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Mrs. Quinn cleared her throat. “You’ll have more privacy in the kitchen.”
I nodded once and went straight for the fridge. Half a beer was down before I felt Easy enter.
A phone rang from the other room, but all I could focus on was Baker. Her arms were folded around her middle like she wanted to make herself small.
I exhaled long and slow. “Tell me your truth. The raw version.”
She lifted her eyes to mine. “Why’d you come back? Just give me that before you hear the ugly facts.”
“For you.”
Her mouth quivered. A few more tears escaped down her cheeks. She lifted her chin.
“I was fifteen when I met Kyle. If there was a god, he was mine.”
Immediately, I hated the guy. Not only for what he’d dragged Baker into, but that he’d owned her heart.
She swallowed hard. “He was twenty. I didn’t care that he was too old for me. He felt right. In here.” She pointed to her chest, and I wrung the neck of my beer bottle.
“He was good to me. Said we were going to do big things. I believed him. He made me believe in him.”
She turned away for a moment. I was impatient for the rest of this story, but I’d give her the time she needed.
“It was little things I had to give up at first. They weren’t sacrifices at the time. He took care of me, treated me like his queen. So of course I’d rather spend time with him than go to the science club. And my friends, they were nothing compared to him.”
“The brainwashing.” A light went off, things making more sense.
“I don’t know if he even meant to do it. He was that good. I was that stupid.” She stared at the floor. I felt her disappointment with herself and could hardly stand it.
“Looking back, it’s easy to see everything. But it all comes down to me. I wasn’t strong enough.” Her voice was bitter. “I was twenty-five when it happened. I didn’t have an excuse of being young and naïve anymore.”
“You were with him ten years?” The question sounded like it had been shredded with razor blades.
She nodded. “It never occurred to me to get away. Not until he started stockpiling guns,” she said hoarsely. “I-I need some water.”
I retrieved a bottle out of the fridge and handed it to her. She gulped greedily.
“He dealt in weapons. I was used to his runs in the middle of the night. But he always came home to me. Kept me shielded from it. Made me feel safe.” She got a faraway look. “We lived in a townhouse in Georgetown.”
Like she couldn’t grasp how one world and the other were one in the same.
“I didn’t know what he was going to do. Only something. I went to the police. Told them what I knew. They seemed to take me seriously, but weeks went by and they never came.”
The plastic bottle crinkled under her grip.
“I tried again. They said they’d look into it. Nobody did until I managed to wreck the car.”
She closed her eyes and sucked in air as if she couldn’t get enough.
“You stopped it.” I searched through my memories for the footage I’d seen of that day. A mangled car upside down in a ditch surrounded by police cars came to mind. No one should have survived that crash. I remembered thinking that at the time.
“When Kyle started shooting, I didn’t really believe it was happening. It was like this bubble. Where I was inside was real. Out past the shimmer was an illusion.” Her lids opened to reveal haunted eyes. “Twelve people died and thirty-seven were injured before I tried to do anything.”
The sentence crescendoed with self-loathing.
I tried to imagine being in that car. Watching someone you idolized terrorize a city.
“He pulled the trigger over and over while he drove. Even told me he loved me as he reached for another gun. Seven minutes. That’s how long it took me to grab the wheel of the car.”
