It's gentle, our lips barely meeting. She doesn't kiss back, she's too confused. So I pull back, unable to walk away, just wanting to taste her one more time.
“You're leaving me here?” she asks, with the pitch of despair in her voice.
I kiss her again, this time taking her face in my hands, tasting her tears, feeling her lips quiver against mine.
I keep tokens of all the places I've been. People I've taken from. And that kiss is the token I'll remember her by. She's not like the others. I'll never give them back what I've taken. I reach into my pocket and clasp the little moon necklace I took from her around her neck.
“Please don't leave me alone out here,” she pleads.
She can hate me, that's the way it's supposed to be.
I stand up and write her the last note.
Do what you have to do.
I watch her eyes study it. I make sure she digests it. Then I crumble in and put it in my pocket. I head back to my truck.
“Sam?” she asks, as if she still believes this is all a bluff. I've toyed with her head so many fucking times, she doesn't even know when it's real. “Sam!” This time it's shrill, there's anger peppered through her voice. “Sam!” she screams as I slide into the driver seat.
I drive on the path towards the service road, watching her chase me through the rear view mirror. She’s covered in mud, with her hands tied behind her back, barefoot. Her pleas grate on my ears, but when I'm far enough away, her voice stops carrying. Darkness has settled and she’s just a speck in my rear view mirror. I hit the brakes and turn back one last time. Just one more look. But I feel a dangerous pull. So I look ahead, turning my back to her.
My name is Vesper Rivers.
It used to be so easy to utter that sentence to strangers. I never thought about what it meant. All the fine details, the lines and the shadows that lie behind that name. Maybe because I was just a two-dimensional sketch of a person. Thick lines outlining my identity. A flat image.
But now, there are creases and collections of small, nearly invisible grooves that come together to create depth and space. To make a picture so complex that depending on the angle from which I look at myself, I see someone different every time.
Now, to say those words, to tell a stranger who I am, it's too much. It's too loaded of a confession. The park ranger will think he knows me, from the details in the news or the circumstances of my disappearance. But that's just me from one narrow angle. If he saw things from my side, he would be shocked.
So I wait, filthy, shivering, sipping a warm cup of generic tea, still wearing the hefty bag Sam shrouded on me, and over that a fleece blanket, waiting for the one person other than Sam who knows the things I know. Who I don't have to lie to.
A deer head floats on the wall across from me. A picture of the man who I first found running down the service road along where Sam left me, with his little girls and wife. This world feels like the artifice. The white-washed walls of my tiny shack, the lake, the unending forest—that was reality.
I feel their eyes. The local police, watching me through the titled blinds on the door that gives me a false sense of privacy.
I go through eight and a half cups of tea. One cup for every half hour I wait for Sheriff Ridgefield. It's all I would say no matter what they asked. I wouldn't give my name. I wouldn't say what happened. Only his name.
I'm staring at the half-drunken mug of tea when the door opens abruptly. Our eyes meet and I can see the veiled panic. He's trying hard not to let me see it. From the sallow color of his face, to his sunken expression, it's clear the sheriff hoped to never see me again.
He closes the door behind him. I look over at the half-turned blinds and he follows my gaze, twisting the pole to block out prying eyes. I grip my mug firmly as he tentatively pulls up a seat across the table from me. This is easier. This I can handle, not all the commotion of police and press, just me, a man, and a room.
“I came out here as soon as they called. You were dropped off far away from home.”
He means the single-level I was snatched from, in a sunny suburban neighborhood. The place where my boyfriend proposed to me. But that's not home anymore.
I nod.
He's smart. He's not saying anything. He doesn't know what I know. But he does know I hold his life in the balance. I understand now, the gravity of Sam's secret. It's not just a family being humiliated and shamed. It is generations of reputation and wealth tarnished in an instant. It's this man's future vaporized in one breath.
Your brother.
He took me.
Every part of me.
He gave me parts of him.
Forced them to fit into me.
Now I am stuck with them.
Then he abandoned me.
I am not the girl in the picture you have in your file.
She has not returned.
She's disappeared forever.
“Are we alone?” I ask.
He looks over his shoulder before leaning in.
“For now.”