“Let him in, Paula.” He leaned in slightly as Paula turned around, both of them peering up at Noelle, who stood on the stairs, hair mussed, eyes a little swollen but not like they’d been at the police station days before.
He felt momentarily disoriented seeing her in a gray sweatshirt and jeans after having seen her in the same outfit for so long. For a moment he thought he’d leaped backward, to the time before. To the time when they’d been different people. But he hadn’t. He was here. And she was only a few feet away. He nudged past Paula, who made a tiny gasping sound as he rushed up the stairs. As soon as he reached Noelle, he pulled her into his chest, carefully avoiding where his damaged hand lay. He held her, not just her two lone fingers, but her, all of her, nothing between them at all. He held her, and he could finally breathe. Finally.
She pulled back and shot a glance over his shoulder. By the look on Noelle’s face, he imagined Paula still there, staring disapprovingly up at them. But she simply turned and led him to her room.
“She’s staying with you?” he asked once she’d closed and locked the door to her bedroom.
Noelle nodded, sitting down on the bed. He was glad Noelle wasn’t alone. He’d pictured her that way, standing in an empty house, grieving her father who she’d never gotten to say goodbye to. Another parent lost suddenly. And his family was entwined in that loss, too, though in a completely different way. He didn’t want to think about it. He couldn’t, not right then.
He’d passed by the officer sitting in front of her house and was glad she had that security, at least temporarily. When that was no longer the case . . . maybe he could convince her to stay with him. She pulled the cuffs of her sweatshirt over her hands, fidgeting. He hadn’t known her to fidget before, not when he’d watched her in school and not when she’d occupied the cage next to him.
“How’s your hand?” she asked, nodding to his sling.
“It’s okay. I have surgery scheduled on Friday. My doctor thinks he can fix it. The plastic surgeon has high hopes, too,” he said, gesturing to the cuts on his face. “I’ll be good as new.”
She let out a small breathy laugh. They both knew that was an impossibility. For his hand and anything else. If only.
He looked around her room briefly, noting the shabby white furniture that he’d bet anything she’d had since she was a kid. The unicorn stickers half peeled off the side of the desk confirmed his thought.
Her bookshelf was loaded down with books, not just in rows but with singular copies wedged in along the top. He wanted to take a minute to glance through them, but not now. It occurred to him, though, that he knew her as well as a person could know anyone, and also barely knew her at all. “What’s your favorite color?” he asked.
She looked briefly confused but then smiled. “Blue.”
“That’s pretty broad.”
“Turquoise, then. The color of that Easter egg dye that comes in those little kits from the grocery store.”
Well, that was very specific. What a luxury to talk about things like favorite colors and Easter egg dye. The realization made his mind spin. And it made him sad. He smiled again, but it felt sort of odd. For the last few days, he’d felt like his face was underwater and all his expressions came out sort of wrong and distorted, like they were being pulled in several different directions by an unseen current.
“Did they find anything?” she asked, her finger playing idly with a thread on the throw blanket on the end of her bed.
He sighed. He knew what she was referring to, but he’d hoped to have a few more minutes to talk about mundane things. Sad things. Because it felt like they mattered too little now. And it felt like they were everything. Life had become a circle of conundrums, and he didn’t know how to make it make sense. “No. The fire destroyed almost everything. By the time fire trucks got out there, it was a smoldering pile of ash. There were bits of human remains found, though, belonging to two individuals.”
She worried her lip for a moment. “The men we killed,” she said. “So they were the only ones there.”
He nodded, taking a seat next to her on the bed and leaning his forearms on his knees before tilting his head to look at her. “Whoever else . . . visited . . . was only there temporarily.” It’d only been a few days since they’d given what information they had to give to the authorities. Multiple agencies were still testing and investigating and whatever else they did with a case like theirs. The FBI was involved. Cyberteams and forensics experts and all the best of the best. Surely they’d find those responsible. Evan couldn’t consider living in a world where the people who’d tortured them for almost a month and a half—it’d been five weeks and one day that he’d been gone, three fewer for her—weren’t apprehended.
From what he’d been able to gather so far, when they’d first gone missing, it had seemed overly coincidental that two kids from the same school had disappeared within days of each other. In the beginning, the police had wondered if they were together—a secret romance, perhaps? But when their friends had insisted that that wasn’t possible and there was no evidence he and Noelle had ever even spoken, much less were carrying on a secret relationship, that potential lead went dry. If they’d been taken by the same person, there was no evidence of that, either, despite that they did have a connection in their fathers’ legal battle. Seemingly, both of them had just disappeared into thin air for no discernible reason. Not much had been uncovered in their absence, so for all intents and purposes, the investigation was just beginning now.
Evan stood, bending a slat in the blind and peering out at the quiet street. The sun was lowering. It would be nighttime soon. Those hours when he was tormented by dreams that felt so real he woke clawing at nothing, his fists swiping at invisible shadows that existed only in his mind.
And reaching for her, his fingers stretching to link with Noelle’s and then dropping when they met only emptiness.
“You have a weapon,” she said, nodding to the hunting knife in his back pocket. It flipped open with the slide of a button and was hooked and sharp and could be deadly if used with enough force.
He’d use that force if he needed to.
“When I was grabbed,” he told her, “there was a moment when I could have used a weapon if I had one. But I didn’t. I only had my fists, and those ended up being mostly useless. I won’t make that mistake again.” He looked out the slat again at the black car parked just down the street. His driver waiting for him. It was supposed to make him feel safe. Whatever safe was.
“I know what you mean,” she said softly. “I looked up how to register for a concealed carry yesterday. It’s like . . . I’ll never feel safe again, you know? I haven’t even left the house.”
He returned to where he’d been sitting on the bed next to her, taking her hand in his, running his thumb over her knuckle. They were still scraped, but they were healing. The bruise on her face looked better too. “Your dad . . . Noelle, how are you?” he asked. “Really?” Was she even able to grieve amid everything else she was trying to bear? The memories, the nightmares. He didn’t have to ask if she was having nightmares too.