Never Have I Ever(47)

That meant I had to find a third way out.

Roux had begun this as a game. She’d told me not to play. But I already was. I had to. More than that. I had to win.

It was an easy thing to say. I have to beat her at her own game. But I had never played before. I didn’t even know all the rules, and she was a pro. It was as crazy as my challenging LeBron James to a driveway round of Horse, and yet I couldn’t see another choice.

Also? I was pretty fucking good at it.

My past and my quiet, watchful nature combined to make me a natural. I’d seen through Roux, after all. She’d gambled, claiming to be Lolly Shipley without all the facts. God, if it had worked? I’d have given her anything. It was emotionally smart. But it had tipped her hand. Coming at me unprepared like that, plus the dingy house—I’d understood gut deep that she was under some external pressure. Money or time, she was short on one or both. I’d used that understanding to buy myself this night to decide. How much more rope would she give me if I pushed her?

Quite a bit, I thought. She only had the one great big red button. She wouldn’t push it. Not as long as she believed she’d get my money in the end. The moment she understood that I was never going to pay, I had no doubt she’d wreck me, but in this gap I had some room to work.

I was up half the night, staring into the darkness, thinking while Davis slept deep and easy. I could hear Oliver through the baby monitor, sighing and shifting every now and again, but mostly sleeping sweetly, innocent.

I needed a plan that did not involve the police or an appeal to Roux’s better nature. The first option ensured that all my secrets would come out, and as for the second—a better nature—Roux didn’t seem to have one. At some point I shifted from waking to dreaming, falling into a fantasy world where Roux had simply disappeared. Mysteriously. Never to be seen again. I understood that this was on me. If she disappeared, it would be because I made it so.

I jerked awake, startled and sweating. Beside me Davis stirred briefly. I froze, waiting for sleep to reclaim him, my body stiff, my eyes staring wide into the darkness.

Disappearing Roux was a road I would not let myself go down. Not even in dreams.

I had once, long ago, taken a human life. I understood the kind of gap that created in the world. It was greater than the sum of its parts. I wouldn’t purposefully create another absence, no matter what, I told myself. I didn’t have the stomach for it. Roux was awful, and she deserved to be in prison, but she also had a child who clearly loved her, needed her.

Perhaps that was the key? Her human connections. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of a narrow path, a crevice I could maybe squeeze through between paying her and the truth. Every person has a soft spot.

Hers was Luca. Each time I brought him up, I felt a stillness in her. Motherhood was too powerful for even Roux to be immune to it. Oliver had caused a shift in me, waking me to depths of love I’d never suspected lived inside me. I’d loved Maddy and Davis before he came, but his arrival had deepened those loves. He’d been so small and sleepy, so fully in my care. His vulnerability in the face of the cold world made me understand how vulnerable Davis and Maddy were, too, and how very mine.

Mother love must be alive inside Roux, or her kid wouldn’t be so . . . nice. As much as I hated Roux, I couldn’t deny that Luca came across as a kid who’d been loved from birth on up. Not that she deserved some kind of medal for it. Every mammal protected its own babies, including rats and weasels. It was hardwired into the biology. Even my own mother, cold as she was, had once upon a time hired me a lawyer.

What if I could dig up some equal and opposing dirt on Roux? Something truly ugly, that could buy her silence sure as money could. I was willing to bet that Roux had dirty laundry—plenty—and every mother had a secret grown-up life apart from her kid. If I owned that, could I own her the same way she owned me? We could stare each other down, crouched over our big red buttons. Mutually assured destruction.

I felt a sparking of real hope. She was better at this than I was, more experienced, but I didn’t have to win, after all. I only had to play down to a draw, get enough to make her walk away.

I needed two things: a secret and to know who she was hiding it from. I didn’t know how to get the first thing, not yet, but I did have a line on the second. If I was willing.

They were here on business, Roux had said. She’d warned Luca not to get embedded. That meant that somewhere Luca had real friends. A father. Roux herself had claimed a husband more than once. I needed to find their home base. No sense threatening her with exposure if I had no one to expose her to. She could take Luca and vanish, then destroy my life from afar.

At least I knew where to start looking. In 1991 she’d lived in my neighborhood. She’d seen the wreck, or at least seen me stagger out on the driver’s side. That meant she’d lived in one of the few houses that faced the woods at the T intersection where Rainway Street met the woods and the old dirt road.

I had to go back there. It was the last patch of earth I ever wanted to revisit, but I had to see which houses had windows that overlooked the sight of the wreck. The lots were large, so it couldn’t be more than three or four. I’d find out who owned those houses back in 1991. I was pretty sure the county would keep records on that down at the courthouse. If not, there were other ways. People remembered things like that, so I would ask. I would find Roux’s family.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. An idea. A direction I could walk in. It was better than feeling helpless, and I thought I could get some sleep, even though right now my plan truly amounted to just three words: