Raymond folds himself into the driver’s seat. The door thunks shut and the brake lights bloom red against the snow drifts. He sits there a moment longer, head still bent over the phone, then types out a quick reply. Then the phone goes into the cupholder, the gear shifter moves, and the Mercedes is rolling.
It rips around the circular courtyard, throwing up rooster tails of muddy snow in its wake with a throaty roar. He turns left at the bottom of the drive and disappears behind the line of hemlocks.
It wouldn’t be hard to catch him. I can be in my own car in ninety seconds. I know the road; there’s only one way out, and I can keep two curves’ worth of distance between his taillights and mine all the way down to the parkway. I’ve done this kind of follow a dozen times. I’m good at it. It’s one of the small, useful things I’m good at, courtesy of my father.
I lift my keys and turn from the window, deep in pursuit mode—and that’s when I hear something through the wall.
A single, stifled sound. Like someone trying to swallow a knife.
I stop.
The plaster here is thick and the doors are heavy oak. I shouldn’t be able to hear anything through them.
But I can hear her anyway.
There it is again. Another sob. Smaller, caged in, but undeniable.
Through the window, the Mercedes passes between two trees and is gone. I have maybe twenty more seconds before the trail goes properly cold. After that, I can maybe still pick it up at the parkway exit, if I’m willing to push the speedometer hard enough on the access road. But if he gets onto the interstate before me, he’s lost in the wind.
It wasn’t easy to let Raymond shepherd Cass away from the meal. Keeping my face still and my attention elsewhere was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I had to pretend to be interested in the booze-soaked woman next to me. I had to sit idly by while they disappeared into the lobby.
I wanted so fucking badly to go sprinting after them.
Eventually, I did. But Susan beat me to it. Thank fuck for that, because I didn’t have a plan when I excused myself from the drunk woman and went after Cass. But when I saw Susan headed in the same direction, I fell back and eavesdropped.
And then that marvelous fucking woman intervened, so smoothly and perfectly. I could’ve kissed her on the damn mouth for extricating Cass from Raymond in one elegant swoop.
But Susan can interrupt one trip. She can’t interrupt the next one, and the Caymans still loom in our near future. For those, Cass needs me.
Better yet, if I want to forestall those, I need to be in my car right now, hot on the tail of a black Mercedes.
So explain to me why I’m hesitating?
I take one step toward the door. My car awaits.
I’ve made a great many choices in my life that I should have made differently. I made some of them at fifteen and some of them at twenty-five and one of them, the most recent, three weeks ago when I told Afon that I could still do this job for him.
That’s the question: Which choice here will I regret? To go or to stay?
Through the wall, Cass’s sobbing has gone quiet.
My ribs hurt. I press the heel of my hand against them, low along the right side, where the damaged nerve has decided to start its evening symphony several hours early.
Hello, friend.
The pain is the same pain I felt in my office when I opened to the last page of the file and read her maiden name in Afon’s blocky blue pen. I’ve come to understand that the pain isn’t actually about the nerve.
It’s not a physical thing.
It’s a heart pain.
Outside, the wind shoves a hard handful of snow against the leaded glass. The flakes are filling in the tracks that Raymond left behind. By nightfall, there’ll be no record at all of which way he went.
So that’s the choice then.
Here or there.
Stay or go.
