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She’d told him so much. About the way her moods swung from furious to hollow after the policewoman told her abouther mom. About the sucking pain that doubled her over when she realized that her mother would rather be dead than be her mom.
She thought they were sharing and she could trust him. They connected for sex, but she could talk to him. He listened. He didn’t understand surviving dysfunction the way Aaron did because he hadn’t lived through it, but Ryan didn’t judge. He asked open-ended questions and let her talk.
Now she knew why.
The longer she stood in the middle of her family room, the louder the voices in her head became. A riot of shouting and banging. The worst parts of her life ran in fast-forward through her mind. Her father’s voice. Aaron’s sick laugh on the video. The way Ryan reassured her as he smiled at her across the coffee shop table.
Men using her. Lying to her. Screwing her. Desperate to break her.
Shutting her eyes and covering her ears didn’t stop the fever pitch. The room spun, and rage crashed over her. It slithered up her body and danced in her throat. Darkened every inch of her until that scream trapped inside her clawed and fought to get out.
Unable to choke the fury back for one more second, she reached for the vase on the end of the mantel. Grabbed it with both hands and smashed it as hard as she could against the stone of the fireplace. Let out a pain-soaked yowl.
Her screeching echoed through the quiet house.
The satisfyingcrackrang in her ears.
Blue glass shattered, sending shards over the hardwood floor and bouncing under the couch and into the fireplace. Pieces pricked at her legs, and she felt a slashing low on her cheek.
She blinked, trying to focus. Forced her breath to slow and her body to keep from crumpling on a heap on the floor. When she did, she saw the fallout from the shower of glass. Pieces stuck everywhere. Some crunching under her feet.
Her body suddenly weighed too much. It was difficult to keep her eyes open and keep her head from bobbing. With careful steps, she walked over to the kitchen and out of the middle of the debris field. The glass crackled as she tried to maneuver around the worst of the mess and make it to that bar stool across the room.
A few minutes later, she sat at her kitchen counter recovering from the aftermath. To cut through the thoughts cramming her head, she flicked the switch and let someone else talk.
This is Nia Simms andGone Missing,the true crime podcast that discusses cases—big and small—in your neighborhood and around the country.
After days glued to this stupid podcast, she heard that opening in her dreams. She’d roll over and Nia’s deep voice would call to her. The line between real and nightmare shifted and blurred.
Today is our weekly call-in show. Let’s talk about the investigations and the three missing women. And since we’re talking about mysteries and missing neighbors, let me know if you have any thoughts about Aaron Payne. Are the disappearances in our area tied? Should the task force be reviewing all of these cases together? What do we need to know to bring these people home?
Even on this podcast where Nia worked so hard to keep the names in the news, three women missing, and Aaron’s name was the one in the spotlight. He sucked up all the energy in the room, and he wasn’t even there.
Nia did the initial hard work. She pushed the theory of the connection among the three. She forced the issue, kept them in the news and the public’s mind, after they’d become voiceless, hardly mentioned. But now she and the people who called in broke into a frothing frenzy talking about the men who might have perpetrated the violence. Their interest turned into something feral and disconnected from the women as people. Ignoring the loss to those families.
Karen Blue. Julie Levin. Yara James.
Lila vowed to remember their names.
The theories droned on. She listened as the calls morphed into one big guessing game. Anyone talking about Aaron talked about her. They made assumptions. Made her out to be some pathetic loner who was happy some man had paid attention to her and who had killed her husband to keep the other man’s interest. All bullshit and maddening.
She slid her arm across the counter, unable to do muchelse. She’d expended so much energy, her body now felt heavy and lifeless. An extra push and she touched the end of the remote. She brought it closer, ready to turn it off just as the next caller broke in.
“I know Aaron, and he’s not the man everyone thinks he is.”
A quick shot without any detail. Probably easy for most people to ignore. Not Lila.
The comment breathed life back into her exhausted body.
She recognized that voice.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
EXACTLY TWO HOURS AND A QUICK CLEANUP JOB LATER, LILAtracked Ryan down at his office. He’d ignored her repeated attempts to reach out, even the one through the college’s main number.
By the time she got to his office door, she’d worked herself into a full-throttle rage. Anger poured through her. His notes and all those side comments he’d written ran through her mind like a movie.
She opened the door and walked in without knocking. The move caught Ryan off guard. He dropped the book in his hand as he spun away from the window to face her.
