The Wife Upstairs(26)

Old habits, I guess.

And John’s church is in Vestavia, something I should’ve remembered, but in the weeks since I’ve moved out, it’s been so easy to forget about John altogether.

Now I ignore him, but I’m flustered, and when I press the button to unlock the car, I hit the alarm instead, the shrill beeping seeming louder than it actually is.

“Fuck,” I mutter, trying to hit whatever button will make it stop, but then as soon as I find it, John is right there, so close to me that I can smell his cheap deodorant, probably something called “Mountain Lynx,” or “Fresh Iceberg.”

“I’m actually glad I bumped into you,” he says, and I move back, my shoulder blade hitting the side mirror of the SUV.

“Well, I’m having the opposite reaction to bumping into you,” I reply, “so I’m—”

“Someone called the apartment looking for you.”

I freeze, a numbness starting in my fingertips, spreading up my arms. Which is stupid because it could be anyone. Maybe Roasted wanted to offer me my old job back. I had written down the apartment’s landline as a contact, hadn’t I? And I’d applied for tons of jobs when I first moved here. That had been a long time ago, but still, people could be looking through old applications. There were a million people it could be. It didn’t have to be them.

But some primal part of me knows.

“Okay?” I say, but there’s no real bite to it and definitely none of the casual “I-don’t-give-a-fuck,” I was trying to convey. I feel trapped and scared.

I am trapped and scared.

“Apparently they were calling from Phoenix.”

My heart is heavy in my chest now, thudding too fast, too hard. The numbness has spread up to my face, and I’m suddenly afraid my mouth won’t work.

“They were trying to track down anyone who might know a woman named Helen Burns.”

John’s tongue flicks out as he licks his lips, and I hate that I can’t control my reaction to this, hate that he’s seeing how freaked out I am. I hate giving him this moment.

But that name.

Turning away, I fumble for the door, not bothering with the key fob now, just wanting to unlock my car (Eddie’s car, it’s Eddie’s, none of this is yours) and get away from John.

“I don’t know anybody by that name,” he goes on, stepping so close that he catches the back of my shoe with the tip of his sneaker, the rubber scraping my ankle.

“But the way the guy was talking, it sure did sound like you. Said Helen would be in her early twenties now. Short, brown hair, brown eyes. A scar on her right arm.”

I turn around then, trapped between him and the car, the metal and glass hot against my back. “What did you tell him?”

John smiles then. He doesn’t look as weaselly and pathetic as he did that day with Eddie. There are no stains on his clothes, and his hair has been combed, and I suddenly have this awful feeling that he didn’t just run into me by chance—that he’s been following me, tracking me all the way to Vestavia, because he wanted to have this confrontation, wanted to be sure it would go the way he wanted.

The thought of it is somehow worse than any of the creepy shit he did when I lived with him.

He’s not supposed to exist in this new life. He, and everything that happened in Phoenix, is supposed to be behind me, forever.

John makes me wait for his answer a few beats too long, seconds in which I feel my stomach sink and my heart race, and I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

Then he shrugs. “Told him he had the wrong guy. I don’t know anyone by that name or fitting that description.”

The relief that floods through me is so sweet it almost hurts, but right on the heels of that is the knowledge that I now owe John Rivers something, and the sweetness curdles in my mouth.

“Of course, he didn’t really believe me,” John goes on, shoving his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels. The fucker is loving this.

“He gave me his number, told me to call him if anything jogged my memory.”

Looking down at me, he grins. “And you know, running into you today has jogged—”

“What do you want?”

A little of the light dims from his eyes. He wanted to draw this out longer, probably. Wanted to watch me wiggle on the hook. Eddie humiliated him in front of me, and now it’s my turn to suffer, fine. I just want to get out of this giving him the least amount of satisfaction possible.

“Is it the rent?” I go on, reaching into my purse. There’s a wad of cash stuck in there—my money, not Eddie’s. Left over from dog-walking and pawning stolen shit, money I kept in the bottom of my bag and had planned on keeping forever because I wanted it to remind me of what I’d left behind, because I’d wanted to be the kind of woman who could just have two hundred dollars in a purse and never think about it, never even need to spend it.

I take it out now, and shove it into John’s hand. “There. It’s actually more than I would’ve owed for my two weeks’ notice, so we’re good.”

John stares at the wrinkled bills, blinking, and then looks back at me. I don’t know what he’d wanted or expected out of all this.

Maybe he didn’t even know.

But the money wasn’t quite it, and I can feel him struggling to gain control of the situation again even as he stuffs the cash in his pocket. “Thanks,” he finally says, and then another smile.