The Watcher Girl(64)

“He does.”

“And he’s okay with it?”

She laughs a soft laugh. “He is. He understands. He accepts me for who I am, no matter how crazy I may seem sometimes.” Her laughter fades. “You know, he’s changed quite a bit, too. At least from what he tells me.”

I think of his apology. And the real tears.

“You know, I see so much of myself in you,” she adds. “My old self.”

Rising from the sofa, she makes her way close and cups my face in her hands, tender and compassionate.

“You’ve been through quite the ordeal, Grace,” she says. “You doing okay?”

Her eyes search the depths of mine, as if she’s gazing into my soul. And warmth blankets me with a sensation I can only describe as home, despite the fact that she and I are mere strangers in this world, sharing not an ounce of blood or a single memory other than what has transpired over the past several weeks.

And still, there’s almost a connection between us.

Almost.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll allow myself to feel it.

“Yeah. Just tired,” I say.

Tired of running. Tired of pushing. Tired of keeping those closest to me at an arm’s length.

“Lie back down, sweetheart.” She helps me get situated, fluffing my pillows and straightening my blanket. And she disappears into the kitchen, returning with a glass of ice water with a sprig of mint and wedge of lemon. “Get some more rest. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

I close my eyes and still my mind. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an emptiness deep inside me. One that no amount of love or compassion could fill. An incompleteness that gnawed at my soul. I spent years hating my past. Convinced that I’d become a whole person, that everything would settle into a better place, once I found my birth mother.

But that aching void is gone. At least in this moment. And for the first time, I have something I’ve never had—acceptance that the past was perfectly imperfect, knowledge that the future will be, too, and hope that I’ll be around to experience every raw, beautiful minute of it.

I fall asleep with Bliss’s idea of reinvention floating through my head.

Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.

The only thing I know for sure is that I’m keeping my name.

I can’t imagine being anyone else but Grace McMullen.





CHAPTER 43

I shouldn’t be here, standing at Sutton’s door, but I was passing by on my run, his car is in the driveway, and I have questions.

Also, I want to thank him—if he’ll let me.

Four days ago, Campbell was arrested and arraigned. The fact that he’s yet to bail her out gives me hope that he might not slam the door in my face.

I press the doorbell and face the camera, attempting to keep my expression light, which is difficult given the circumstances, but I manage.

He doesn’t keep me waiting. Within seconds, the doorframe fills with his presence. A brown bottle rests in his left hand. He hasn’t shaved since the last time I saw him.

“I was hoping you had a minute to chat?” I use “chat” instead of “talk,” hoping it’ll put him more at ease.

He scans me from head to toe—contemplating his decision, maybe—and then, without saying anything, he motions for me to enter.

“I just laid Gigi down for a nap,” he says, monotone.

The place isn’t a mess, but it’s less neat than before. A nonfiction book on a sofa cushion. An empty sippy cup. Toys thrown near the toy basket but not quite inside it.

“I don’t plan to stay long,” I tell him, sitting on the couch because this isn’t the kind of conversation you have standing up. “I just had a few questions . . . about last week . . . I’m trying to make sense of it, I guess. The timeline. What’s true and what isn’t. The police said you saved me.”

He lowers into an armchair and rests his beer on a coaster. “Yep.”

The man across from me is a different version of the one I once knew, and a different version of the one I’ve come to know. The bags under his eyes suggest little—if any—sleep lately, and I assume he’s trying to piece together what remains of the life he knew less than a week ago.

“First of all . . . thank you.” It’s strange thanking a man who, days ago, held a gun to my back and marched me through miles of forest, implying he was going to kill me. But from what Rose has told me, Sutton was instrumental in figuring out where we were. He was able to make a few phone calls to some friends of theirs and narrow it down to the cabin in north Jersey long before the police were able to serve a warrant to the car rental company to perform a satellite locate. He hightailed it out there before the police arrived, knowing that he could handle her better than any hostage negotiator because he knew more than anyone what she needed to hear. The police weren’t too thrilled with his decision, initially.

“She was obsessed with you.” He reaches for his beer, stopping to graze his thumb over a peeling corner of label. “To the point that it drove her insane.”

“Clearly.”

His eyes flash to mine. “No. Long before this. When we first started dating, when she saw a photo of you on my phone, she was fascinated by the fact that the two of you looked alike. And it was pure coincidence. That or I guess I have a type. But she fixated on it. And years later, she found this old box I kept of . . . things . . . from college. And it sent her over the edge.”