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at this moment I need to take every a...
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I realize that if I’ve read her wrong, everything we’ve discussed could be recorded, documented, part of the official Norton police record
Melvin Royal is on the phone with me. How is this happening?
“Make me, Gina. Hang up on me. But wait, if you do, if you do, you’ll never find out who’s coming for you.”
“You don’t even know what’s happening. You can’t see it.”
“I want you to know that when it comes, when it all falls down, it’s your fault, you worthless, stupid bitch. I should have started with you. But I’ll finish with you, one of these days. You think I won’t touch you? I will. From the inside out.”
Even if they find the phone, it doesn’t matter. He’s proven he can reach out from behind those bars whenever he wants. Next time it won’t be him. It’ll be someone else doing his bidding.
I need to drive the poison of Melvin Royal out of my system.
I’m not letting Mel win. Not ever.
When I’m shooting, I know exactly who I’m killing.
He sounds normal, but something about this feels strange.
His eyes are . . . dead. It’s unsettling.
“Mel didn’t need or want my help. I’m a woman. Women are never people to someone like him.”
There’s something about the way he says her name that clears things up for me. Kezia Claremont didn’t come just because of her father’s concern; her father had met me exactly once, and while he seemed a nice old guy, that hadn’t quite rung true for me.
She’d mentioned Javier in a businesslike way. But the way Javier refers to her is more revealing.
I’m still dimly surprised anyone ever acquitted me at all. I haven’t begun to forgive Gina Royal.
If I hadn’t seen, if I hadn’t reacted, the back of Sam’s head would have been jam. He’d have been dead in a second.
It strikes all of us that the report and even the shooting here . . . those were diversions.
My son is not there. My children are gone.
this scene could mean two different things. One, the truth: my children have been abducted. Two, the very plausible lie: I did something to my own kids before I left this house. Someone’s going to think that.
she knows she’s failed, and the price . . . the price may be higher than either of us wants to face.
You’re forgetting something, Mel’s voice whispers to me. I flinch, because I don’t want it, don’t want his voice in my head, I don’t, but he’s right, too. I am forgetting something . . .
they have to be here, nothing else makes sense. This is their sanctuary, their safe place. Their escape.
No one could get to them here. But someone has. They were in here. They fought here. They bled here. And they’re gone.
Irrationally, insanely, I suddenly want Mel. It horrifies me, but I want someone to turn to, someone who might share this feeling of emptiness.
I wonder if this puts me and Sam back in a box together as conspirators.
We do have a past, even if I hadn’t known it. We do know each other. We do like each other now, on some level.
It makes my head hurt, trying to think like Prester, but I have a notion that he’s already seeing us in a very different light.
“Tell me everything,” Prester says. Once I star...
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The house is no longer a home because of the cold absence . . . the absence of the one thing that makes any kind of home for me.
His eyes are cool and remorseless, and I hate him with a clear, pointed fury in that moment, as if he’s the one holding my children, hiding them from me.
An hour and twenty minutes. That’s how long it took for my life to fall apart.
“I am not Melvin Royal. I’m not even Gina Royal. I am the person I had to be to save my kids from the people who wanted to hurt them and still do.
I’m still forgetting something. I can’t grasp what it is.
It’s something I’ve seen, something that didn’t make any difference, and now I can’t slow my mind down enough to find that nagging, whispering, elusive thing.
It’s about Connor. Something a...
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I won’t be back here, I think. One way or another, it’s not home.
I don’t know how they’d have treated the parent of two other missing children, but Gina Royal? Gina Royal is a suspect first, last, always.
There’s no evidence of anything except you being the victim of not one but two crimes today.
“That’s what it’s like, being the ex-wife of Melvin Royal. I’m not a person. I’m just a target.”
That smear on the back of my hand is not grease at all.
There is blood on the back of my hand.
Lancel Graham has blood in his SUV. And everything, everything, begins to make sense.
This is the most important moment of my life.
We might be the only two people alive in the world.
It’s from Sam Cade. He’s not on the mountain, searching. This whole trip has been a lie.
I need to think. I need to plan before I can act. Let him think he’s got me.
I have to kill this man. But first, I have to find out where he’s taken my kids.
If I don’t keep control, if I react with pure emotion, I will lose.
I have to be better at this than a psychopath.
