Never Have I Ever(54)

Her face cleared. “Oh, we knew the Gasts. Lovely family. They moved to be closer to the grandkids. You aren’t far off. Go that way, maybe ten houses down?” She pointed back the way I’d come.

“Thank you!” I said. “How long have you lived here? Did you know my parents? The Dennings?”

“I don’t know that name, no,” she said. “But we’ve only been here fifteen years.”

“Yes, they’d moved away by then,” I said, perky. “It’s strange, but I don’t remember this house at all. Who did you buy it from?”

“No one,” she said, and chuckled at my blank expression. “We built it. This was an empty lot. No wonder you’re confused, between our place and Shantytown across the street.”

I did my best to give her a sympathetic look. Poor her, beset by climbers who could only afford homes in the high six figures.

“I can’t believe the woods are gone,” I said. It was the only sympathetic thing I could say that was true. “Thanks for the directions.”

I walked back toward my Subaru. This house hadn’t even existed, and I’d ruled out the others. So where had Roux been standing?

She’d seen the crash. She’d described it, on the day she’d come to wring a confession out of me. She’d asked me if I remembered the sounds, the smells. . . . I stopped dead in the middle of the road.

Those things were the same in all car crashes.

She’d claimed she witnessed the wreck when she was pretending to be Lolly Shipley.

She’d never said she saw it from a window. That was my assumption. She’d gone along with it. But what had she known, really, that I had not prompted?

She knew my maiden name. Knew my history. Knew about the accident. That I had money. That I had so much guilt I’d already given tons of it away.

She’d sought Boyce out, in fact, because she knew my story. If she wasn’t a witness, then how had she known all that? Most especially, how had she known that I was driving?

When I asked that question, it got simple. Because the list of people who knew that I’d been behind the wheel was very short.

Me, but silence had long been my specialty.

My mother, but she had the knowledge buried so deep that she did not admit it even to herself. I knew exactly how that worked.

“Shit,” I said out loud, because there was only one more person.

Only one person alive who could have sold me out to Roux.

Tig. Fucking. Simms.





10




I drove to Divers Down to pick up wet suits and air tanks. Then I had to go straight home, and yet every molecule in me yearned west, bending toward Tig Simms. Anxiety came in waves, and at the crest of each I was sure that Tig was in on it. More than in. The orchestrator. He was Roux’s mystery husband, Luca’s father, and the whole plan had been his from the start.

But if this was true, then he had to know that I’d paid off his mortgage. Why send Roux? He could have come to me himself, said, Do you really think that was all that three years of my life were worth? Write another check.

Maybe because this hurt more. If hurting me mattered, then they’d done a gonzo job. This hurt like hell. But when I put his three incarcerated years in terms of Oliver, in terms of losing that time myself, I deserved it.

Then the wave would pass, and hope would swell behind it. I would be suddenly, equally sure that Roux was using him. Tig was her unwitting pawn. He would know things about her—her maiden name, her home base, more of her “clients”—that could help me. Assuming he had any desire to help me.

But why would he? I would ask, and anxiety would rise again.

It was an unceasing, churning cycle, but I couldn’t go to Tig and end it. I had to retrieve Oliver, meet Luca, keep Roux happy and complacent. She’d been smart to book my time up, keep me watched and busy.

As I pulled in to my driveway, I saw Luca already sitting on my front porch steps like an orphan, staring deep into the mysteries of his cell phone, wearing his expensive wireless headphones.

I made myself smile and call to him, “Hey, Luca,” in a normal voice. To him I was only Maddy’s nice Monster, doing him a favor, not one of his mother’s “clients,” paying the universe for all the bad I’d put into the world.

He must have heard me over his music, because he looked up and turned the beam of his white smile on me. It was so spectacular that my breath caught. When I was fifteen, what would I have done to get a boy this beautiful to make that smile for me? Anything. That was the answer, and my heart quailed for Maddy. Luca hurried toward me with unabashed excitement, pushing the headphones down around his neck.

“Hey, Ms. Whey. This is so cool. Thank you!” he said, sounding genuinely grateful.

I planted him on my keeping-room sofa with some OJ and the open-water textbook. He got to it, studying, and the right way, too. Each chapter had learning objectives in the form of questions at the front, and he was underlining the answers as he came to them. He didn’t even put headphones on, giving the book his whole attention.

I kept catching myself staring at the kid, seeking Tig in the straight lines of his nose, his wide, full mouth, his chiseled jawline. I couldn’t see it.

Which meant exactly nothing. Genes were funny things, and anyway, Tig could be Roux’s husband whether Luca was his child or not. He could just as easily be her business partner. Or her patsy. Watching Luca, I wished I had a textbook, too. The DIYer’s Guide to Blackmailers. Machiavelli for Dummies. Something that would help me figure out Tig’s motives. The only way to know for sure was to go to him. Ask him myself.