Twenty minutes later I saw headlights illuminate the road beside me. I put my thumb into the air like I was hitching a ride. The familiar squeak and rumble as the truck slowed to a stop beside me.
The door opened and Hunter was there, a grave expression on his face.
“Where you headed?” he asked, deceptively calm.
“No place in particular.”
“Isn’t that usually the point of hitching a ride, to get somewhere?”
I grinned, repeating his previous sentiments back to him. “I like to travel. Sometimes I do jobs, but in between them, I keep travelling.”
He paused, seeming to think that over.
“Well, hop in then,” he said so softly I barely heard him.
I climbed into the truck and tossed my bag in the back. Without looking at me, he started up the engine and took us forward. Though I didn’t have a destination in mind, I expected him to pull out onto the freeway. Instead he kept going down Main Street past the turnoff.
“Where are we going?”
He reached under his seat and handed me a book. “Got something for you.”
I touched the familiar cardboard cover, traced the lettering. Niagara Falls.
Once the mere thought of this had sustained me, small doses of hope. Now that I’d seen the real thing, I couldn’t regret any of it. The falls were both more beautiful than I could have imagined—and yet meant so much less. They were rock and water, not meant to be anyone’s salvation. Not like flesh and blood.
There was more. A manila folder was tucked between the pages and sticking out from the sides. I opened it. My breath caught at what I read. A full confession written in Hunter’s hand detailing how he’d kidnapped me, the sexual acts we’d performed in clinical terms, and signed by him at the bottom.
Even more shocking was the letters beneath them. Signed witness statement from Laura and James. A small pain stabbed my heart imagining Laura’s horror and confusion at learning the truth. And some man named Roger Wilbourne, proprietor of a diner and gas station, who had seen a girl call for help, who’d found three unconscious men on his property later that day. Hunter had collected statements from them that were both factual and damning.
The truck slowed to a stop.
I looked out the window. The sign on the old building read Niagara Falls NY Police Department. My stomach churned with revulsion. No.
With an impassive expression, he nodded for me to get out of the truck. To go into the station and hand these documents over. The gesture took me back to that first day at the motel. The forced casualness, the banked desire. He’d claimed to want my body that night, but he’d really needed so much more.
This wasn’t about right or wrong, love or hate. If I sent him back to jail, no matter that he was stronger now, he could get raped again.
“I would never send you back,” I said through gritted teeth.
He stared at me, gaze burning with unnamed emotion. “What the fuck do I care if I go back? I can’t keep you either way, so what do I care where I am when I’m alone?”
I shuddered from some combination of shock and want. We were standing in the water at the top of the cliff, the water rushing around us, threatening to pull us under.
“Why can’t you keep me?”
His expression was incredulous. “You know what I did. How it was between us. Even if we don’t tell anyone else, you know.”
“I forgave you that night, remember.”
He snorted, unbelieving.
“You were a priest. Of all people, you understand forgiveness.”
Something dark flickered in his eyes, and in those shadows I remembered what he’d once told me. I didn’t scream, Evie. I prayed. And fallen over the cliff, crashed into the water as fast and as deep as any person could do. It wasn’t a surprise he’d become isolated and cold in the aftermath. It was a surprise he’d survived at all.
“Don’t you see? I can’t ever be normal again. Never be the kind of man who can give you a real home—”
“I had a home. For twenty years I was trapped inside one. Now I want to roam. With you.”
“I’ll never be the kind of man who can be gentle with you, Evie. Not like you deserve.”
He was talking about sex, promising me more nights of bruising hands and forceful sex and sweaty, panting, screaming into the dark.
I met his gaze. “I’m not the kind of girl who needs gentle. You aren’t the only fucked-up person here, you know.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” he said mildly.
“And I was broken long before we even met.”
“You’re not broken.” He almost snarled the words, his ferocity terrifying, compelling. “I love the way you are. The way you’re terrified but do it anyway. The way you stand up to me when you shouldn’t.”
I climbed over to him, throwing my knee over and straddling him. His whole body tensed as if it had been shocked, rigid instead of welcoming.
“What about the way I fight for us,” I whispered, “even though you’re trying to push me away?”