk. Now.”
14
GWEN
Sam doesn’t look right. He seems pale, and tired, and deeply unhappy, lines on his face I haven’t seen before. I don’t know what he sees when he leans down to look at me through the open door of the car, but he gets in and slams it shut. I immediately start driving.
“Where are you going?” he asks me. He even sounds exhausted. Hasn’t slept, I’m sure. Like me, he’s worn thin with it.
“Away from all this bullshit and this damn town. Mike called me. He said you were out on bail and where to pick you up. Where is he?” Sam doesn’t answer. “Never mind. Let’s go home.”
“Home isn’t a refuge,” he says. “Stop the car.”
I haven’t pulled out of the motel parking lot yet, just made the turnaround. I pull the rental into a space. “What?” I have the feeling I’m not going to like this. At all.
He hesitates for a long moment, and then he says, “I don’t want the kids to hear this.”
“I’m pretty sure we need to,” my daughter says. “Enough with the secrets! We’re not babies.”
But they always will be to me; tiny little bundles of sweet, new skin and kicking feet and waving hands that need protection from the world. I feel breathless, because Sam wouldn’t have said that if it wasn’t serious. If it wasn’t something that would change everything.
But he takes Lanny at her word. He leans up against the passenger side door to look at me, and at them too.
Then he tells us the truth.
“Miranda Tidewell and I used to be close,” he says. “I lived with her for a while. Before you assume anything, it was just . . . I needed a place to stay, and she provided a room in her house. A guest room.”
“For how long?” I ask him.
“From the time I got back from deployment until I moved to Stillhouse Lake,” he says. “I told you that I went there thinking I’d prove that you had something to do with Melvin’s crimes. That was true. I just didn’t tell you that I had funding.”
“Funding,” I repeat. “From Miranda.”
“And I guess she’s finally realized she’s not getting value for her investment.”
I feel something catch inside me, sharp as a fishhook. He’s only ever talked about it as his own decision, not that it was any kind of shared secret. Shared with her. “She knew you were coming to Stillhouse Lake. To hurt me. Put me in prison if you could do that.”
“Yes.”
Connor says, “The woman on TV? That one? You lived with her?”
“I did.” His voice
breaks. He doesn’t want to admit this to Connor. “There’s more. I put together the Lost Angels group. It started with the two of us, then pulled in the families and friends of Melvin’s other victims. If we didn’t get everyone, we got close. It was meant to be a place to heal. But that’s not what it turned into.”
“Sam . . .” I know about the Lost Angels group. And I feel a crawling horror beneath my skin. “No. No.”
“I started it,” he says. “Miranda and I did that to you. God, Gwen . . .” I can see how long he’s carried this secret, and how much it hurts him. I can feel sorry for him even as he’s cutting my heart in two. “At first it was just talk, just internet bullshit to make ourselves feel better. Then . . . then I made the wanted posters. I found out where you were living after you changed your name.” He looks ill now. “We came back every day to put them up. For weeks. We tracked you.”
I want to throw up. I brace myself on the steering wheel. I remember how happy I was to get my kids back with me, how safe and warm our new refuge felt after my acquittal. We’d started over. I believed in the goodness and forgiveness of people then. I’d really thought we could move on without the stench of Melvin’s evil following us.
And then wanted posters with my picture went up around our neighborhood, accusing me of rape, torture, and murder. They were stuffed in our mailbox. They were nailed to our front door. To the doors of my kids’ school.
To hear that Sam did that . . . it burns something to ash inside me. He destroyed our safety. He pushed us to run for our lives, because after that first time it all went viral, beyond anyone’s control. Reddit went mad with speculation about how deep my involvement went in the murders and concluded that I was the mastermind. That Melvin was just my patsy.
We were relentlessly doxed from that point on. No safe spaces. The Lost Angels, and the army of rabid assholes who followed after them, began sending us more and more violent imagery and fantasies about our deaths.
I realize, with a horrible jolt, that Sam sent those too. He must have, in the beginning. It’s never stopped. Every day, the Sicko Patrol floods my in-box.
Sam is the real author of our misery.
I don’t even know how to process the depth of that betrayal, even if it was done before we ever really met.
There are tears in my eyes now, cold enough to freeze. It hurts. Everything hurts. How could you not tell me? How could you make me trust you? What kind of sick game are you playing now? I can barely feel my body. I’m sick enough to faint, but I don’t. I cling grimly to the world, this ugly, broken world, and I say, “You asked me to marry you. Did she tell you to do that? Marry me, then break me? Or maybe just kill . . .” I can’t continue; it hurts too much. My voice is shaking. I’m shaking. And I realize, Oh God, that I’ve not told the kids he proposed, that my children are witnesses and victims now, that I should have done as he asked and stepped out of the car to listen to this confession because this . . . this is going to destroy them. They trusted him.
I turn to look at them. Connor’s head is down, and I know that posture; he’s guarding himself against the pain. Lanny is staring at Sam, and there’s pure horror on her face.
It sharpens into rage. “You bastard,” she says. “You monster!” She’s quoting her father’s letter. You don’t know who he is, Gina. You don’t know what he’s capable of doing. I’m laughing at the thought that you only bring monsters into your bed. You deserve that.
Maybe I do. My children don’t.
Sam’s face has gone starkly pale now, his gaze still on me. “I came here to hurt you in the beginning, and yes, Miranda knew, but then things changed, they changed, and when I say I love you and I love these kids, I’m telling you nothing but the truth. I understand why you said no to me. I get it. But please. Please believe me.”
