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I nodded, crossing my arms against my chest as I remembered the box of bones and ash. It was sad, how little remained after you burned an infant child to cinders. It was barely enough to fill a box the size of a coffee mug.
‘Where’s John?’ I asked.
‘Being the fucking prez, now that he knows you’re okay. I had to stop him from coming in and getting himself killed by your beloved.’
I snorted. ‘Who, Dornan? He’s hardly my beloved anymore. Not after everything he’s done.’
He must have heard the violent reality behind my words. ‘It was bad, huh? In Colorado?’
I opened my mouth to answer him and a sob came out. Just one. An overflow of emotion, and then I caught it and shoved it back down where it needed to stay. ‘He’s not the man he used to be,’ I said, staring out of the window as Los Angeles passed by in a blur of asphalt, overpasses, and randomly spaced palm trees. ‘There’s killing someone and there’s murdering someone. You know?’
Guillermo nodded, and I suddenly remembered what he had gone to prison for. Killing his wife for betraying him. ‘I didn’t mean–’
‘It’s okay,’ he said, cutting me off. ‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t.’
‘Did you know Stephanie?’ I asked him. I thought of her, the woman I had never known except in myth, as the woman Dornan had first loved, and then in death, as I greeted her bloody corpse in a bathtub in Colorado.
I’d never seen Dornan so indifferent in the face of death. When he’d killed the woman in the backseat of his truck, he had cried. Wept as he pulled the trigger and delivered the bullet that ended her life. I’d seen the anguish in his eyes, seen the devastation that engulfed him. Now he seemed almost bored with the fact that he’d just killed someone. And not just anyone. He’d loved her, once. That was the part I found the hardest to accept. He’d loved her, and she’d left, and this was what happened when you left a man like Dornan Ross and never came back.
Eventually, he found you, and then he slaughtered you.
Guillermo nodded. ‘I did know her.’
‘Do you think she deserved to die?’
He frowned. ‘I didn’t even know she was alive.’
I thought back to my ill-fated pregnancy. How I’d given myself two choices – get an abortion, or run. I’d wanted that baby. A daughter. I wasn’t going to erase her. I was going to run. And then, before I could, he killed her while she was still in my womb.
‘He killed Stephanie because she took his son. He killed her because she wanted a better life for her child. He beat her until her face was . . .’ I couldn’t even think of an adequate way to describe it. Pulp, maybe. ‘Until it was gone. It was just a mess. You couldn’t even tell who she’d been.’
‘She was a pretty girl when I knew her.’
I’m sure she was,’ I replied. I remembered Dornan’s hands on me after he’d murdered her, the way he held me down and forced himself inside me. It hurt. But him – he liked it. He was turned on by my begging. The way I fought him off excited him. That was not the man I’d fallen in love with.
‘So you’re not going to run, are you?’
Guillermo’s eyebrows were raised, the prison tattoos on his neck slick with sweat despite the AC blasting in our faces. His sudden question snapped me out of my macabre rerun of that night in the motel room, when Dornan began his systematic destruction of anything good I’d ever seen in him. The night he’d turned into my nightmare. The night I started to be more afraid of him than I was of his father.
The night my lover became my nightmare.
‘No,’ I said softly, tucking my long hair behind my ears. As Guillermo drove, I rested my head against the window, my throat thick, my eyes burning behind my dark sunglasses, my black clothes like magnets attracting heat. I felt like I was burning up, but inside I was so cold.
I opened my mouth, my breath hitching in my throat. Closed it again. I didn’t want to breathe in the tiny particles of bone dust that had somehow attached themselves to my shirt, to the seat I was sitting on. There was already enough death inside me without swallowing more.
‘Don’t ever pull a fucking stunt like that again, you hear me?’ Guillermo said. ‘Don’t ever change that code on me.’
‘Don’t ever change it on me,’ I shot back. ‘You know how long I was stuck in that goddamn apartment before you came along. I refuse to be trapped in there for one more minute of my life.’
Something in my words appeared to get through to him. He sagged a little in his seat. ‘Sorry.’
I don’t think he’d ever apologised to me in all these years. Suddenly I felt shame at the way I’d effectively trapped him and John inside the apartment.
‘Me too,’ I muttered.
We drove in silence for a bit. The sun was filtered by the traffic haze that always seemed to hang in Los Angeles. On the freeway at this time of day it was brutal. We sat in a crawling procession of cars, everyone poisoning the air together as we fought each other to get where we needed to be. I’d grown to hate this place. The place that had represented freedom to me as a child growing up in Colombia had inadvertently become my prison cell. I couldn’t wait to put my bare feet in the dark soil of the jungle in some lush locale in South America, or maybe it’d be white sand in some tropical paradise. Whatever, it didn’t matter, because it would be somewhere other than here.
I dared to consider John’s words from earlier. At the time I’d still been too focused on Emilio and the baby to think about what he’d been saying, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
