Chương 2
Garrett and Penelope were still watching the place where our SUV had vanished.
Tobias grabbed my jaw and forced my attention back to him.
He pointed again.
Stay down.
So we stayed dead.
We surfaced beneath the service pier where concrete pilings concealed a narrow maintenance recess from the road.
I sucked air so violently I vomited river water onto the ledge.
Tobias hauled himself beside me and collapsed against the concrete.
For several seconds neither of us spoke.
Water dripped from his hair.
His legs stretched in front of him.
His real, functioning legs.
I stared at them until he noticed.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Do this here.”
“Fifteen years.”
His mouth tightened.
“Keep your voice down.”
“Fifteen years, Tobias.”
“Garrett is maybe eighty yards away.”
“I carried you up three flights of stairs when the elevator broke at Aunt Margaret’s building.”
“I remember.”
“You complained the whole time.”
“You dropped me.”
“I was nineteen.”
“You still dropped me.”
I slapped him.
The sound cracked beneath the pier.
Tobias closed his eyes.
My palm burned.
I immediately hated myself for doing it.
I also wanted to do it again.
“You let me believe you were paralyzed.”
“I was.”
“Was?”
“For almost four years.”
The anger stalled.
Tobias looked toward the narrow opening between the pilings.
“I regained movement slowly.”
“You never told me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because somebody tried to kill us once already.”
A vehicle door slammed somewhere above us.
We both froze.
Voices carried faintly from shore.
Penelope said something I could not make out.
Garrett answered more clearly.
“We wait until it comes up.”
My stomach turned.
Tobias put one finger against his lips.
Garrett continued, “No bodies, no certainty.”
Penelope’s voice sharpened.
“You said they couldn’t get out.”
“They can’t.”
“You said that about everything.”
“Penny.”
“Don’t call me that right now.”
Their argument faded beneath the slap of water against concrete.
Even terrified, some bitter corner of me noticed that Penelope sounded less like a triumphant mistress than a woman discovering the man beside her was not entirely under control.
Tobias leaned close to my ear.
“We need to move before emergency crews arrive.”
I stared at him.
“You think they called 911?”
“Garrett will.”
“Why?”
“Because grieving husbands call 911.”
The answer made me cold in a way the river had not.
We crawled along the maintenance recess until Tobias found an old steel ladder bolted into the concrete.
His first attempt to climb failed.
His left foot slipped.
I caught his waist.
He stiffened.
Neither of us said anything.
On the second attempt he made it.
I followed.
We emerged behind an abandoned pump building nearly a quarter mile downstream, soaked, barefoot in my case, and looking exactly like two people who had crawled out of a river.
Tobias took a phone from another waterproof pouch.
“You planned for this.”
“I planned for something.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No.”
He powered on the phone.
It was an old device I had never seen.
No wallpaper.
No saved contacts visible.
No cheerful family group notifications.
Just a black screen and four bars of service.
He dialed a number from memory.
A woman answered after two rings.
Tobias said, “It happened.”
He listened.
“No, she’s alive.”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
He looked at me.
“She knows.”
I grabbed the phone.
“Who is this?”
The line went dead.
Tobias took it back without fighting me.
“That was unnecessary.”
“So was pretending to be paralyzed for eleven years.”
“Fair.”
I hated that answer.
Sirens began somewhere in the distance.
Tobias limped toward a gravel access road behind the pump building.
I followed because my husband had just tried to murder me and, at the moment, my lying brother was still the person I trusted most.
That was not a comforting ranking.
A gray pickup arrived seven minutes later.
The driver was a woman in her late sixties with cropped white hair and a Baltimore shipyard security badge clipped to her belt.
I recognized her only after she stepped out.
“Evelyn?”
Evelyn Shaw had handled security investigations for our family company before retiring six years ago.
She looked at Tobias’s legs, then at me.
“Well,” she said, “this is worse than the version I hoped would never happen.”
I backed away from both of them.
“You knew.”
Evelyn did not insult me by pretending otherwise.
“Yes.”
“How many people?”
“Three.”
“Who’s the third?”
Tobias opened the passenger door.
“We need to go.”
I stayed where I was.
“No.”
The sirens were closer.
Evelyn glanced toward the road.
“Rosalind, Garrett needs the authorities to find a drowned wife and a drowned brother.”
“He won’t.”
“Eventually he will realize that.”
“Good.”
“No,” Tobias said.
His voice changed.
For fifteen years I had heard my brother speak from wheelchairs, couches, hospital beds, car seats, and ramps.
Standing beside that pickup, he sounded like somebody I had never met.
“If Garrett knows we survived, everything he has hidden starts moving.”
“What has he hidden?”
Tobias looked at Evelyn.
She gave the smallest shake of her head.
That private exchange made something ugly rise inside me.
“Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Deciding what I’m allowed to know.”
Neither answered.
I laughed once.
It sounded terrible.
“My husband wires me into a car and drives me into a river, my pregnant sister waits on shore, my paralyzed brother stands up, and apparently I’m still the least informed person in my own family.”
Evelyn opened the rear door.
“You’re also hypothermic.”
“I don’t care.”
“You will in twenty minutes.”
“I want the truth.”
“You’ll get enough of it to ruin several nights of sleep.”
“That supposed to reassure me?”
“No.”
I climbed into the truck.
The heater smelled faintly of dust.
Evelyn gave me an old wool blanket from behind the seat, and I wrapped it around myself while Tobias sat beside me.
His wet pants clung to legs I kept accidentally looking at.
After the fourth time, he sighed.
May you like
“I know.”
“You don’t get to be irritated.”
