“You taught yourself to make all this?” I ask as he slides a plate in front of me, everything on it looking both appetizing and visually appealing, like it could be served in the finest restaurant in a big city, not a bachelor pad in Faulkner, Arkansas.
“I take no credit,” he says. “It was all TV and the internet.”
“TV and the internet didn’t cook this dinner,” I say, accepting a glass of wine.
I feel strange, like a stranger in his house, the same way I felt when I went home after being here for months. Nothing quite fits right anymore. Maybe it never did. You’d think we’d be perfect together, two lost people with no place, no purpose in the world anymore.
Maybe it could have worked before, if he’d agreed to meet instead of being too scared to show his face. Now I’m too broken, too fragmented to ever fit together with anyone. And though he’s broken, too, our pieces don’t match up. They grind against each other as we try to force them together in a desperate attempt to make something bearable from our lives.
Mr. D sits beside me, and we eat in silence for a few minutes.
“I’m going back to school,” I say at last.
He pauses, then finishes chewing before answering. “Because you missed the last few months? You should be able to work something out if you’re that close to graduating.”
“I was only a junior,” I remind him.
“You said you were eighteen.”
I shrug. “My mom forgot to enroll me in school when I was five.”
He nods. “Royal graduated. You won’t have to see him.”
“He knows your truck,” I say.
There’s a beat of silence, heavy with the words I left unspoken. He knows more than Mr. D’s truck. He knows his house.
“You’re sure he followed me here?” I ask at last. “That he knows where you live?”
“I’m sure.”
My stomach lurches, and I can’t swallow the food in my mouth. I have to spit it into a napkin and suck in a loud, ugly breath before I can speak. “Are we safe? Is he outside right now?”
He snorts. “Now you’re worried about your safety? We both know what you were doing today, Harper. What you were trying to do.”
“I wasn’t…”
Was I? I don’t remember. I remember sobbing so hard I thought my chest would implode. When I woke up on that roof, though, I knew what I wanted, the first time I’ve truly wanted anything since the morning Mr. D pulled me off that tree.
“You left the truck running,” he says quietly, spearing a green bean. “And closed the garage.”
I take a sip of wine to get my throat working again. I was so out of it after I saw Royal, I don’t even remember driving here. I should have been terrified, watching for him in the mirrors. Instead of being paranoid, I forgot the games he plays.
“I can’t protect you when I’m not with you,” Mr. D says. “If he makes you do that again…”
“He followed me here,” I repeat, as if just realizing it, as if saying it again will make it untrue, make him contradict me. Panic rises in my voice. My head swims, and I have to grab the edge of the counter so I don’t fall off the barstool. He could have run me off the road and killed me right there. He could come after me again. He will, too. He won’t stop until I’m dead. He knows where my mom lives, and now he knows my hiding place.
Mr. D frowns at his plate. “You should have protection for when you’re not with me,” he says at last. “I can’t give you a gun, not after what you pulled today. But I’ll have you fitted for brass knuckles, and if you know any other weapons you can’t turn around on yourself…”
“I won’t,” I say.
He fixes me with his unflinching, turquoise gaze. “Until you see him again.”
I don’t answer. I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t know myself anymore, the person I am now. I didn’t know I’d be able to face Royal, to talk to him and even to snark back at him like nothing changed. I didn’t know it would be the thing that finally pushed me to the edge.
I finish dinner with Mr. D and slide into his bed. I’m ready for him, but he doesn’t use me the way he used to. When he returns from the shower, he climbs in beside me and pulls me into his arms, and we go to sleep.
For the next few weeks, that’s how it continues. I don’t leave again. I don’t want to risk running into Royal. I dive deep into the makeup work my teachers sent for the last two months I missed at WHPA, so I can turn in everything and start senior year at Faulkner. It helps to focus on something and get out of my head. Day by day, I feel myself emerge, not the girl I used to be or the one Mr. D made but someone else, someone whose raw edges are sealed over with scar tissue, whose broken pieces at least resemble a human.