The gears in his mind rattled and churned. He had to find a place to stop.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
Evelyn didn’t turn his way, didn’t even move.
He continued. “Why don’t we grab a bite to eat, and we can—”
“You’ve been dishonest.” The word came out in a slur:dish honest.
Every hair on Reed’s body rose. He kept his eyes on the road. “Why would you say that?”
“Do you think I’m an unintelligent person, Adrian? Do you consider me stupid?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Your actions lead me to believe otherwise.”
He looked at her. She sat stiff, her shoulders straight, her hair piled on top of her head in a tangled mess that made her appear like she’d just rolled out of bed. Her eyes were pink and wet.
“Livy,” Reed said, using her pet name—a tool he often employed when he needed her to soften. “You show up out of the blue when I think you’re away, and then you sit there without saying a word while I drive. And now this. Will you please tell me what’s going on?Whatever it is, we can talk it out.”
She tilted her head toward her lap, her chin clicking lower in a stilted, almost animatronic way. “I did well in my classes growing up. Math, science, geography. It didn’t matter how hard the subject was. There were rules to follow. Patterns. I could always figure them out, even when the other children couldn’t. They asked me for the answers, and I helped them. Then they mocked me. They imitated the way I spoke. They pretended to be robots. For a significant portion of elementary school, I thought it was a compliment. I thought they did it because they wanted to be like me. For an intelligent person, I was quite stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” Reed said. “Not at all.”
“Yes, I was. In middle school, I let two girls cut my hair. They were popular. They told me a new hairstyle would help me fit in. When I let them do it, they chopped most of it off. Then they attempted to shave my head with a pair of electric clippers. I ran home in tears. I looked incredibly foolish. I wanted to die after that. I tried.”
She tried? What did that mean?His stomach lurched. “That’s … horrible.”
“Correct. It was. And it continued into high school. No matter what I did, or how kind I was to my peers, they continued to torment me. During my sophomore year, a girl stole my clothes from the locker room while I showered. A girl I’d thought was my friend. All I had was a towel. More girls were waiting for me when I came into the hall, and one of them snatched that, too. Then they laughed. They called me Naked Nash.” Her tone went high and biting. “‘Here comes Naked Nash!’ ‘Watch out, everyone, Naked Nash is on the loose!’ Every day, they called me that, day after day after day, until I cried so hard my father withdrew me from school.”
She blinked and shook her head, her lower lip trembling.
“He told me it was for my protection. And perhaps it was to an extent. But his actions weren’t congruent with protection. He rarelytook me out in public. He didn’t take photos with me, or videos. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it does now. He didn’t want to be seen with me. He had a legacy to protect, and I was an embarrassment.”
“He loves you,” Reed said, stunned at her interpretation. “There’s no way he—”
“Do not interrupt me, Adrian!” Evelyn’s voice cut through him like a sheet of ice. “Iknowhe loves me. And I’m answering your question. I’m telling you what’s going on.”
A weight formed in Reed’s gut. He returned his gaze to the road.
“As I grew, I came to realize I was different. And people don’t like people who are different. They like people who are the same as them. It made sense to me. I understood then I was meant to be alone. It took me some time to accept that, but I did. And I was fine with it until you came along and changed my mind.”
The weight in Reed’s gut swelled and expanded until it felt like his skin would rip. He tried to say something, to assure her everything was fine, to tell her he didn’t know where this was coming from, but when he opened his mouth to speak, all that came out was a slow stream of air.
Evelyn turned her expressionless face toward him, her eyes drilling straight through his skull. “You wanted to see some countryside, did you? In this weather?”
Reed’s mouth went dry. The blanket of fog surrounding them was growing thicker by the second. At this point, he had no clue where they were, only that they were rolling down some random country road with his heart beating so fast he thought it might explode.
“How long have you been planning to misappropriate my money?”
Reed was right. She knew—which meant he was in danger. But not from her so much as from whoever she’d told. Forget lunch. He needed to ditch her right now. And he needed to lose the BMW as soon as possible after that. Then he’d need to get the fuck out of town.No way he’d risk the airport at this point—too much attention—he’d need to take a bus.
“Why would you say something like that?” he asked, eyeing the road, looking for a spot to pull over. There weren’t any, and the fog was making it increasingly difficult to see.
“My money is gone, Adrian. All of it. I know it was you. I installed cameras in the condo. I saw you packing. I saw you retrieve your phone. Give it to me. I need to turn it over to my father.” Before he could stop her, she swiped the phone from the cup holder.
Reed nearly choked. He’d dumped his burner. This was his real phone full of all of his contacts. Packed with his personal information. He’d kept it hidden from Evelyn in a small hole he’d cut into the wall near their closet and covered with a blank wall plate until now. Until today.
