Annie got up on shaky feet, her hand braced on the wall as she walked down the short hallway to the bedroom.
Please. Please be there. Please be there. That gun was her only chance.
She closed the door behind her and then, dizziness and headache aside, she nearly leaped over the bed to the small beside table and yanked open the drawer.
It was empty. Sobbing, she searched it, pulling it all the way out, but everything was gone. The books. The gun. The article about Ben. Everything.
She collapsed against the wall and fell to the floor.
The bedroom door creaked opened and Hoyt stood in the doorway. A blond devil. Her gun, like a toy in his great big palm.
In his other hand were her books. The sticky notes from Dylan. The artifacts of her rebellion. Of her entire life here.
Silent, he tossed the books onto the bed. The article. The notes.
She wanted to gather them up, out of his reach. Out of his sight. But it was too late. Everything she owned he’d ruined with his touch. She tipped her head so she couldn’t see them. Like a child, she thought if she couldn’t see them, they weren’t real.
They never happened.
All she had left was getting out of this.
“Who is Dylan Daniels to you?” he asked.
“No one. I don’t know who he is.” Annie got to her feet without any idea why she was lying when she was doing it so badly. All she knew was that she could not put Dylan in the middle of this nightmare.
“Stop.” He held up the phone, the screen showing all of their text messages. The picture she had sent of her nearly naked body. Her breasts and her tummy, the pale white blur of her thighs.
Annie had been unfaithful to a man who smacked her around over chicken pot pies. Strangled her over windmills. She could not imagine what he would do over adultery.
“I know about it all. So you need to stop lying. For your sake.”
He was going to kill her. A gasping sob cleared her throat.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered. His face creased with agony. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Annie nearly laughed. But terror had squeezed her body.
“I don’t like it, Annie, but I…I guess I understand.” He tilted his head like the old yellow lab they used to have. “What I did to you made you…act out like that. I know that’s not you. That picture, those notes. That’s not the Annie I know.”
The Annie he knew was a rag doll. A scarecrow. An animated reflection of him. The Annie he knew was gone.
But Hoyt was still talking. “We can go back home and just forget it. Forget this Dylan Daniels. Start over.”
That was impossible. There was no forgetting Dylan Daniels. He was burned under her skin. Into her bones.
Move, she told herself, keep moving, don’t just sit here and let him ruin you again. As long as she kept moving she was alive, and as long as she was alive, there was a chance.
Annie pulled a clean shirt out of the dresser. “You mind?” she asked, when he just kept standing there. That gun held so casually in his hand as if to mock her fear.
A muscle twitched in his jaw and he glanced down at the books on the bed and the phone in his hand, silently asking if she really thought she was deserving of modesty now. But then he bowed his head and walked out of her room as if granting Annie some privacy was a favor. A silly stupid wish by a silly stupid woman.
Once he was gone, she pulled off her dirty shirt and slipped on her clean one. The windows in here were all too small to climb through, but she pushed open her curtains hoping Ben was still in his garden, hoping she could catch his eye. But his garden was empty. Joan’s trailer was still dark.
As lightly as she could, she stepped to the door, listening for sounds from the rest of the trailer so she could try to tell where he was. But it was silent. Eerie and silent and awful.