The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(61)

Several seconds ticked by. Or was it a minute? Time was starting to stretch and bleed over the landscape. The stars crowded to hear her answer.

“Listen . . .”

Such a terrible word to start with, listen. So defensive.

“I’m listening,” he said.

She wanted to go back, rewind, back to the tunnel, back to the kissing. Back to the laughing. Back to the dark. She could have told him then. He would have understood. But you can’t go back. You can’t re-create the conditions.

David sat down on one of the benches along the path and stretched his legs out long in front of him. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited.

“How did I not work this out before?” he said. “It was so obvious.” He smirked and shook his head.

“He came to my house,” Stevie said. “He was there when I got home from school on Friday. He was talking to my parents. He brought information about all of this security. He convinced them I should be able to come back.”

“That was nice of him,” David said. “And he said, ‘Come on my plane’?”

“I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to be with him.”

“But you took the ride,” he said.

“Of course I took the ride,” she shot back. “I needed to get back. I knew he doesn’t do stuff just to be nice. I asked him what he wanted and he said . . . nothing . . . I just needed to be here, because . . .”

Stevie couldn’t find her foothold. She’d made her lunge, and now there was nothing—just a smooth, slippery surface. David was doing what good interrogators do: when someone is confessing, you let them talk. And the impulse was there. She had to talk.

“He wanted me to, just, talk to you. Because he said you were freaking out. And that was it, and I . . . Would you say something?”

“Like what?” he said. His voice was cool. There was still a trace of thickness from when he had been crying, but all other emotion was gone.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said, her voice cracking.

“What I want from you? Yeah, you’ve been hanging with my dad. Even you. He even got you.”

A few more tears trickled from his eyes, but he laughed, hoarse and miserable, his every last suspicion of the world confirmed.

So Stevie did what guilty people do when confronted. She ran. It was a ridiculous impulse, but it was the only one that made sense at the moment. She took off down the path, her feet thudding against the brick. But it seemed absurd to be running away in full view of David, so she turned to go across the relative dark of the green. Running is one of the most human responses of all. Fight or flight. Like her therapist said, once you start the circuit of response, you have to complete it. If you feel like you have to fly, you fly until your body tells you to stop or until you are stopped by an outside force.

Stevie, not being a regular runner, stopped when she got to the tree cover on the other side and heaved a bit, her throat raw. She slowed just enough to hear if David was following her. Of course, he wasn’t. David wouldn’t be behind her anymore.

She continued on to the circle of statue heads, the gossipy stone chorus that gathered eternally between Minerva and the yurt. She held on to one of the plinths and caught her breath. She had to get herself together. Think. Her friends would be at the yurt, waiting for her. That was where she was expected. But she couldn’t face them, couldn’t risk another encounter with David.

She circled a bit under the dark sky and hated it for being so wide.

Maybe she should call her parents and leave.

No. That was fear talking. She had to get a grip. She needed . . .

She spun her bag and opened the front pocket, feeling around until her fingers hit a small metal tumbler, about half the size of her thumb. She twisted it open and dumped the contents into her palm.

One small white pill. The emergency Ativan that she carried “just in case.” The one she never really expected to take. It was not a large pill, so she put it on her tongue and tossed her head back and force swallowed a few times until it went down dry. It would take a little while to work, but at least she knew it was heading for her stomach, where it would be picked apart and sent to her bloodstream.

She felt the need to sleep. Just put her head down somewhere, anywhere, and sleep. If not home and not the yurt, then . . .

She pointed herself in the direction of the art barn, taking broad, fast steps. Upon reaching the barn, she tapped herself in and pulled the door closed behind her.

She walked along at a clip to the yoga studio—a high-ceilinged, bare room with a mirrored wall and a bamboo floor. She pulled that door closed tight as well and then, for no reason she could understand, grabbed one of the yoga straps and ran it around the door handle, lashing it to a barre. It wasn’t the tightest security, but it was something. Then she switched on the light, assured herself that the room was utterly vacant, then turned it off again.

Once you start doing something weird and you fully embrace it, it’s much easier to get on with it. Stevie proceeded to build herself a tiny bunker in the alcove where the yoga supplies were stored. She made herself a thick bed of mats, which she covered in several blankets for padding and for warmth. She folded another blanket as a pillow. Then she stacked the rest of the supplies next to this nest, making a short protective wall around herself so that anyone peering into the room would see nothing but a small pile of yoga blankets and mats. She climbed into the bed she had made for herself, pulling several blankets over her. It was quiet and dark and she was very alone. The wind whistled alongside the building and the trees scraped the art barn roof. The yoga blankets were a little stinky and scratchy, but they were warm and soft enough. She took out her phone and wrote a text to Janelle and Nate.