“Get the hell out of my car, Nick.” His freaky orange eyes flashed in the light.
A second ticked by. Then another. I tried getting a read on him, wondering how far he’d push.
“Get. Out. Of. The. Car.”
“You’re an asshole, you know it?”
He grabbed the back of my head and slammed my face into the dash. White dots exploded in my vision. A sharp pain radiated out from my forehead, across my skull, and down my neck.
While I tried shaking off the blow, Trev reached over, opened the passenger door, and shoved me out. I hit the pavement on my back, still half in the car.
Trev stomped on the gas, and my legs slipped out. He stopped to slam the door closed and took off again.
I crawled to my feet and watched the beads of the red taillights disappear around a bend in the road.
“Shit.”
Cornfields surrounded me on both sides. Behind me was the road we’d come in on, and more cornfields. In the time we’d been arguing, the factories had disappeared, replaced with absolutely nothing. Except corn.
How long had we been driving? Ten minutes? Fifteen?
My head swam, either from the hit, or the booze, I couldn’t tell which. The contents of my stomach sloshed around and then was coming up, eyes burning, bulging. I stumbled to the shoulder of the road, crashed to my knees, and hurled everything I had in me till my stomach muscles ached and my head pounded.
I lay back in the grass trying to catch my breath, and let the wooziness pass. Now I was well and truly screwed. Why did I have to go and open my big mouth? Trev was the best lead I had, not only on the lab, but on Riley, too.
Locating the lab would be a big step in finding out what had gone on here and why I’d been sent here in the first place.
Now Trev was going on his own, leaving me completely out of the loop.
I started walking in the direction we’d come from, hoping I’d make it home at least before midnight.
20
ELIZABETH
AGGIE AND I ATE DINNER WITHOUT NICK. Of course, he’d said he’d eat in town, but part of me had still hoped. Despite the fact that he’d been out of my life for six years, now that he was back, it felt like he’d never left.
I’d known him for only a few hours, six years ago, but it’d been enough to leave an imprint so large, I felt like he would forever be a part of me. Like he’d always been a part of me. He’d arrived in my life when I didn’t feel like it was worth much. And he’d showed me that it was.
Sometimes, when I was with Chloe and Evan and the others at Merv’s, my past seemed like a horror movie I’d watched one night when I was too young to tell the difference between fiction and reality. It seemed too terrible to be true. Chloe’s and Evan’s lives were so normal that when I was with them, I could pretend that mine was, too.
After Aggie went to bed, I washed the dinner dishes by hand, telling myself it was simply because there were so few, and running the dishwasher seemed like a waste. When really it was because the window over the kitchen sink afforded me a clear view of the carriage house.
I finished just after nine and still Nick hadn’t returned. I scrubbed down the counters. The table. I swept. I emptied the trash. I returned to the window. I stared at the carriage house until my eyes burned.
By ten o’clock, I had convinced myself I’d imagined Nick.
By eleven o’clock, I’d gone to bed, only to get back up and tiptoe to Aggie’s sewing room. I set a chair in front of the window that looked out over the backyard and resumed my post.
I stared at the carriage house.
I stared some more.
The windows were dark. Nothing moved.
My chest grew heavy with waiting.
The minutes turned into hours. The hours into agonizing days.
He would come back.
Please come back.
Why did I want him to come back?
What would I do if he didn’t?
For the past six years, I’d been trying so hard to make sense of what had happened to me. How it had ended. How Nick fit into it.
I’d tried telling myself I’d heal from the wounds. The physical ones. The emotional ones. The wounds that didn’t even have a label. But as the years went on, they still felt wide open and festering. I felt like I’d never be right again.
Nick’s arrival was a stitch in the gash, and a little part of me felt real again.
He had to come back.
I pulled my legs up, propping my feet on the edge of the chair, my arms wrapped around my knees. I glanced at the clock hanging above Aggie’s sewing desk, and the hands marked midnight.
He was never coming back.
Movement out of the corner of my eye pulled me to the window.
Nick crossed the pool of light cast by the carriage house’s exterior light, his steps slow and unsteady. He paused at the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the house.