“Thanks.”
That was one good point about this: punching Jeremy had been at least vaguely cathartic. Strangely, hitting him the second time hadn’t felt quite as good as the first, with a kind of diminishing return that came from knowing that nothing would ever happen to him, really, for what he’d done.
“The hardest part was when he tried to make out that it was all in my head. He treated it all as if he hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“Does he actually believe that, do you think?” Christopher asked.
Paige was about to reply when something snagged in her brain. A flicker of something that made her sit staring while she tried to work it out.
“I’m sorry, I’ve said the wrong thing,” Christopher said.
“No, the right thing,” Paige tried to latch onto the thought, and when it came to her, it was breathtakingly obvious. “This is about belief.”
“I didn’t think Adam was religious.”
Paige was already shaking her head. “Not that kind of belief. I mean, it doesn’t matter what’s true. It only matters what Adam believes to be true. When he spoke about his uncle helping to abuse him, it doesn’t matter if that was true or not, only that he thought it was. And when he killed Angelique, it doesn’t matter that I never thought of her as having done me some great wrong, only that he did.”
“So what does that mean for the case?” Christopher asked as he neatly overtook another car, glancing across at her.
Paige tried to take in all the implications. “It means that Prof. Thornton was wrong earlier. He told me that I had to focus on Jeremy because he was the person who had most obviously wronged me. But in Adam’s mind, it could be someone else entirely. Someone who never did anything wrong but who he thinks did.”
“Who?” Christopher asked, a sense of urgency in his voice. “If he’s about to strike again, Paige, I need to know who he’s going to attack.”
Now, there was no sense of it being ok if Paige guessed wrong, no sense that they could just keep trying until they caught Adam. Now, she could hear how much he needed her to get this right, because as much as he’d tried to tell her that it was all ok, someone’s life hung in the balance.
Who, though? Someone connected to Paige, obviously. Someone Adam thought had done her wrong, presumably because Paige had mentioned them in their sessions.
One name leapt out from Paige’s memories instantly. “My mother. He’s going to target my mother.”
“Are you sure?” Christopher asked.
There was no room this time to get things wrong.
“He knows I don’t have a great relationship with my mother after everything that happened. I’m sure I talked about things being wrong with her at one point, to try to get him to open up…”
Paige could remember the conversation perfectly. She’d mentioned her mother, trying to get Adam to open up about his uncle. If Adam thought that they were essentially the same, if he thought that she was somehow guilty for not spotting the abuse that Jeremy had inflicted on Paige in time…
“It’s her, Christopher. He’s going to kill my mother.”
“Where is she now?” Christopher asked.
“A couple of towns over, back the way we came.”
Paige felt the car lurch as Christopher skidded to a halt and spun it around. A car behind them hit its horn, barely stopping in time before it hit them. Paige didn’t care right then. The only thing that mattered was getting to her mother in time.