Page 14

JAX

Mark’s truck pulls out of the driveway a little after two.

He said he was going into town for supplies, which is the kind of vague answer Mark gives when he doesn’t want to specify what he’s actually doing. My guess is clothes. Anna has been wearing my T-shirts and his sweatpants since yesterday, and she’s going to need something that fits.

Which leaves me alone in the house with her.

I’m at the counter with a cup of coffee, watching over the rim of the mug as she pads barefoot through the living room into the kitchen.

She’s still in the T-shirt and sweats from lunch. Her hair is dry now, pulled back in a loose knot, and even with a dried smudge of egg on her cheek, she looks like a goddess. A vision of Aphrodite, and I would be happy to worship at the temple of her body every day for the rest of my life.

Yup, I am so fucked. Pretty sure Mark is too.

We had a plan—and the plan was simple. Crash the wedding. Steal the bride and finally, finally, get payback. For Penny. Of course, that was before I saw Anna standing at the altar in that monstrosity of a wedding dress swallowing her whole like an ivory nightmare straight out of an eighties fashion magazine.

That’s when the plan went to shit.

We kicked in the doors of that church, fully prepared to steal Patrick’s future trophy wife, thinking we’d hold her long enough to hurt Patrick and then set her up with a new name and a new life somewhere far from him. What I didn’t plan for was any of what has happened since. The van, the negotiation, the shower this morning. Whatever this is, whatever she has become to me and Mark in the last day, I don’t have a word for it, and I’m not sure I want one yet. Naming a thing makes it real, and this one is already realer than I’m prepared to handle.

“You okay?” I ask.

She’s stopped in the middle of the kitchen, staring at some middle-distance point that isn’t really in the room. Her arms are wrapped around herself.

“I don’t know,” she says, her voice quieter than it was at lunch. She moves past me toward the window over the sink but doesn’t look at the woods behind the farmhouse. She just stands there with her hands braced on the edge of the counter.

I barely know this woman. Mark and I researched her and her family, but there wasn’t anything in our files that could have prepared us for the real thing. Somehow, she fits like the missing piece between me and Mark. A piece neither of us knew was missing until we took her—in more ways than one.

“After this morning, I was hoping you would be.” My left eye twitches. Not quite a wince, but I find myself bracing against whatever comes out of her mouth next, because I suspect it won’t be good.

“Yeah, well, the quiet has a funny way of catching up with you.” She drops her forehead against the cabinet above the sink and lets it rest there.

From the corner of the living room, Wiggles chooses this moment to make himself known. He is, for reasons known only to him, dragging a piece of the newspaper Mark left on the coffee table across the floor. He gets it about two feet before he realizes it’s larger than he is, gives it a small, offended squeak, and then sits on it.

Anna makes a sound that is almost a laugh. It doesn’t quite make it out.

“He’s been at that for twenty minutes,” I say.

“He does that when he’s stressed.”

“He’s stressed?”

“He can tell when I’m stressed. Then he gets stressed. Then he does things like sit on newspapers.”

I look down at Wiggles, still sitting on his prize. He looks back at me with the same skeptical expression he had in the van. “He’s judging me,” I decide.

“He’s judging everyone. Don’t take it personally.”

She’s still not looking at me. Her forehead is still resting against the cabinet. The almost-laugh drains out of the room, and whatever she’s been building up to say is right there, waiting.

“Hmm, I suppose the quiet does catch up with you.” I inch my shoulder up, the slightest shrug, and keep my voice soft and easy because she looks fragile, like she might break. As much as I don’t want to be the reason she falls to pieces; in the best possible way, I need to know where her head is at, and what she’s thinking. “And how are things looking to you?”

“Like I don’t know who I am anymore.” She lifts her head and grips the edge of the counter with both hands, staring out into the woods behind the farmhouse. “Yesterday I was getting married.”

She raises her hand as if to stave off the argument she must sense is coming because what was about to go down in that church yesterday was far from a marriage. “Yes, I was being forced into it, but I resolved myself to the fact that I was marrying Patrick for my mom. To save her. I wanted to run, you know? I was going to sneak out of the house and disappear. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live with myself if she died because I didn’t have the strength to do what was necessary to save her. So I made a choice. Or, at least, I told myself that’s what I did.”

Anna’s chin is up, and her shoulders are pushed back, but she won’t look at me. She just keeps staring out that fucking window like the key to the universe is dangling from one of the pine trees.

“And then you and Mark stormed in, armed to the teeth. You took me from the church at gunpoint and tossed me in the back of a van. I should have been terrified. I mean, I was terrified. But I was also relieved.”