What Lies in the Woods(91)

“That was years before he was arrested,” Ethan said raggedly. “He killed three women in that time. Probably more. If I’d told someone, maybe they would still be alive. But I couldn’t. So when you lied, I didn’t say anything. I’m not angry that you sent my father to prison, Naomi. I’m grateful. You did what I wasn’t brave enough to do. I never wanted to hurt you. I only wanted to understand.”

“And do you?” I asked, scraped empty. “Did you get what you wanted from me?”

“Naomi, please,” he said, two thin words splitting open with the weight of all they contained.

“Get out of here,” I told him.

“Please.” His hand moved down my wrist, fingers sliding under my palm. I pulled my hand away from his. We stood, inches apart, not touching. My fear was gone. Only the electric pulse of anger remained. Every man I’d slept with had been a mistake of one kind or another. The mistake was the point. You couldn’t let someone in without it breaking you, but you could choose the way you broke.

It shouldn’t hurt like this. It shouldn’t feel like this, unless I had felt something I never let myself feel.

His fingertips brushed the hollow of my throat. He pressed his brow against mine and I let him, a feeling that wasn’t quite pain spilling over my skin, tracing the patterns of my scars.

I wrapped his shirt around my fist. I kissed him roughly, my teeth on his lip, his fingers digging into my shoulder in a startled grip, and I pulled him back, pulled him down.

It was rough and fast, anger and hunger and pain. I turned my face away and broke apart, and the cracks were beautiful across my skin.





I twisted out from under Ethan as soon as it was done. We hadn’t used a condom, and I swore quietly as I cleaned myself off and yanked my underwear back on.

“Naomi,” Ethan said. I hated the sound of my name in his mouth. The way he said it so tenderly, like he was afraid that if he pressed it would split like overripe fruit.

I turned back to him. He sat on the edge of the bed, those earnest eyes searching mine. “Get out,” I told him.

“I thought—”

“I want you to leave, Ethan.” He’d lied to me. Lied and manipulated and made me trust him. Made me feel for him. I was done. I knew the map of my scars again, the ones you could see and the ones under the surface, and now I was finished.

I watched him get dressed. He avoided my eyes. He stopped one more time in the doorway and looked like he might say something, but he thought better of it. I listened to his footsteps until they reached the front door. Listened to his engine start up and the tires crunch away down the gravel drive.

My body echoed with the ghost of his touch. I had lost nothing, I told myself. A man I’d known for a few days, who turned out not to even really exist.

The mirrored back of the closet doors threw a hash-marked reflection back at me. Some of the scars had blurred and faded. Others remained as ridges and knots. I ran my fingers over them in a roaming inventory. Ribs—two. Chest—three. Stomach—six. Arms—four. Face—one. I turned to see the single knot of scar tissue on my back, below my left shoulder blade.

It took a long time to stab someone seventeen times. You had to be focused. Or you had to be in such a manic rage that the seconds blurred.

I tried to picture it. Jim seeing me crawl up out of that hole, realizing what it meant. Coming up behind me.

Jim Green was a lifelong Chester native. He did the things men of Chester were supposed to do. He drank hard, worked an honest job, hated liberals, went hunting on the weekends. Jim Green knew how to take a knife to a still-kicking deer and stop its struggling.

I imagined his hand in my hair. Saw the knife swiped once across my throat. Or driven in through my spine. Quick, clean, and finished.

These were not the scars of an execution. This was rage. The person who did this to me wanted me to suffer. Oscar, then.

He would have wanted you to see him. The thought came unbidden, but once it arrived I couldn’t shake it. Oscar would have wanted me to know it was him and be afraid. To wrap his hands around my throat and feel the fragile crumpling of bones.

I told myself I was being ridiculous. He wouldn’t have cared whether he killed me with a knife or by strangling me. He’d just wanted to obliterate me.

I pulled my dress on. Tires on gravel signaled another arrival, but by the time I shoved my feet into my shoes to see who it was, Dad was calling.

“You still here?”

I stepped out into the hall. He gave my disheveled appearance a good looking-over. “Passed that Ethan Schreiber fellow on the way up the drive,” he said.

“He won’t be coming back,” I replied.

“Huh,” was all he said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Stopped by the bank while I was waiting on the food. Thought I’d get you those records. From the trust.”

I walked forward leadenly and took it from him. It was a statement from when the trust was set up, and there it was—a thirty-thousand-dollar lump sum. “I thought you said the money was from Jim Green,” I said.

“Sure, because it was. He offered, I said yes, the money arrived. Simple.”

“This payment isn’t from Jim. It’s from Green Mountain Solutions,” I said.

“I guess he did it through some company. That’s one of his, isn’t it?”