I hear the pain in his voice. I see it in his eyes, glittering with tears like the ones running down my cheeks. All this is said in quiet tones, but I want to scream and keep on screaming until the world stops. I’ve never imagined Sam as the kind of monster Melvin was until this moment, but now it’s all too clear. All too real.
Because he’s hurt us just as much.
“I don’t believe you,” I tell him. “Miranda just paid your bail. Didn’t she?”
He makes a sound like I’ve gutted him. For a moment he doesn’t move, except to bow his head. He just breathes. I wait. If he reaches out toward me, toward either of my children, I will grab that arm and break it. I will keep twisting, and he’ll bend forward and I’ll crush his throat with a hard, straight fist. The sequence is clear to me, but his face isn’t there when I try to imagine it. It’s just a blank space. Because right at this moment, I can’t fathom who the man sitting across from me really is.
He opens the car door and lunges out, like he can’t wait to get away from me. But then he staggers and has to lean against the car, on Lanny’s side. He doubles over and braces himself with palms on his thighs and gasps for air.
“Go,” Lanny says. “Just drive, Mom.” There are tears running down my daughter’s face. “I want to go home!”
I’ve failed them. Again. I don’t know how to ever make this right. “Okay,” I tell her. “We will.”
Before I can put the car in gear, Connor opens his door and gets out. I freeze because I don’t know what he’s doing until he walks around the car, faces Sam, and says, “Are you telling us the truth now? Everything? Are you sure?”
Sam nods. He’s still trembling and trying to breathe. I can’t imagine what my son is feeling, but I don’t want to stop him. I can’t.
“Mom!” Lanny hits the back of my seat with a hard fist. “Do something! Get him back in the car, and let’s go!”
“Connor!” He’s not listening to me. I climb out of the driver’s side. “Connor, get back in the car!”
But my son’s ignoring me—and Lanny, who’s going ballistic in the car. He’s watching Sam with steady focus.
Then he says, “I understand.” He’s not talking to me. He’s talking to Sam. “They’re mad. I’m mad too. But it’s easy for somebody to tell you what you need to hear. I listened to my . . . my father even when I knew better.” He swallows, and I can see how nervous he is. And how much it takes for him to do this. “We knew who you were before. It’s not different. It’s just . . . more.”
“Kid . . .” Sam hangs his head. “You should get back in the car. Your mom and sister want to go home.”
I want to say something, but I can’t. There’s something happening here, and it’s important.
Connor says, “You hated us once. Then you got better. I still believe you.”
It hurts. Everything’s in chaos inside me now, whirling edges of steel that cut and cut and cut. Connor’s a child, he’s just a child, he can’t understand. But in some ways, my son understands more than I ever will.
Sam lets out a tortured gasp, and he grabs my son into a hug so fierce it makes me ache. Connor hugs him back. And I know that look. I’ve felt it, all the way down. I know the loss and the fear and most of all, the love.
Sam loves my son.
He really does.
“Mom!” Lanny gets out of the car now. She’s pale and frightened and unsure what’s going on, and I put an arm around her and pull her close. “Mom, Connor can’t just . . . he can’t just forgive him.”
But she’s wrong, and I see it like a sudden flash of sunlight. There’s something beautiful in front of me. Something precious. Nobody earns this. But Sam deserves it.
“Lanny,” I say quietly. “Connor’s right.”
“Mom, we can’t trust him!”
I know that. There’s not a reason in the world to trust him except . . . except what he’s done since coming to us. At no point has he hurt us except when his past has come to light. At no point has he done anything but be my partner, protector, champion. That isn’t an act. It can’t be an act, because I am seeing the consequences right now, in real time, for being truthful. He knew this would happen. And he told us anyw
ay.
That’s brave. That’s the Sam I know.
Sam kisses my son on the top of the head and says, “I love you, Connor. Remember that, okay?”
Connor steps back. “You can’t leave.”
“But I have to,” Sam says. “Don’t I?”
Sam and I look at each other from opposite sides of the car. I catch my breath on another surge of real pain; I can see the heartbreak in him. The damage done.
“Sam,” I tell him, “get in the damn car.”
He blinks. I see the flash of hope, and then it’s gone. “Miranda . . .”
“You said she’d destroy us. Don’t let her.”
“It’s too late. Isn’t it?”
I honestly don’t know. “You can’t just . . . go. You don’t have money, or any way to get out of town. Unless Mike—”
“No,” he interrupts me. “Mike’s with her.”
I don’t know what to say. I’m not the only one who’s been betrayed today. He was already hurting. Now it’s worse. He’s as alone as he’s ever been, I think.
“You’re right. She did bail me out,” he says. “She and Mike gave me a choice. I chose you. I chose this.”
If he’s telling the truth, it’s the biggest thing that anyone has ever done for us. And despite the gulf between us, despite the pain of what he did that feels new and raw even if it’s years past now . . . I can’t ignore that.
Lanny whispers, “Mom? Mom, but . . . what he did . . .”
“It’s what he’s doing now that counts,” I tell her, and turn to look right at her. “Do you trust me?”
She nods. Unwillingly. There are tears glittering in her eyes. She’s confused and hurt. I understand that.
I turn back to Sam. When I speak again, my voice is gentler. “Please get in the goddamn car.”
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