Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(33)

“Bullies, and no reason. Jeez, leave it, Mom. I’m fine.”

“Would you like to learn some moves from Javi? Or—” I almost say Mr. Cade, but I stop myself. I just met the man. I don’t really know how Connor feels about him. I don’t know how I feel about him.

“I’m not starring in some teen movie,” he tells me. “It doesn’t work like that in real life. By the time I get any good I’ll be graduated.”

“Yeah, but think of the epic graduation fight,” I tell him. “Middle of the school auditorium? Everybody cheering while you take down your bullies?”

He pauses the game. “More like me ending up bloody and in the hospital, and all of us getting charged with assault. They never show you that part in the movies.”

I don’t quite know how to phrase it, so I say, “Connor . . . how did you meet Mr. Cade today?”

“Well, Mom, he lured me into a rape van with a puppy.”

“Connor!”

“I’m not stupid!” He flings that at me like a knife, and I admit, it startles. I start to speak, but he runs right over me, never taking his eyes off the screen as the image of a car shifts lanes, speeds, jumps, rounds corners. “I got beat up, I walked home, I sat on the dock, and he just asked me if I was okay. Don’t make it some freaky Serial Dad creeper thing, all right! He was just nice! Not every guy in the world has to be an asshole!”

“I never—” I’m shocked not only by what he says but also by the anger behind it. I haven’t realized how much my son has taken his anger and turned it on me until this moment. It’s understandable, of course; why wouldn’t he? I’m here to represent the shitty life he leads, every day.

It begs a larger question. I do treat every person I meet with suspicion—and men more than women. I do that out of sheer self-preservation. But I realize now that in doing so, I’ve appeared unreasonable in my son’s eyes. After all, if I distrust those people, especially men, will I eventually look at him the same way? He has to wonder. After all, he’s his father’s child.

It breaks my heart and shatters the pieces, and I feel tears gather in my eyes. I blink them away.

“I’ll get an ice pack for that nose,” I tell him, and leave.

I run into Lanny in the kitchen. She’s making lunch—enough for all of us, I see, a pasta chicken dish that she’s spicing with great abandon. She’s a good cook, if a little liberal on flavors. When I open the freezer, she hands me an ice pack already prepared. “Here,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Didn’t want to interrupt mommy-son time.”

“Thanks, honey,” I say, and I mean it. “Looks tasty.”

“Oh, you’ll definitely taste it,” she says cheerfully, continuing her stirring while I deliver Connor’s ice pack. He’s already laser-focused on the game, so I leave it next to him and hope he’ll remember to use it before it melts.

“Lanny,” I say, as I set the table. “You should go back to school this afternoon. I’ll call in an excuse for you.”

“Ha. No. I’m staying here.”

“Don’t you have an English test?”

“Why do you think I’m staying here?”

“Lanny.”

“Okay, Mom, I get it, fine, whatever.” She turns the burner off on the stove with an unnecessarily violent snap of her wrist and bangs the skillet down on a hot pad on the dinner table. “Eat up.”

There’s no use arguing. “Go get your brother.”

She does that without complaint, at least, and lunch is good. Filling. Even Connor seems to like it enough to try to smile, though he winces and probes at his swollen nose afterward. I place phone calls, Connor and I drive Lanny to school, and I think longingly again about the van that waits at Javier’s house.

I also think that running almost ensures another stir of interest, and eventual links to our real identities. Maybe we don’t need to pull up our tentative roots quite so quickly. Maybe I’m overreacting, the way I did when I pointed a gun at my own son not so long ago.

I’m well aware that my paranoia is part of my huge, overwhelming desire to never give up control, ever again. And I know that same impulse could be hurting my children.

Like Connor, caught between uncomplicated childhood love and adult hate, and nowhere to stand in between. Like Lanny, defiant and furious and ready to take on the world, but far too young to do it.

I need to think of them. What they need. And as I stand in the hallway and wipe tears from my cheeks, I realize that what they might need right now is for me to stand my ground and trust that we’re going to get through this. Not just another hopeless late-night flight, another town, another set of names to memorize until none of them are real anymore. Their childhood has been incinerated. Destroyed. And running is one more log on that fire.

It’s ironic that there are protection programs for witnesses, but not for us. Never for us.

But the body in the lake. It nags at me, having this spotlight focused so close to us. There are similarities to my husband’s crimes, but I tell myself that it isn’t an uncommon way to dispose of a body. I’ve done that research, obsessively, trying to understand Melvin Royal, trying to understand how that killer could be the man I thought I knew and loved.

I can hear Mel’s mental whisper again: The smartest ones are never found out. I never would have been, except for that stupid drunk driver. Our lives would have gone on just the same.