“I did, didn’t I?” If he was suggesting that I learned how to fire a gun, he was wrong. “But I’m not going to kill anyone.”
“Then you’ll get killed.” He took a black towel from his pocket and threw it at me. “Wipe yourself off. Go get the car. Drive it back here.”
I raised a brow. “While you wait here?”
“Would you rather wait with the body?”
Whatever.
I opted to go around the outside of the building. It was longer, but there would be fewer people. I couldn’t think straight. All I could do was find the car, and drive.
Grant put the man in the trunk and wrapped him in a tarp bound with bungee cords. Then he gestured at the wheel, and I scooted over to the other side.
If it had been any other time with Grant, I would have been used to the silence. The aching nothingness would have been familiar, knowing that Grant only said what he wanted. But with a dead man in the trunk, knowing that it could have been two of us back there, my patience was thin.
“So that was your hit?” I asked. He didn’t respond. “You’re still doing hits?”
“It was a favor,” he said.
“For who?” When he didn’t answer, I knew who it was. “You’d do anything for Zaid, huh? But not for me. You’re just like Heather.” I knew none of it made sense, but I couldn’t stop myself from rambling. I needed us to fight, to hate each other so the emotions battling inside of me would make sense. Why was it so shocking to see Grant kill someone, what I knew he had been trained to do exactly that? Why did I care? “You’ll leave me too, just like Heather,” I stammered. “And then I’ll be a memory you can forget.”
“Youleft your sister,” he yelled. My jaw dropped. He had actually raised his voice. His hands gripped the steering wheel. “Not the other way around. You’re the one choosing not to go to your sister’s wedding.”
“Because she’s marrying him. And you’re accepting it.”
“I want them to be happy,” he said, his voice stern. Then in a softer tone, he added, “Don’t you?”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted my sister to be happy, but I didn’t understand how she could love Zaid. It felt like a betrayal. Even if Zaid had protected Grant and his mother, it still hurt to know that Grant would choose Zaid over me. Like my sister would.
It never stopped feeling like they wanted me out of the way. I was a nuisance. A burden. Like Grant’s pretty words were lies to make me be more compliant. Because I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that he cared. That he needed me. But how could he be telling the truth when I had caused this entire mess? When we were here, drivingtogetherto get rid of a body, because I had let someone die? I shouldn’t have been alive.
Accident or not, that night with Dean had changed me forever.
“Maybe I should move in with Christine,” I said. She didn’t know about Dean, and none of this would matter to her. Even if I had to break my streak of trying to tell the truth with her, at least she would accept me. “Then you won’t have to deal with me anymore.”
I wanted him to say something. Anything. To tell me that I ought to go through with it. That I would be better off with her. Thathewould be better off without me. Because then I would know where we stood. It wouldn’t be this constant limbo of acceptance and abandonment.
But Grant didn’t say anything. He didn’t even sigh. He drove, his eyes concentrating on the road, taking us past Las Vegas, to the same area he had taken me weeks earlier. Where his step-father was buried.
This time, when he told me to stay in the car, I listened. Not because I wanted to. But because I didn’t want to watch him bury a body.
There was someone out there who wanted to do that to me too. It felt like it was all my fault.
