“I’m sure this was sort of a shock,” she said. She kept her eyes on me and her movements slow as she set her purse and the bag of groceries she’d evidently just picked up on the counter. I must have missed her at the supermarket by minutes.
“She was recording my conversation, Ryan,” Wilder said, a note of desperation in his voice. “She’s recording everything.”
Ryan turned her green eyes on me. The others had mentioned them in their interviews, and the media had certainly fixated on them in her time, but not until that moment did I understand their full effect. She looked at me with a strange mixture of pity and appraisal, but I somehow felt that she wasn’t surprised. Ryan met my gaze unwaveringly. After a moment, I felt compelled to either look away or give in, and I wondered how many others had been swayed by the same tactic.
She was waiting for me to speak, but I didn’t. Finally, Ryan asked, “Is that true?”
I glanced at Wilder and then held my phone up and said, “Yes.”
“Why?” Ryan asked.
There was no sound in the house. Outside, wind moved through the forest.
“I’m writing a book,” I said to Ryan at last. “About your life.”
Wilder exploded. “You canneverpublish that!”
Ryan ignored him. “Why are you doing that?”
I faltered a little at this. No one had pressed me on my reasons yet. It was a given that the book, if I pulled it off, would be a bestseller. Everyone was willing to pay for more information about the life and disappearance of Ryan Holding. But these were not my reasons.
“Because I wanted to understand the woman who brainwashed my little brother,” I said.
“How condescending can you possibly—” Wilder started, but Ryan cut him off.
“So you knew that he’d come with me? The whole time?” she asked.
I kept my phone clutched tightly in my hand. “I strongly suspected.”
Ryan nodded. She looked at me for another moment, then turned to Wilder. “I think Elyse and I need to talk woman-to-woman.” And when he looked like he was about to protest, she raised her eyebrows and said, “You wanted to put away the lawn furniture before the rain tonight, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said without looking at me.
“Thanks, Wilder.” She watched him go. Then she said to me, “Come on to the living room. We’ll be more comfortable. Lilla, you can come, too, if you’re not going to sleep.”
Ryan swept away while I looked around me and saw my niece, who—unnoticed by myself or Wilder—had crept back into the room and hidden under the kitchen table.
I followed Ryan and Lilla back to the living room. The cottage was not how I’d imagined Ryan living; I’d pictured her in a secret Italian villa somewhere with gated security and most of the luxury she’d become accustomed to retained.
But this house was on par with the other small homes on the island—cedar paneled, low lit, and snug. The furniture reminded me of the thrift-store pieces we had in McKees Rocks, and houseplants and blankets littered the space. Ryan curled up on the couch opposite the coffee table as I sank into an armchair. Lilla crawled into her lap.
They did look so alike, the now-dark-haired Ryan and the little girl with wispy strawberry curls. But my brother was there, too, in Lilla’s nose and brown eyes and dark brows.
“How much did Wilder tell you?” Ryan asked. She had not requested that I stop recording, so I’d slid my phone in the breast pocket of my jacket in the hopes that it wouldn’t come up just yet.
“The broad strokes,” I said stiffly. “I knew most of it until you two broke up. Or said you had.”
“We did break up.” Ryan nodded. “I broke up with him. And it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”
“Then why do it?” I pressed. “Why not just date publicly? Unless you were ashamed of him.”
She gave a small smile. “You sound just like him. But it wasn’t that simple. The media pressure was hard enough on my other relationships—how can you really get to know someone when you’ve got a whole camera crew following you around everywhere you go, criticizing your outfits and your public affection and the way you eat pasta in print the next day? I obviously struggled with it. The men I dated struggled with it. And all of us were famous already. Wilder ... Wilder hadn’t had to deal with all that yet. And I didn’t want to put him through it.”
“That was his choice to make,” I said. “Didn’t you trust him to decide what was best for his own life?”
Ryan looked at me again with that watchful, appraising eye.
I stared back and then glared. “This is different. I thought he was dead, Ryan.”
