Never Have I Ever(58)

Now he really had surprised me. Of course he knew why I’d helped him. Was he lying? I still had no doubt that his path had crossed with Roux’s at some point. He’d told her all about me. About us, and what we’d done. Nothing else made sense. But why would he sell me out to Roux if he wasn’t angry or vengeful? If he was grateful? It made no sense.

“Tig,” I said. I looked at my coffee, because I couldn’t look at him right then. “You know why. I owed you. I think I probably still do.”

“You don’t owe me shit,” he said.

I couldn’t let that stand. “You wanted to sleep it off. I’m the one who said we had to go. I’m the one who—”

He cut me off, repeating, “You don’t owe me shit. I owe you.”

He took a sip of his coffee. Then we sat in silence for half a minute, because clearly he didn’t want it said out loud, what we had done. He didn’t want me to call up the ghost of Mrs. Shipley.

I had to break the quiet, though. I was on the clock. Timeless as the room felt, it was ticking on, relentlessly, outside this place.

I said, “Can you tell me about Angelica Roux, then?”

I was looking into his eyes, but he had no serious reaction. A little puzzled, maybe.

“I don’t know her,” he said.

If he was lying, he was better than me. Better than Roux, even.

“You must. You told her about me, the accident. You told her—” He was still looking at me, open-faced, but what I was saying did not seem to be connecting. “She’s beautiful, tall and pale. Long dark hair. Crazy yoga body. She has a teenage son, same hair as her—”

His face cleared. “You mean Ange Renault.”

The name was similar enough to pause me. I shrugged, but he was pulling his phone out of his pocket. He scrolled to a picture and showed me. “I’ve never seen a woman that beautiful who was camera-shy, but I only got this by accident.”

It was a picture of a car, a Firebird in terrible shape. The house was in the background, though. There, out on the lawn, a woman very like Roux stood in profile, talking to someone who wasn’t in the shot. I zoomed in, her perfect face growing fuzzier as I got closer, but I had no doubt. It was her.

I closed my eyes in a long blink. Angelica Roux was not her real name. How na?ve I had been, with my assumptions and my Googling! It had never occurred to me that she would lie on this most basic level. But of course she would, and now that I thought about it, her name didn’t even sound real. It sounded like the pirate queen from the pages of a bodice ripper. No wonder there was nothing—literally nothing—about her online. Ange Renault didn’t sound much realer, though I’d Google that name later, just to be sure. Both names were dramatic, and French, and had the same initials. Maybe she chose noms de plume that sounded close to her real name.

If I had her real name, what kind of power would that give me? She was using fake ones for a reason. There might be a warrant for her arrest. That seemed likely, given her profession. Her real name might be all I needed to own her.

“Rumpelstiltskin. Rumpelstiltskin.”

I didn’t realize I’d whispered it aloud until Tig said, “What?”

“Sorry, I— Ange Renault. This is her. This is who I meant. When did you meet her?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” Tig said.

“Two weeks?” I said, shocked.

“Maybe three,” He said.

God, but she moved fast. She’d moved in fast on me anyway. She must have left here and gone straight to sex with Boyce Skelton, then landed in my neighborhood twelve days ago.

“Tell me about her. Tell me everything,”

And Tig, unlike any other person on the planet, didn’t ask me one damn question. He simply told me.

He’d met Roux at a junkyard he frequented. He was skimming for parts. She was there to sell a beater Honda so ancient that Tig wouldn’t have let a dog drive it. Luca was with her, sitting in the office playing with his phone, but at first all Tig saw was Roux, sexy as hell and clearly in a mess. She didn’t have the paperwork for the car, only her word that she owned it. The junkyard owner, a shady guy named Pete, was negotiating price with her.

Pete took a phone call, and Tig and “Ange” had started talking.

“The car was stolen?” I asked.

“Technically, not that that would bother Pete much,” he said. “But it was hers-ish.”

“‘Hers-ish’ is not really a legal term,” I told him, and he smiled.

According to Roux, her husband had the pink slip, but it was her car. She and Luca, whom she introduced as “Randy,” had left the husband; he wasn’t good to her. He wasn’t good to her boy either, she’d said, in a way that was pregnant with subtext. The husband was looking for them, she told Tig, eyes wide, clearly frightened. Tig asked her if it was a custody issue. He didn’t want any part of a kidnapping charge.

She swore it wasn’t. The husband was Randy’s stepdad. His real dad wasn’t in the picture, and that made sense to Tig; she’d obviously had the kid quite young.

I had to work hard not to snort there. Sure she had.

Tig believed her. She talked about taking a beating like a woman who knew how. Plus, she’d had old bruises on her back and hips.

“You saw her hips?” I said, though this was not germane. And not at all my business.