Andy said, “You talk like him.” When Laura didn’t answer, she said, “He calls you darling and my love, just like you call me.”
“I don’t talk like him. He talks like my mother.” She stroked back Andy’s hair so she could see her face. “Those were the words she used with me. They always made me feel loved. I wasn’t going to let Nick keep me from using the same words with you.”
“‘She always knew where the tops to her Tupperware were,’” Andy quoted, one of the few things Laura could come up with to capture the essence of her mother.
Now, she told Andy, “It’s more like she knew which china set was from the Queller side and where the Logan silverware was cast and all the other unimportant things she felt gave her control over her life.” Laura said something that she’d only recently realized was the truth: “My mother was as much a victim of my father as the rest of us.”
“She was an adult.”
“She wasn’t raised to be an adult. She was raised to be a rich man’s wife.”
Andy seemed to mull over the distinction. Laura thought she was finished asking questions, but then she said, “What did you say to Paula when she was dying?”
Laura had dreaded being asked about Paula for so long that she needed a moment to prepare. “Why are you asking now? It’s been over a month.”
Andy’s shoulder went up in a shrug. Instead of going into one of her protracted silences, she said, “I wasn’t sure you would tell me the truth.”
Laura didn’t acknowledge the point, which she proved by saying, “It was a variation of what I told Nick. That I would see her in hell.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Laura wasn’t sure why her last words to Paula made it on the long list of pieces of herself that she still kept hidden from Andy. Perhaps she did not want to test the boundaries of her daughter’s newfound moral ambiguity. Telling a crazy woman with a razorblade lodged in her throat Nick is never going to fuck you now seemed jealous and petty.
Which was probably why Laura had said it.
She asked Andy, “Does what I did to Paula bother you?”
Andy shrugged again. “She was a bad person. I mean—I guess you could break it down and say that she was still a human being and maybe there was another way to do it, but it’s easy to say that when it’s not your own life in danger.”
Your life, Laura wanted to say, because she had known when she hid the razorblade inside her bandaged hand that she was going to kill Paula Evans for hurting her daughter.
Andy asked, “Back in the prison, when you were walking away, why didn’t you tell him about the earbuds? That everything he said in your ear was recorded? Like, a final fuck you.”
“I said what I needed to say,” Laura told her, though with Nick, she was never sure of herself. It felt so good to say those things to his face. Now that she was away from him, she had doubts.
The yo-yo snapping back again.
Andy seemed content to end the conversation there. She turned on the radio. She scanned the stations.
Laura asked, “Did you like the song I played?”
“I guess. It’s kind of old.”
Laura put her hand to her heart, wounded. “I’ll learn something else. Name it.”
“How about ‘Filthy’?”
“How about something that’s actually music?”
Andy rolled her eyes. She punched at the buttons on the tuner, likely searching for a sound that had the depth of cotton candy. “I’m sorry about your brother.”
Laura closed her eyes against the sudden tears.
“You did right by him,” Andy said. “You stood up for him. That took a lot.”
Laura found a tissue and dried her eyes. She still couldn’t come to terms with what had happened. “I never left his side. Even when we were negotiating the deal with the FBI.”
Andy stopped fiddling with the radio.
Laura said, “Andrew died about ten minutes after the plea agreement was signed. It was very peaceful. I was holding his hand. I got to say goodbye to him.”
Andy sniffed back tears. She had always been sensitive to Laura’s moods. “He stayed around long enough to make sure you were going to be okay.”
She stroked Andy’s hair behind her ear again. “That’s what I like to think.”
Andy wiped her eyes. She left the radio alone as she drove down the near-empty interstate. She was clearly thinking about something, but just as clearly content to keep her thoughts to herself.
Laura rested her head back against the seat. She watched the trees blur by. She tried to enjoy the comfortable silence. Not a night had gone by since Andy had returned home without Laura waking up in a cold sweat. She wasn’t suffering post-traumatic stress or worrying about Andy’s safety. She had been terrified of seeing Nick again. That the trick with the piano and the earbuds would not work. That he would not walk into the open trap. That she would walk blindly into one of his.
She hated him too much.
That was the problem.
You didn’t hate someone unless part of you still loved them. From the beginning, the two extremes had always been laced into their DNA.
For six years, even while she’d loved him, part of Laura had hated Nick in that childish way that you hate something you can’t control. He was headstrong, and stupid, and handsome, which gave him cover for a hell of a lot of the mistakes he continually made—the same mistakes, over and over again, because why try new ones when the old ones worked so well in his favor?
He was charming, too. That was the problem. He would charm her. He would make her furious. Then he would charm her back again so that she did not know if Nick was the snake or if she was the snake and Nick was the handler.
The yo-yo snapping back into the palm of his hand.
So Nick sailed along on his charm, and his fury, and he hurt people, and he found new things that interested him more, and the old things were left broken in his wake.
Jane had been one of those broken, discarded things. Nick had sent her away to Berlin because he was tired of her. At first, she had enjoyed her freedom, but then she had panicked that he might not want her back. She had begged and pleaded with him and done everything she could think of to get his attention.
Then Oslo had happened.
Then her father was dead and Laura Juneau was dead and then, quite suddenly, Nick’s charm had stopped working. A trolley car off the tracks. A train without a conductor. The mistakes could not be forgiven, and eventually, the second same mistake would not be overlooked, and the third same mistake had dire consequences that had ended with Alexandra Maplecroft’s life being taken, a death sentence being passed on Andrew, then—almost—resulted in the loss of another life, her life, in the farmhouse bathroom.
Inexplicably, Laura had still loved him. Perhaps loved him even more.
Nick had let her live—that was what she kept telling herself while she went mad inside of her jail cell. He had left Paula at the farmhouse to guard her. He had planned to come back for her. To take her to their much-dreamed-of little flat in Switzerland, a country that had no extradition treaty with the US.
Which had given her a delirious kind of hope.
Andrew was dead and Jasper was gone and Laura had stared up at the jailhouse ceiling, tears running down her face, her neck still throbbing, her bruises still healing, her belly swelling with his child, and desperately loved him.
Clayton Morrow. Nicholas Harp. In her misery, she did not care.
Why was she so stupid?
How could she still love someone who had tried to destroy her?