She vanished around the corner, and we were left standing there. I fixed my gaze on the contents of my cart, and John Wilder examined the crayons with the intensity of a man whose life might one day depend on knowing the difference between Crayola peach and salmon.
Then he said, “Mr. Smith, I?—”
“It’s Avery,” I told him.
“Um,” he said, still staring at the crayons. “I go by Wilder.”
“Your name is Wilder Wilder?” I asked like an idiot, because of fucking course it wasn’t. Iknewthat!
He shifted from foot to foot. “It’s John Wilder, but nobody calls me John. Anyways, I wanted to say, about the other night?—”
“We don’t have to talk about that,” I said. “Ever.”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding relieved. He still wasn’t looking at me, and his stubbled cheeks were pink. “Okay, yeah.”
How the fuck long did it take a clever and resourceful five-year-old to find a pack of googly eyes?
Wilder’s thoughts must have echoed mine because he said, “I should check on Gracie, make sure she found the eyes.”
“Right,” I said, nodding.
Wilder disappeared around the corner, and I grabbed the handle of my cart and steered it firmly in the opposite direction. My other craft supplies could wait.
The rest of the trip was like a weird game of reverse hide-and-seek, where I checked the aisles to make sure they were Wilder-free before I turned down them, and I was pretty successful apart from one close encounter near the bakery section.
Everyone liked cake, right?
And suddenly there I was, thinking about Wilder’s ass again.
I was out in the parking lot loading up my trunk when I saw Wilder and Gracie leaving the store. They only had one bag, so by rights they should have finished well before me, but I guessed shopping with a five-year-old could be time-consuming. Everything was like a theme park to them. Actual theme parks must be insane. I’d find out soon enough because I had a class excursion coming up to something called the Goose Run Adventurama.
But apart from the incredibly awkward meeting over the crayons, that had all in all been a successful shopping trip. I’d even remembered the bath mat.
As I drove out of the parking lot, I saw Wilder lifting Gracie into an old truck.
About halfway back to Goose Run while I was singing along, badly, to Sabrina Carpenter, I glanced in the mirror and jolted when I saw the truck.
Well, surely notthetruck? This was Virginia. There were beat-up old trucks everywhere. Except, as the truck drew closer, I thought that maybe itwasWilder in the driver’s seat. Made sense that we were both heading back to Goose Run, I guessed.
We both turned off the highway near the gas station and headed for the town. From here, a bunch of roads branched off, and Wilder’s truck was still behind me. It was starting to feel less coincidental and more…intentional? Goose Run wasn’t a huge town, sure, but most people would have turned off in the direction of Main Street and not kept following me over the old bridge that crossed the creek and then the railway line.
Oh my god. Was Wilder stalking me? Was I being stalked?
This seemed worse than all of my middle-of-the-night knife-wielding killer fantasies, because this was actuallyhappening.
I was being stalked by a stripper—no, worse. I was being stalked by aparent. My brother Dallas had warned me about this, but I’d never thought he was serious.
I tried not to panic, but when I turned into my street and Wilder followed, my hands were shaking. I needed to figure outwhat to say when we stopped. Like, he wouldn’t go full psycho with Gracie with him, would he? I needed some way to de-escalate the situation, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what the situation was. Hadn’t we agreed in Walmart never to talk about the stripper thing again? I mean, we hadn’t agreed that Wilder wouldn’t stalk and then murder me, but I’d assumed that went without saying. Also, if he was taking his daughter on a seek-and-destroy mission, he was an even worse parent than I’d thought.
The fact that my instinctive dislike of him was justified wouldn’t be much comfort when they found the body, though.
I gave myself a mental shake. I was being ridiculous. It was just my lack of sleep talking. My driveway came into view, and despite everything a thrill ran through me as I remembered that I actually owned a house. Sure, it was small and not very fancy, and it was in the sketchy part of Goose Run, but it wasmine.
I pulled into the driveway, and my heart rate calmed some when I saw Wilder’s truck pass slowly by in the rearview mirror.
Only to see it turn into the driveway right. Fucking. Next door.
I turned the engine off and climbed out of my car.
