Tabula Rasa(53)

He’d flown into a rage and actually got into a car chase with me like right out of some cheesy movie. How smug he must have been when I woke in the hospital for that brief moment without a single memory in my head, with no way to know I’d wanted to leave him and the country. Now I could again. Technically.

But all those plans were from my life before. While the idea of Paris still sounded nice in theory, I didn’t want to leave Shannon. And if I ran away, I’d no doubt make some amateur move, and he’d see it in plenty of time. And even if he didn’t, he would find me. He probably already suspected I’d go to Paris based on what he’d learned about me. And unlike Trevor, Shannon had the means and ability to follow me and drag me back. Realizing all this should have disturbed me. But for whatever f*cked-up reason, it didn’t. The only thing that bothered me was the continued nagging fear that he might not want me anymore.

There was a fine sheen of frost on the ground. It glittered like starlight under the weak rays of the sun. I leaned over the balcony railing. There was a trellis I could climb down. A f*cking trellis. Like he’d set it all up for me. I went back inside before I froze to death. Winters in Georgia might be mild, but I was only wearing a towel, and my hair was still wet. I didn’t want to tempt fate.

I went back down the hall to my room and quickly got dressed in some jeans, sneakers, and a light sweater. Back in Shannon’s room, I noticed the nightstand drawer beside his bed was open. I pulled it out the rest of the way and gasped. Holy shit, there was a lot of cash. Small bills, mostly twenties. There must be a few thousand dollars in there. It’s not that I considered this an inordinately large sum of money. My bio-dad had given me a staggering amount after all. This was small potatoes by comparison. But my interaction with money had always been through the medium of plastic cards and distant vague numbers on bank computer screens, which my brain refused to fully process as money—even though it could buy me things. So this was a large amount of cash.

This was definitely a trap. It was all too convenient. Him abruptly leaving me, creating an emotional reason for me to leave... money in the dresser. Cell phone left behind—though that had been hidden in his pants and could have been an accident, but it also could have been intentional. Shannon never left his clothes lying around. Then there was the unarmed balcony door and the trellis with an easy way to the ground level and freedom outside.

There was still a part of me that feared he wanted me gone from his home. Like he was tired of me, and maybe he did feel some spark of something that made him not want to kill me, but nothing else beyond that to make him want me to continue invading his personal space like this. But if he didn’t want me gone, it was definitely a test. Either way it was orchestrated, everything laid out so simply and enticingly.

I grabbed a few hundred out of the dresser and put half in one pocket and half in the other. It wasn’t like I was stealing it. He had full easy access to my accounts if he hadn’t already drained them. I could pay him back. Though I doubted he cared if I did.

I searched for a spare set of keys and was happily surprised to find one in the drawer with the money. I stepped outside and locked the balcony door behind me, then climbed down the trellis to the ground. Child’s play.

I wasn’t going to run, but I sure as shit was getting out of the house for a while. If he wanted me gone, he could have a conversation with me and tell me himself. Or he could put a bullet in my head. Whatever. But f*ck this. Even if I wanted to go, I wouldn’t leave this way. He had to be smart enough to know that by now. Maybe in the first day or two in his care I would have, but over weeks my feelings had changed.

I’d known in a vague way that Shannon lived in a nice neighborhood, but now I was walking through it, experiencing it live. I wasn’t even sure what month it was, which, now that I had my memories back, seemed extra disorienting. I was sure it was after Christmas, though.

I’d had opportunities to learn the date, but each time I’d only realized after the fact. Like when I’d been shopping online for clothes that first night... all I’d had to do was glance into the bottom right corner of the screen, but I’d been too flustered by everything. And the time I’d checked Shannon’s phone for his number. There wasn’t much time, and it just didn’t occur to me until Shannon’s phone was back in his pocket that I could have easily read the date on the phone. And even this morning with the red phone. I could have checked that, but I’d already taken the battery out when it occurred to me yet again. And by now I was too paranoid to put it back in. I was determined to remember to find out the date while I was out.

I hadn’t realized how close Shannon lived to town. He lived in a small town near Savannah, called Stoney Oak. From what little I’d seen in the car with him, there might be fifteen thousand people here, if I was being generous in my estimation. His parents lived inside Savannah proper, but it was still an easy drive to get from one place to the other. I wondered how he felt about his parents living so close. They could just drop in on him at any time, but so far since I’d been here, they’d maintained a polite and respectful distance.

It was maybe a mile walk into the main part of town—twenty minutes or so. Or it was that far into what had been the original downtown area at least. I wasn’t sure how much urban sprawl had overtaken the edges.

There was a small old-fashioned grocery store on the corner of a strip of buildings that looked like they’d been built maybe around the mid-eighteen hundreds. Next to that were several boutique stores that ranged in offerings from tourist-y gift shops to clothing stores.