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“Candles?” she says again. I know that look on her face. I’ve seen it before. My heart sinks. “Are you fucking kidding me, Peter?”
I say nothing.
“There’s a crazy person out there who’s hellbent on terrorizing me, possibly to death if he can have his way, and you’re talking about candles?”
“I don’t know what you want from me, Emily,” I say, and push up from the bed.
My temper’s slipping a little. Understandably so, after the day I’ve had. But she doesn’t know anything about that, about the dead-end case, about my father, any of it.
I take a breath. “I just meant it would really help if you didn’t freeze me out like this.”
“Sorry if my trauma is a little too inconvenient for you,” she says, and pulls her knees up, hugging them to her chest.
“Don’t do that. Sulking isn’t going to help anything. I’m trying to have an open conversation with you.”
“And I’m trying to figure out how the hell we got here, Peter. How we ended up in this hotel room because he found me at your apartment.”
Shit.
“If you had a team watching his every move, how did that happen, Peter? How did a man whose description they have, driving a car they’ve been on the lookout for, get into the secure apartment block of a cop he’s never met, to deliver something to a woman he’s not supposed to even know is there? How did they miss that?”
Emily looks absolutely lost and afraid, and she’s turning to me for answers.
I sigh heavily and run my fingers through my hair. I don’t think I can avoid the truth much longer. And after what happened today, maybe it’s best that she knows everything. Better to have her guard up than make a silly mistake because she doesn’t have all the facts.
“It’s because they weren’t watching his every move,” I say, and move to lean against the closet behind me.
Her face clouds with confusion as my words percolate in the space between us.
“I don’t understand,” she says, dropping her legs over the side of the bed.
“I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to panic about something that could end up being nothing. It—”
“What didn’t you tell me?” Her voice is low, filled with a warning that I know I’d be better off paying attention to.
I shake my head slowly. “We never had him, Emily. We were never even close to having him.”
“What do you mean, you were never close?”
“He dropped off the map the day after he talked to you from his car. The address was a dead-end, he hasn’t been showing up for classes, he’s just…gone.”
She bites her lips, glowering at me. There’s so much racing behind those eyes of hers, but what strikes me most is the hurt I see there. Plain as day. A part of me wishes that she would lash out at me, get angry, because the silence is way worse.
“I was trying,” I say. “I even went to my dad today, who I haven’t seen in I don’t know how long and who I didn’t necessarily want to see again, ever.”
“Gee, thanks for that mighty big sacrifice, Peter. I feel so much better about being lied to now.”
“That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t mean to what?” Without warning, Emily closes the gap between us until she’s right up in my face. “Make it sound like you’re the saint in all of this? Try to play it off like I should be thanking you?”
I open my mouth to respond, but she jumps in before I can say anything. “Because there’s nothing saintly or even medium good about lying and going behind my back, Peter. Especially not when there are things like, oh, only my whole goddamn life in the balance.”
“Emily—” I try to take a hold of her hands, but she immediately pulls away from me.
“Don’t Emily me,” she says, seething.
“I was trying to protect you. Don’t you get that? I thought I was doing the right thing. I was doing it, all of it, for you.”
