The bar is empty as I stumble in, drenched in rain from head to toe. The place doesn’t open for another half of an hour. The faint smell of sweat and tequila is in the air, the lights are low, the chairs turned up. I think about the last time I was here. The chill of the freezer. The voice. The blood. I try to remember the rest. Connect the dots, but everything is still hazy.
I find River in his office, just like he said, talking on the phone. Lily is screaming inside me. Don’t do it! And then suddenly she’s out, walking around in River’s now clean office—he must have had someone clean up in here.
“No Glen, I don’t think this is a good idea.” He shakes his head as I stand in the doorway and wait quietly while he talks on the phone. “I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.” A pause. “Look, I don’t fucking care if I owe you, this is wrong… not to mention illegal.”
“Hmmm… interesting…” Lily says, watching him have the heated conversation. “He’s doing things with Glen, the drug trafficker.”
I want to ask what she’s implying but that would require talking aloud and making me look as insane as I am. So instead I stand there, listening to River argue with Glen while Lily wanders over to a shelf, glances at a stack of papers, then grins at me and says, “Well, well, well, what do we have here?”
I’m about to go over there when River sees me and his face drains of color. “I have to go. I’ll call you later.” He quickly hangs up. He stares at me for a moment or two then casually says, “We seriously need to get a bell on you so I know when you’re coming.”
I don’t respond, trying to measure him up before I go any further into the office. He looks the same as he always does, faded jeans, a dark grey shirt, a hint of scruff on his jawline, and he has a beanie on his head. He doesn’t seem afraid, like he thinks I’m a killer.
But then why did he need to talk to me?
Don’t trust him. No matter what.
“You look tired,” he notes, taking in my appearance as I inch closer to his desk. “And wet. Is it raining outside?”
“It is… and I haven’t been sleeping well.” Deciding I should sit down, I cross the room, combing my fingers through my wet locks of hair. “So what did you want to talk to me about?” I take a seat across from the desk.
He reclines back in the chair, crossing his arms, studying me with his head cocked to the side. Always watching you. “The police came to talk to me this morning,” he says. “They wanted to ask me a couple of questions about Sydney.”
“Oh yeah.” I pick at my nail polish, pretending to be blasé, even though I’m a nervous wreck. “Do they have any leads yet on who they think did it?”
“I don’t think they do yet.” He pauses, making heavy eye contact with me. I know what’s coming even before he says it. “They wanted to ask me a couple of questions about you, too.”
I drop my hand to my lap, refusing to look away from his penetrating gaze. No eye contact shows a guilty conscience. “Oh, yeah? What about?”
“About how you said you were here that morning because apparently we spent the night together.”
I twist a strand of my hair around my finger. “Technically we did.”
He tugs off his beanie and rakes his fingers through his hair, making it stick up in all directions. “Are you in some kind of trouble? The detective seemed really interested in you and if I’d spent the entire night with you or if that was a lie… he seemed convinced that it was.”
I unravel the strand of hair from my finger and put my hands on my lap, stabbing my nails into my legs to channel my anxious energy there. “What did you tell him when he asked?”
He smashes his lips together. One. Two. Three seconds go by. “That you were with me all night.”
I sit up straight in the chair, freeing a trapped out a breath I was holding in my chest. “You lied for me. Why?”
“Because I care about you.” He gives a shrug, like it’s no big deal, when it is. He leans forward and rests his arms on the desk. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
“I’m not buying it,” I tell him with skepticism. “You can’t care about someone you hardly know.”
“I know you better than you think,” he says, his tone carrying an underlying meaning that sends a chill up my spine. “You just don’t want to believe I do. You want to be mysterious. Want people not to see who you really are.”
I don’t like where he’s going with this. I slouch back in the chair, keeping eye contact even though I desperately want to look away. “You might think so, but you’re wrong.”
“Am I?” he mumbles to himself without taking his focus off me. He seems so undecided, so confused. “I have to ask you something and I need you to answer me truthfully.”
“What makes you think I’d lie to begin with?” Maybe he does know me better than I thought.
You might want to prepare yourself.
What does that mean?
“Because I know you do a lot,” he says straightforwardly. “But I need you not to lie this time. I need you to give me this for lying to the police to you.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that,” I remind him. I know I should be being more cooperative, but he’s troubling me with his persistence for the truth. It worries me what he’s going to ask.
“I know you didn’t,” he replies. “But like I said, I did it because—”
“Because you care for me,” I finish for him. Is he being genuine? It seems like it, but I don’t think I’m the best judge to come to this conclusion. I can barely understand myself, let alone another person.
I place my arms on the armrests, knowing I have no choice but to let him ask his question. Whether or not I answer truthfully is an entirely different story. “What do you want to know and I’ll try my best to give you a real answer.”
You better be ready.
He seems undecided, taking a deep breath and exhaling. “I want to know whether I’m talking to Maddie right now… or Lily.”
Chapter 23
Maddie
It takes a moment for my mind to catch up with what he said. Quite honestly, I think I’m having one of my hallucinations. But as River stares at me from across the desk, waiting eagerly for a response, I realize that this is reality. That he did ask me if I was Lily. That somehow he’s discovered my alter ego that might be named after my dead sister. Perhaps he’s even met her. I can’t help but think of the man that broke into the house. He called me Lily… It didn’t sound like River, but still…
“Who’s Lily?” I play dumb, coiling a strand of my hair around my finger.
“Maddie, please don’t do that,” he says in a soft, soothing voice, which seems out of character for someone who knows about the other part of me that has killer tendencies. “Don’t go back to where we started.”
“Where we started? What start? We never had a start, River. We fooled around sometimes. That’s it.” Wow, you’re just as cruel as me. I didn’t think you had it in you. Bravo.
I can’t help but think of the memory of me cutting Lily and how she seemed proud of me when I did it. Why do you like when I’m bad?
Because it’s who you are, yet you fight it so hard. You let fear own you, so afraid of being what you are.