The Safest Lies (25 page)

He tilted his head, took a step closer. “You’re thinking all of that?” he asked.

“I am.”

“I’m thinking I want to kiss you now,” and I was nodding, but he was already walking toward me, and he backed us straight through the bathroom doorway until I was pressed against the sink, with both his hands cupped around the base of my neck, his fingers stretching up into my hair. And then he used one arm to help lift me onto the counter, his palm lingering where the fabric of the shirt met my bare leg, his hand circling the outside of my thigh.

“Oh,” I said when he pulled back.

“Oh,” he said, and then he kissed me again.

And then the buzzing of my phone on the table slammed me back to reality, his hands slipping, the distance growing as I skirted past him for the cell: Jan.

“Hello?” I picked up, my hand over my heart, my pulse already too fast.

“Kelsey, where are you? Emma said you’re not at home.”

“I sent you a message last night. I’m at a friend’s. Is Cole okay?”

“What? Yes, Cole will be okay. We’re on our way home with him as soon as the paperwork goes through. The police just called to let me know we’ve been cleared to go back into your house to pick up what you need.”

“Thanks, Jan.”

“Kelsey, come back,” she said. “We need to talk.”

I hung up the phone.

Ryan looked at me from the doorway of the bathroom.

“That was Jan. Still no word on my mom. But I can get back in the house.”

“I’ll take you,” he said. Then he grinned. “I’m just gonna take a nice, cold shower first.”

—

There was a police cruiser at the start of my driveway, blocking it off to traffic. And there were two other cars—no,
reporter vans
—hovering around outside.

“Oh God,” I said.

“Yeah.” Ryan reached out and grabbed my hand as he rolled down the window.

The police officer asked for our IDs, and Ryan held out his driver’s license. The cop looked from him to me.

“I left it in the house,” I said. And then I pointed for emphasis. “That one.”

He looked closely from me to Ryan and waved us through. I wondered if they had men stationed outside Annika’s place, too.

I tried calling Annika as Ryan navigated the driveway, but her cell went straight to voice mail. I sent her a text, in case she was grounded and couldn’t keep her phone on.
Just checking in,
I wrote.
You okay?

There was another cruiser at the end of the driveway, and we parked behind it. The black iron gates were ajar, the light overhead still out, the system still down. Even the front door remained unlocked. The house smelled faintly of smoke, of chemical reaction, and there was a fine haze clinging to the walls, like we were inside a dream.

Everything served as a reminder: the pan on the stovetop; the curtains pulled back, revealing the bullet hole; batteries scattered on the kitchen counter. I saw shadows in my peripheral vision, something that didn’t belong, but when I turned to look, they disappeared.

There was nothing familiar about this house anymore. Nothing safe, everything ruined.

I walked down the hall toward my room, seeing everything anew, as an outsider might. Bars over windows, thick, tinted glass, cameras pointing at the outside, and a basement full of chemicals.

This was the home of someone mentally unstable. Someone who needed to agree to weekly visits with Jan in order to keep custody of her child. A person who was unpredictable. Someone the police could not begin to understand. I felt her slipping even further away.

Someone else had been through my room, my desk, and everything felt tainted and wrong. I pulled open the dresser drawers and threw piles of my clothes onto the bed. Ryan got a garbage bag from the kitchen, and he held it open as I randomly tossed clothes and toiletries and a toothbrush inside. And then I thought of the basement, the money, the passports. The things that were hidden—and that should be kept hidden. The police wouldn’t understand them—they
couldn’t
—if they didn’t understand my mother.

“Will you wait up here for me?” I asked.

“I can come with you,” he said.

But I shook my head. “I’ll just be a second.”

He didn’t argue, but he stood in the foyer with the garbage bag beside him, looking at that family picture again, of me and my mother with the light streaming through behind us, big smiles. Perfectly normal.

The stairwell was dark. The main power hadn’t been turned back on, but the generator was still running, and the battery-powered lights were still set up in the corner. The boxes that Ryan and I had searched through were still open and scattered haphazardly, in disarray. The door to the safe room was now open as well, and darkness beckoned. I stayed near the entrance, saw the shelves pushed back to their upright positions, the boxes and supplies now stacked into some semblance of order. The hole in the floor that we’d escaped through. And the darker spot on the floor, where Cole had bled and kept bleeding, until we’d found a way out.

I pushed a box aside with my toe, crouched down to search for the plastic envelopes, then heard footsteps on the stairs. “I’m almost done,” I called.

I looked over my shoulder, but it wasn’t Ryan. It was that other officer from yesterday—Detective Conrad, I thought—and he held the plastic envelopes in his hand. “Looking for something?” he asked.

He no longer looked at me as if I was the victim, with an expression full of sympathy and compassion. Something had shifted.

I was never supposed to give out the code, because it wasn’t safe.
Careful.
I was supposed to be careful. I was supposed to keep things hidden—and this, I now understood, was one of those things.

I was in the basement again, and I was trapped. I felt the walls closing in, his voice echoing against the walls as he gestured for me to follow him back upstairs.

This too was an ambush of sorts. And I could already tell—it was going to hurt.

—

“That’s not yours,” I said. I stood in the kitchen across the island from him, the envelopes on the counter between us.

“I know that. Is it yours? Why were you downstairs looking for it?”

“It’s my mother’s,” I said. “And it’s not safe just sitting here in a house with no locks.”

He drummed his fingers on one of the envelopes. “This is a lot of money,” he said.

