I smile back because I think a frown would kill him too. “Yeah.” I tip my chin down the hall. Away from the media. Away from the storm. “Take the back door.”
He manages a tiny laugh, and I know how lucky I am to have this as my last memory of him. Shirtless, doused in sunlight, his smile eclipsing into a laugh. I’ve lived a full life, and I’m not even thirty. Whatever comes next, I’m prepared to accept it.
As he turns to go, I grab him just before he gets away. “And one more thing.”
Then I kiss him good-bye.
“THANK YOU FOR taking the time to sit down and go over a few last details.” Detective Reyes closes the folder in front of her. “I know this has been a trying process for you.”
A week after my night with Torrin, Detective Reyes called to ask if I’d be open to going over my case again. I agreed, but not without setting the date out as far as I thought I could push it without pressing my luck. The week between her call and today went faster than I would have liked.
“No problem. Thank you for all of your patience.”
“Well, the police couldn’t manage to find you for ten years.” She leans back in her chair looking like she’s trying to get comfortable, but she doesn’t seem like the kind of person who could ever just get comfortable. “Waiting a couple weeks for the rest of your story was really the least we could do.”
I smile because she’s making a joke, and I’m getting better with conditioned responses. I’m relearning at the pace of a turtle with three broken legs, but at least I’m moving forward.
Detective Reyes offered to drive to my place to go over the last few things, but I told her I’d meet her at the station. It’s a small thing that feels like a big one. When we first settled at her desk to talk, I felt everyone watching me. I suppose most of them were involved in my case either at the beginning, the end, or both, and all of them are familiar with my dad, so I should have been ready for the stares.
Reyes must have picked up on my discomfort because she didn’t ask if I wanted to move; she just stood and waved me back down a hall. She offered either a break room or an interrogation room, and I went with the interrogation room.
The interview took less time than I’d expected, making me wonder why we couldn’t have just gone over her handful of questions on the phone.
As I start to push my chair back from the table, Reyes lifts her pen. The file stays closed. “Real quick—there was a solar panel salesman who came to Earl Rae’s house two days before your rescue. Do you remember that?”
I have to dig around in my head for a moment because I’ve been working on replacing those memories with the new ones I’m making. I don’t have to dig long because I haven’t managed to bury them very deep yet. “Yeah, I do.”
“You saw him?”
My eyebrows come together. “No, Earl Rae put me in the closet. He always did when anyone showed up at the house.” I know I’ve mentioned that before, so I’m surprised she’s asking.
“So you never saw the salesman?” She spins the pen between her fingers. “Was there any way he could have seen you?”
Unless he had Superman X-ray vision? “No. And no.”
Reyes nods and continues. “The black Converse you were kidnapped in. They had little hearts you’d penned onto the rubber toe?”
I nod.
“Where did those go?” she asks.
My favorite pair of shoes. I still miss them . . . and it wasn’t me who penned those black hearts on the toes—it was Torrin. “That was all gone when I woke up. I was wearing something else. He told me he’d burned it all.”
Reyes’s expression is flat, but that pen keeps spinning slow circles in her fingers like she’s working out something. “So those shoes couldn’t have been lying around the living room right around the time you were rescued?”
“No. No way.”
She makes a sound like she’s stumped and trying to work through a problem that won’t add up. She’s not really looking at me—she’s watching the twirling pen.
“Okay, so weird string of questions.” I curl my sweater more tightly around me because it’s cold in this room. Something about what I can almost feel Reyes is working out is making me cold too. “Why are you asking?”
She keeps watching the pen, and I start to feel like I’m twirling around the room with it. “Well, that solar panel salesman?” Her head shakes once. “He wasn’t exactly a salesman.”
My lungs go limp right before they feel like they’re about to burst. “Oh my god . . . it was him. Wasn’t it?”
She doesn’t nod, because she knows I don’t need a confirmation. I know it was him.
“After telling us what he remembered about Earl Rae at the gas station, he wasn’t happy that things weren’t moving at lightning speed, and we weren’t breaking down doors that day, so he decided to track down Earl Rae. On his own. Without telling us,” Reyes grumbles. “When he told us about his little covert op, he said that he’d caught a glimpse of you in the hall—along with your shoes in the front room. Two days later, we were breaking down that door.” Reyes looks at me. “That’s how we found you.”
I feel a lot of things right then. Mostly I’m just kind of overwhelmed from learning that it was him—he was that close—and that I might still be on the end of that chain of it wasn’t for him. But I also feel worry. This feeling grows as the other recedes. He lied. To the police. I know that’s never a good thing, and in certain cases, it’s a crime. I’m going to guess a lie about seeing a missing girl that resulted in the police assembling a couple dozen people to storm a house would fall into that category.