The Girls I've Been(37)

“If he’s sick—”

“I’ve got it, Mr. Mayor.”

It’s like time freezes and then backtracks between us, because the look he gives me has me feeling twelve years old again. But I don’t lose hold of my knife this time. I tighten my fingers around it. And I don’t run.

“I do have a lot of paperwork to get done.”

“I can let you know when dinner’s ready,” I say, wishing I could lock him inside and get Wes out before setting this entire place on fire.

“You do that,” he says, before turning and leaving the kitchen. My breath tangles in my throat, half scared he’ll head right up the stairs to prove he’s in charge. But his steps continue to click against the stone tile that leads to his office; there are no soft thuds up the wooden stairs, muffled by the antique runners.

I sag against the counter as the vegetables hiss and heat, on the edge of burning.

I don’t let go of the knife.

It takes almost two months for Wes to heal. We try to keep everything clean and bandaged, but with just Steri-Strips to hold everything together instead of stitches and staples, it all keeps breaking open again. It heals so much rougher. His shoulders are new terrain now; the old scar that taught me we were the same is bisected with sensitive tissue that’s purple-fresh and livid against his skin.

He tries to shrug it off, what happened. He tells me he doesn’t want to talk about it. That he’s fine, even though he spends hours alone in the not-guest room, reading whatever books Lee gives him.

His newfound reading habit gives me the time I need.

I fall out of normal so easily, it’s laughable now that I ever thought it might stick. It’s naive to think a few years with Lee would undo anything. I just locked it up, but now I’m free.

So I make two plans. I get leverage. But I don’t lie in wait.

I go and find him.

The mayor likes to go shooting on Sunday after church. He likes to go alone. Just him and his rifle and his thoughts up in the deer blinds as he picks off Bambi—badly, because of course he’s a shit hunter on top of being an abusive asshole.

Until Clear Creek, I’ve never lived anywhere that had forests like this. Abby preferred cities when she was free, for obvious reasons. But hiking with Wes through middle school and high school had taught me not just the beauty but the value of the woods. They’re secret and silently loud, and the forgotten mining roads make the part of me born to run and hide settle sweetly. And now it’s proving useful.

I feel kind of silly lurking behind the trees downhill from the deer blind, listening to the mayor’s bad shots and waiting for the beer to catch up with him and open my window of opportunity. Finally, the erratic shooting ceases, and I hear the thump and creak of the ladder. He’s on the move.

I move when he does, watching him disappear through the trees to go pee somewhere away from his hunting ground. I hurry up the embankment, heading toward the trees he’ll pass on the way back to the blind. I tape the pictures against the trunk at eye level, where he won’t be able to miss them. Then I climb up into the blind, pulling the ladder up and inside behind me.

Sitting back into the shadows, I wait, my heart ratcheting up with each moment that passes. His rifle is right there. I edge away from it. It’s not that I’m scared . . . and it’s not that I’m tempted.

It’s that I know where things go if I touch it. So I don’t.

His footsteps crunch through the underbrush, so loud they probably send any prey scattering for a half mile. My nails bite into my palms. I guess he found the photos. I hope he’s terrified.

“Hey,” he shouts from below.

I give myself a moment to breathe. Because a part of me is scared, but a part of me is gloriously excited. The kind of happy that little kids feel when they see their birthday cake. Gleeful in the I’m gonna win way, because this is what I’m good at. But I need to play it right. There’s too much riding on this to mess it up.

“I know you’re in there!”

I pop up into view in the doorway of the deer blind like the nastiest of surprises. “Hi, Mayor.”

His jaw is probably still hurting, it drops so hard. It takes all the wind out of him, and he sags in shock, almost wheezing out my name. But in his hand is one of the photos I’d taped to the tree. It’s glossy and high definition. I’d splurged on the good paper for effect. It creaks and crumples as he fists it.

“I’m gonna stay up here while we have this talk,” I say, taking great care to settle myself in the doorway and letting my legs dangle along the edge.

He doesn’t sputter, but he takes a good ten seconds to respond. They tick by, because ten seconds is a long time when it’s just us two in the woods and there’s blackmail material taped to the trees. A little drama to get his blood pumping.

“What are you doing here, Nora?” he asks, like that day in the kitchen where my hand curled around the butcher knife.

There’s no running from this. I don’t want to. I came here for this.

The mayor’s never liked me. I’ve always unnerved him, and I could never tell if it was because I wasn’t as girly as he’d like or if he somehow senses the grift in me.

Besides preachers, politicians are the other acceptable kind of grifters, after all. I’ve known from day one that the mayor’s more than a little shady. And now there’s proof in his hand and on a few trees he missed on his run back here to get his gun.