Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 75414 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75414 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
“He never brought anyone else over?”
“No. I think he didn’t like how I talked to you. He always left to meet people outside of the house after that.”
My hand slid up her spine to toy with her hair, knowing it always calmed her down.
“Junior and I can absolutely do the trip alone. But if you have any interest in going back to get anything—for closure, whatever…”
She sucked in a deep breath and I was sure she was going to tell me no, that she was done.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “I want to see it one last time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Lolly
The pain dulled to a more tolerable level in the third week, and I figured there was no other good reason to put off the trip.
The sooner we deleted my existence from Ben’s life, the better. I didn’t know what kind of connections Ben had, if he had online friends who would notice his absence after a certain amount of time, who might start looking for him.
It was time to completely close the book on that chapter of my life.
I was surprised by how settled I felt as Nave, Junior, Edith, and I climbed into the car with the intention of heading back to my old prison.
But it was hard to be scared of anything with two giant, burly men with ‘bad news’ written across their foreheads.
The trip that had taken me five days—thanks to avoiding all the main roads where cameras might catch sight of me—only took about twenty hours of actual driving, a task that Junior and Nave shared while I stretched out with Edith in the back.
Before I was fully prepared for it, we were ambling down the long, winding road to the center of the woods.
Then there it was.
Familiar, yet suddenly very foreign.
I was not the same woman who had run from that place a few weeks before.
“You okay?” Nave asked, his hand sliding to my lower back as Edith let out a little huff, clearly not happy about being back to a place she had also moved on from.
I sucked in a steadying breath.
“Yeah,” I said, realizing it was true. “Yeah, I am.”
Junior came around the car with a laptop bag crossed over his chest and a small cooler in his hand.
They’d been filling that thing with ice each time we stopped at a gas station. But they had been acting so strangely about it that I decided it was maybe best not to ask.
Nave scooped up Edith, then we followed Junior up the steps.
He paused at the top landing, reaching into the cooler and pulling out…
“Is that…”
“We needed to be able to get inside,” Nave said, wincing.
“You have his finger. How do you have his finger?”
“Well, Dezi was smart enough to remove it,” Nave admitted as Junior handled the severed finger like it was something he did every day.
“The fingerprints still work?” I asked, shocked by how… not shocked I was.
“When you keep it frozen, it’s as good as fresh,” Junior said, pushing the finger into the reader.
I expected it to fail.
But there was a click.
The light went green.
We were in.
“Alright, glove up,” Junior said, tossing the finger back into the cooler, then handing out disposable gloves. I struggled to get it over my cast, but with a little wiggling and some help from Nave, I got it on.
Then we were all walking in.
“It’d be a nice place if it didn’t belong to such an evil fuck,” Junior declared, looking around.
He showed no sign of it, but I got the feeling he noticed every single camera around the space.
“Office?” Junior asked.
“Upstairs. The second room on the left.”
Without another word, he was off in that direction.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“It almost feels like this part of my life wasn’t real now,” I admitted. “I want to check out my old room.”
Nave followed me through the house, helping me pack up my old things. Not because I wanted them, but because we wanted to erase every bit of me from the house.
As Nave took all of those bags to the car, I moved back to the kitchen, going into the fridge to grab all the food, then taking it outside to toss around. Whatever the wildlife didn’t eat, the bugs would.
“What are you thinking?” Nave asked when all the obvious work was done.
“This is going to sound crazy. But I think I should clean this place one last time.”
“That’s not crazy,” he decided after a minute. “In this case, to make sure there isn’t a single trace of you around. I mean, the place seems clean.”
It was.
Even without me, standards could not slip. The whole place smelled like bleach and lemon. I didn’t see a speck of dust or dirt or a stray hair anywhere.
But I wanted to be sure.
I never wanted anything to trace me to Ben ever again.
This new life I was starting with Nave, with my baby, with all the new friends who already felt like family, it was pure and perfect and none of the ugliness of my past should ever be able to taint it.