“Okay.”
“No, Nic. I mean, I’ve never toldanyone. The partners at my law firm don’t know; the police don’t know. Not even Connor knows. If I tell you, you’ll be the first, and I…” She swallows. “I need to know that I can trust you.”
I sink onto the floor in front of her. “I may not have told you everything about Claire, but what I did tell you, about the two of us being in a relationship, I’ve never disclosed to anyone except my father.” She picks at the loose threads on her jeans. It’s not enough. Whatever she wants to share demands a larger sacrifice. I would need to confess the truth to her: my complicity in Claire’s murder, my refusal to report my suspicions to the police. The truth I’ve kept hidden most of my life. How can I share that with anyone?
I watch her, her chest rising and falling with her breaths, and remember what waking up next to her felt like. That moment of audacious hope. I could hold tight to my secrets, swear I don’t want to know hers, either. Or I could take a chance on whatever’s unfolding between us, even if it’ll leave me exposed and defenseless.
I don’t want to be alone anymore, locked inside my house while the rest of the world goes on without me.
“If you tell me…” I say, carefully considering each word before it comes out, “then I’ll tell you what really happened to Claire.”
Her eyes snap to mine. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know—but I want to.”
I rest my hand on top of hers. Her skin’s clammy; her fingers tremble. I suddenly realize she’s much more frightened than I am,which frightens me in return. What is she about to share with me? Trying to push my apprehension aside, I flip her hand and thread my fingers through hers, so our palms are pressed together. She takes a deep breath.
“That girl wasn’t Steffani,” she begins. “But once, a long time ago, I was.”
34GREER
STEFFANI ARNOSTI.
I’ve spent so long trying to scrub that name from the world that saying it now feels like a betrayal. Nic stares at me, her confusion clear.
“You were… What do you mean?”
“Just what I said: I’m Steffani Arnosti. The driver’s license you found in the pit? It’s mine. I threw it in.”
“You threw it in.”
“It’s what I wanted to get rid of.”
It was the only remnant of my old life left in our cabin. When the police showed up to search the property, I snuck it into the bottom of my boot, underneath the insole, and smuggled it out with me. A smart choice because, even though they swore I wasn’t under suspicion, they asked me to turn out my pockets when I arrived at the station for questioning. I’d thought about burning it to ashes hundreds of times after that, but whenever I stood in the backyard, thumbing the lighter, watching the flame spark to life, the girl gazing out from that shitty DMV photo stopped me. Now, though, with Tom’s execution date looming ever closer, she’s too much of a liability.
Nic’s hand slips away from mine, and the warmth from her palm immediately starts to fade into the memory of what could’ve been.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You’ll have to explain.”
I tell her about how my father, myrealfather, tracked me down again and again; how I hitchhiked my way across the country, accepted a ride from a stranger who then kidnapped me, locked me in a shack, and almost killed me—before changing his mind. I watch her closely as my story unwinds, searching for any traces of reassurance, but her expression remains painfully stoic.
“That’s impossible,” she finally says.
“You wanted the truth.”
“That’s not the truth; it can’t be. Tom Woods’s arrest was national news. The FBI, the state police, everyone worked on that investigation. Your birth certificate is a matter of public record.”
“It’s not my birth certificate. Tom had a daughter who lived with him until she was eighteen. It’s hers.”
The girl whose photo hung on the refrigerator.
“What happened to her?”
“She died. It was an accident.”
Nic looks like she doesn’t believe me—and why should she? We both know what kind of man Tom Woods was. And yet, when he told me what happened to his daughter, I’d believed him without question. He’d raised her just like he raised me—tucked away in the wilderness, with only each other for companionship. By the time she reached adulthood, she was desperate to build a life beyond him. She knew he’d never let her go easily, so she decided to run away. When Tom checked her bedroom and discovered it empty, he tore off to the nearest town in an attempt to find her. He whipped around a sharp turn in the road, blind to what was waiting on the other side—until it was already too late.
I used to imagine her—the real Greer Woods—running across the road, then whirling at the flash of headlights, only to find her father speeding toward her without enough time to slam on the brakes.
