No One Knows Us Here(75)

CHAPTER 24


I woke up to distant voices, to laughter, to clattering pots and pans. Wendy! I sat up straight in bed and looked around for something to put on. As I padded down the hallway, the laughter grew louder. A voice came from the kitchen, a deep, male voice, and for a moment I let myself think it was Sam, because wouldn’t that be perfect?

Wendy sat at the head of the dining room table. Before her lay plates of food, some of it hot, the steam rising up from them in lazy swirls. Dozens of pancakes, a bowl of fresh blueberries, wedges of cantaloupe. She wasn’t eating any of it, but she held a fork in one hand.

I was so relieved to see her that I gave a little gasp. My arms opened, and I wanted to lunge toward her, hold on to her, make sure she was really there, but something stopped me.

“You’re up!” she said in a falsely bright tone. Her eyes inspected me, taking in my appearance, which couldn’t have improved much even after a long, turbulent sleep. “Are you okay?”

As if responding to a stage cue, Leo stepped out from the kitchen bearing a plate of fried eggs. He’d fried up a whole dozen and arranged them in a neat design, like the overlapping slices of apple on a tarte Tatin. My first thought was how odd that was, this geometric egg arrangement. Each egg a uniform circle, the bright-orange yolks quivering in the center. I’d never seen anything like it. My second thought was that Leo Glass was the one holding the plate, standing in my kitchen, trying to feed my sister.

“Hungry?” Leo said.

I froze. Wendy was staring at me, waiting for direction. I could have yelled at him. I could have told Wendy to call the police. I didn’t do either of those things. Maybe I should have. Maybe if I had, things wouldn’t have ended the way they did.

Instead, I did what I had been doing for the last five months. I played along. I sat down next to my sister and raised my eyes to Leo. “Starving.” I helped myself to three pancakes and an egg. “Aren’t you having any, Wendy?”

She placed a hand on her stomach. “I already had breakfast.”

“When did you get home?”

Wendy glanced quickly at Leo, then back at me. “Hannah dropped me off last night. You were out like a light.” She spoke in a crisp, formal style that wasn’t like her at all. No trace of that vocal fry.

I wanted to communicate to her somehow that I knew what I was doing. That this was the way to handle Leo Glass. It seemed to me then that if I could just get through that breakfast, he would leave. I could play nice and get him out the door. I didn’t want him there, in my apartment, where he didn’t belong. He wasn’t supposed to be there. I wanted Wendy to know that. I wanted her to know I had tried. I had tried to keep him away from her, all this time.

Leo sat across from me, his eyes darting back and forth between me and Wendy. He speared a cube of cantaloupe with his fork and took a dainty bite.

“This is certainly a surprise,” I said to him now.

“Thought I’d check up on you,” he said.

We appraised each other from across the table.

“We’ll eat breakfast,” I said. “And then you need to leave.”

Leo dabbed at his face with the edge of a cloth napkin. He raised his eyebrows at me. “I need to leave? It seems to me that I pay for this place.”

“It’s over, Leo. I told you that.” I tried again to pull the ring from my finger, but it still wouldn’t budge past my knuckle.

“Oh my god,” Wendy said at the sight of the ring. She didn’t sound excited. She sounded terrified.

“I asked your sister to marry me.” Leo smiled broadly and placed a hand on Wendy’s shoulder, and that’s when I stood up, quickly, scraping the chair across the hardwood floor so fast it toppled over, crashing to the floor.

“Get your hand off my sister and get out of here. Now.”

“Or what?”

Suddenly all my jangled nerves—the fear, the anger—smoothed over. When I answered Leo, my voice was low and steady. Sam had been right. I just needed a good night’s sleep to clear my head. Everything seemed very clear to me then, sunlight through a polished window. After all these months, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Wasn’t this what Sam had been telling me? Leo was a bad person. It wasn’t just me and Wendy anymore, either. What about those factory workers in China? What about the environment? I could fix everything. I just needed the courage to follow through with it.

A weight lifted from me then. I felt lighter, better. Better than I’d felt for days, weeks. Months. I could make everything all right.

I may have even smiled at him. That was how I remembered it. I smiled and I said, “Or I’ll kill you.”

“Rosemary—” my sister started.

“Go to your room,” I told my sister. When she opened her mouth to protest, I shot out, “Now!” and she jumped up and scampered away like a startled cat.

Across the table, Leo stood up, slowly, his hands raised.

“You shouldn’t have come over. That was our agreement.”

I braced myself for his reaction. Surprise, hurt, anger—whatever it was, I would deal with it.

Instead he bowed his head in contrition. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I tried calling but—”

“You won’t be able to reach me. Not anymore.”

“You disappeared from the airport. I was worried.”