The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(61)

“How are you both doing?” he said as they emerged. She saw him take note of their clasped hands.

“About how you’d expect,” David said.

Charles nodded solemnly.

“Can we go to the yurt now?” David said. “Do they need me for anything else?”

“I think they’re done for now,” Charles said. “There may be some more questions later, but for now, you should be with your friends and get some rest. I’ll get someone to walk you over.”

“Can we skip that?” David said. “Can we just go? It’s not like you won’t know where we are.”

“I think that will be fine,” Charles said. “The two of you can go together.”

David started to go, Stevie trailing along, linked to him.

“Don’t worry, Stevie,” Charles said quietly as they left. “Everything will be all right. We’ll speak to your parents.”

David turned at this, taking note, and then the two of them went down the iron staircase and out into the cold night.

The stars were bright overhead. On nights with no clouds, the star fields over Ellingham were like nothing Stevie had ever seen—so many of them, so many more than she knew. There was a half moon, low and buttery yellow, casting a bit of light over the lawn and the Great House.

They were approaching one of the pathway lights, where a security camera perched above them. He stopped and stared at the camera.

“The school seems to be very understanding,” David said after a moment.

“About what?”

“About your parents,” he replied. “Making sure they don’t get freaked out. It must be hard to keep everyone calm when your students keep dying.”

“I guess,” she said.

“You must have given your parents a really good speech to convince them to let you come back,” he said. “What did you say to them?”

There was thunder in her ears.

“I . . . I don’t know what motivates my parents.”

It was a nonanswer, and it did not work on David the way it had on Nate.

“I was on the roof when you got back,” he said. “I saw you come home. It was late. I mean, I was pretty high at the time, but I know it was late on a Friday night.”

It wasn’t a question, and that was terrifying.

“You guys must have been driving for a long time,” he said.

“I flew,” she said.

“Oh. Sweet. Didn’t you drive up the first time?”

She had to open her mouth and answer, because every passing second told the tale for her. But how? Because the truth now was a confession, not a gift.

The blue eye of the camera observed them coolly.

“The plane is nice,” he said. “Did he try to get you to eat the chips?”

Several seconds ticked by. Or was it a minute? Time was starting to stretch and bleed over the landscape. The stars crowded to hear her answer.

“Listen . . .”

Such a terrible word to start with, listen. So defensive.

“I’m listening,” he said.

She wanted to go back, rewind, back to the tunnel, back to the kissing. Back to the laughing. Back to the dark. She could have told him then. He would have understood. But you can’t go back. You can’t re-create the conditions.

David sat down on one of the benches along the path and stretched his legs out long in front of him. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited.

“How did I not work this out before?” he said. “It was so obvious.” He smirked and shook his head.

“He came to my house,” Stevie said. “He was there when I got home from school on Friday. He was talking to my parents. He brought information about all of this security. He convinced them I should be able to come back.”

“That was nice of him,” David said. “And he said, ‘Come on my plane’?”

“I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to be with him.”

“But you took the ride,” he said.

“Of course I took the ride,” she shot back. “I needed to get back. I knew he doesn’t do stuff just to be nice. I asked him what he wanted and he said . . . nothing . . . I just needed to be here, because . . .”

Stevie couldn’t find her foothold. She’d made her lunge, and now there was nothing—just a smooth, slippery surface. David was doing what good interrogators do: when someone is confessing, you let them talk. And the impulse was there. She had to talk.

“He wanted me to, just, talk to you. Because he said you were freaking out. And that was it, and I . . . Would you say something?”

“Like what?” he said. His voice was cool. There was still a trace of thickness from when he had been crying, but all other emotion was gone.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said, her voice cracking.

“What I want from you? Yeah, you’ve been hanging with my dad. Even you. He even got you.”

A few more tears trickled from his eyes, but he laughed, hoarse and miserable, his every last suspicion of the world confirmed.

So Stevie did what guilty people do when confronted. She ran. It was a ridiculous impulse, but it was the only one that made sense at the moment. She took off down the path, her feet thudding against the brick. But it seemed absurd to be running away in full view of David, so she turned to go across the relative dark of the green. Running is one of the most human responses of all. Fight or flight. Like her therapist said, once you start the circuit of response, you have to complete it. If you feel like you have to fly, you fly until your body tells you to stop or until you are stopped by an outside force.