Our Little Secret(49)
“Does anyone die in this story?” Olive rasped. Her eyes were closed.
“I’m not sure yet. When the little girl was born, her mom and dad were the proudest parents in the land. They threw a huge party with cake and balloons and sparklers. But at the party an evil, jealous witch snuck in and she poisoned the cake and her mom ate it and fell down asleep for five whole years.”
“The mom was poisoned?” She was captured the way kids always are with dark stories.
“For five whole years she was asleep and the witch took the place of the mom and tricked the little girl and the daddy.”
“How did she trick them?”
“By pretending she was the mom.”
Olive opened her eyes. Her little-girl tummy pressed against her pajama top. “Does the real mom wake up and kill the witch and the family lives happily ever after, The End?”
“Well, life’s not always like that.”
Olive sighed sweet hot breath towards my face and rolled over, tumbling nearer to sleep. “Poor Godmother Angie,” she mumbled.
“Why poor me?”
“There’s a mommy and a daddy. You’re the witch.”
“I’m not the witch! Why am I the witch?”
But she’d fallen asleep. I left her room quietly, my face hot with injustice.
Novak’s pager beeps and he stands up jerkily. “There’s someone who wants to see you.” His exit is rushed like a new idea.
chapter
* * *
19
When the door to the interview room opens again I expect it to be Novak with my mom. It’s the kind of move he’d make: drag the parent into the principal’s office to make the disappointing kid feel worse.
But it’s not her.
HP walks the few steps to the chair alone, and my stomach twists with a longing to hug him. His flip-flops clack. I haven’t seen him for two weeks and he looks tired and frayed, although he’s recently shaved.
“Hi.” He doesn’t smile, but he’s not giving off rage, either. “Are they treating you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry about Saskia,” I say.
He nods slowly and gives me another look I can’t read. “LJ, I know it’s crazy, but I can’t help thinking that she’s left me. You know, just walked out.”
“That’s what I keep telling Novak!”
“Yeah, you get it. And you know what? Maybe she was right to. I mean, we’ve been having some . . . Well, it doesn’t matter, but this kind of shock gets a guy to thinking. We should have spent more time together, you and me.”
My breath catches in my throat. This is all I’ve ever wanted.
“I’m sorry about stuff I did to you in Oxford and all the years since.”
I daren’t exhale. There’s a flood buried inside me. I’m a well no one’s looked into for years.
I take a deep, steadying breath. I hadn’t expected an apology. “What are you going to do about Saskia? I mean, when they find her or she comes back?”
He looks towards the door, then at his feet. “Novak told me he has a new lead. Do you know anything that could help him?”
There it is. At the very center of his soft blue eyes, I can see the truth, the pickax metal hatred he’s trying to hide.
“You fucking bastard,” I say.
He sits back and flounders. “LJ, what do you—?”
“You come in here and manipulate me?”
“She’s my wife, Angela. And she’s disappeared. Do you understand what that even means?”
“Does that give you a right to lie to me? To manipulate me? Oh, Novak must have thought it was a masterstroke, sending you in here. Who’s to say you didn’t hurt her yourself?”
He’s suddenly glacial, his eyes cold. When he launches, it’s feral how fast he moves. He has one hand around my throat before my chair even tips back, before it clatters to the floor. Part of me is excited by the swiftness with which he grabs me, but I can hardly get air.
“Where’s my wife?” he yells.
My feet are off the floor now, my eyes bulging and wet. The door flings open and Novak and a couple of cops barrel in behind him. It takes all of them to pull HP off me. When the white of his fingertips finally slips from the skin of my throat, I slide down the wall, my lungs raking. Novak speaks into HP’s ear while I gasp for breath. I can’t hear Novak’s words but he calms HP down fast, then guides him out of the room, leaving me on the ground with the feel of HP’s hands still on my skin.
chapter
* * *
20
I’m still trying to catch my breath when Novak comes back in, and as he takes his seat, he has just one question for me: What did you do to make HP hate you this much? But all I can think about are the years I’ve put aside for HP, all the times I’ve tried to show him how much I care. And still he doesn’t know me. In the end, all roads lead to Saskia Parker, however hard I try. Whether or not Novak finds her, she isn’t the great disappearance. She never was the most serious theft.
Novak, for his part, has been trying his best to follow the bread crumbs I’ve scattered along the way. At least he’s making an effort. Maybe he deserves the rest of the story now. It’s time to tell him what I did.