Ryan stood beside me, joined by a second officer, this one in uniform. “She didn’t trust anyone, let alone online banks,” he said, repeating what I had told him earlier. Believing me.

“Who is she, Kelsey?” Detective Conrad asked.

“Excuse me?”

He pressed his lips together. “We want to talk to you some more about your mother.” He slid the fake passport across the table, opened to the familiar photo. The one with my mother, and the wrong name, and I knew he had me.

“Call Jan,” Ryan said, his body tensing beside me.

“You’re not in any trouble. We’re trying to find her,” Conrad said.

“Someone
took
her,” I said. “I don’t know why she has this. Until yesterday, I’d never seen it before. But I know she was terrified, and she was ready to run if they found her again.” My hand lingered over the picture, the image seared into my mind. “That must be why.”

“If
who
found her again?” the second cop asked.

“Whoever took her the first time! She was kidnapped when she was a teenager. Maybe you remember it? Amanda Silviano?”

Detective Conrad narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, wait, wasn’t that the one where everyone suspected the dad, and then he killed himself, and then she reappeared?”

The horror of her entire life reduced to a single sentence. “That’s the one,” I said.

“Was it ever solved?”

“No,” I said.

“Wow,” the uniformed officer said. “So that’s why she’s living like this? She was terrified it would happen again?”

“It
did
happen again!”

There was a long pause, and they looked at each other in the gap. Detective Conrad lowered his voice, going for calm and compassionate once more. “We’ve spoken to Jan. We know that your mother has been living with this fear. We know she brought you up like this. This was what you’ve been raised to see, Kelsey.”

I shook my head, eyes wide, disbelieving. “There were men here, and she’s
gone.
”

He nodded. “She turned off the alarm, isn’t that right? All signs of forced entry happened
after,
correct? That’s what you told us yesterday. I think we need to consider the possibility that she left willingly.”

“She couldn’t,” I said. “There’s no way.”

“But she had passports. She was
planning
to one day.”

Or she was hoping to, and she couldn’t.

“Listen, we’ll be in contact with the cops from Atlanta,” the officer said. “See if we can’t dig anything else up. But it’s an old case, Kelsey. I’m not holding my breath.”

“Oh, one more thing,” the detective said. He tapped the envelopes on the table. “Where’d she get the money?”

“Inheritance,” I said.

“From who?”

“Her father?”

That pause again, and my heart sank. The men shared a look before the officer spoke, and I realized they already knew. They knew my mother’s story. They knew before I got here and told them. “I remember that case,” the officer said. “It bled him dry before he killed himself, isn’t that right?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t know, I wasn’t alive.”

My feet itched to move, to leave. I didn’t like where this was going. Everything about this conversation whispering
Wrong.

“So let me ask you again,” the detective said. “Where’d she get the money?”

“She works. From home. She does bookkeeping, you know.”

He looked around the house. “Pretty nice setup you’ve got going on here. How much do you think it costs to set something like this place up?”

I didn’t answer. I had no idea. But they didn’t seem to care. It was as if they were playing a part, and were working themselves up to something.

The detective turned to the officer. “What do you think?”

The officer whistled. “A lot,” he said. “A lot of money.”

“Is it possible she stole it?” Detective Conrad asked. He was looking at the officer, but he was really asking me.

“Kelsey,” Ryan warned. “Let’s go.”

“We’d like you to come down to the station, talk some more. But first, did you know about this?” Detective Conrad slid the other passport open in front of me, and I heard Ryan suck in a breath.

It was my face. With a name that was not mine.

I closed my eyes, willing it to disappear.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know. I swear.”

Me, but not me.

Ryan’s face was caught between surprise and something more. He was scared of me, that girl in the picture that he didn’t know.

And how could I explain? I was scared of that girl, too.

Ryan picked up the bag, and I stumbled after him. I was disappearing, my life in a plastic garbage bag, and the woman I thought I knew better than anyone was shifting before my eyes.

—

Ryan stopped just outside his car. He threw the bag into the backseat, had his hands on the hood of the car, leaning forward. He took a deep breath, turned around. “Who is she, Kelsey?”

I took a step back. Because he was staring at me like he was asking something more—not just who she was, but who
I
was.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. I shook my head, fighting back the tears. “I don’t know how she got the money, or what she was hiding from, or why there are passports…or why Cole says she remembers what happened. And I don’t know where she is. But I know, I
know
she’s not okay.”

“Okay,” he said, and his hands hovered between us, like he was debating. No, like he was waiting for a sign from me. I stepped forward, and he pulled me toward him. And I tried to keep my word to him. That I would not break.

But a new thought had lodged in my head, circling and digging, refusing to let go:
Who is she, who is she, who is she—

This went to seventeen years of lies, not just to me, but to the world. She had to have a reason. The woman who’d stood in front of me, who raised me, who had nightmares and feared the world: she was real. But so was this other one.

Can you love someone if you don’t really know them? My heart was in a vise.

Who am I? I do not know.

R
yan parked in front of Jan’s house and grabbed my bag from the backseat. I stood in front of the door, not sure what to do. Too much time had passed to just walk in or use the spare key like I used to. I rang the bell, heard the footfall of someone heading down the steps.

Emma flinched when she opened the door, her eyes darting between me and Ryan. She shrank behind the open door when she realized she was standing in front of Ryan wearing pajamas and no makeup.

“Is your brother okay?” Ryan asked.

She hung on the side of the door, moving it back and forth. “Lost a lot of blood, but the bullet missed all the organs. Guess we have you to thank,” she said.