“Go on,” I reply, still unable to feel any empathy or understanding forhisside of the story.
He clears his throat, obviously feeling his guilt starting to choke him a little. “When I got close enough to see what had happened, it was clear that you had been hit by one of my bullets. There was so much going on, what with the sirens and everything, that I realized I had made a huge mistake, and I was about to hate myself for ruining your life. So, I decided to give you a new one.”
I narrow my eyes at him a little, leaning back in my chair.
“I identified myself as your husband easily since I had gotten ahold of your wallet before the paramedics did. They had no idea how to identify you, so I gave you a new persona. You were now my wife, one of the most well taken care of women in the country. I didn’t know what life I had cost you before, but I was determined to make sure that it wasn’t a total loss.”
I can hear the pain in his voice now, and my heart begins to soften a bit despite all of my efforts to keep myself from giving in. It’s obvious that he really feels conflicted about all of this.
“Why would you do that? You could have just left me there and drove away. You risked getting yourself caught. Your little Samaritan effort could have put you in prison for the rest of your life,” I reply, forcing an edge to my voice that otherwise wouldn’t be there.
“I knew that. Of course, I knew that. But as I said, I wasn’t really thinking straight, and the fact that you were just this beautiful young girl that I had permanently broken absolutely crushed me. I had to make it right. So, that day, you became River Poltorak,” he replies softly.
It takes me a moment to really absorb his words. For a few minutes, they seem to just slide over my brain, like they won’t catch hold of me in a meaningful way. It feels like he’s just telling me a story, like it’s something I’ll just end up forgetting at the end of the day anyway. It all sounds so absurd.
It’s so hard for me to wrap my head around it all. He found me being pulled out of a car, so it must have beenmycar if I was the only person in it.
“I need you to take me back to where you found me, where my car is,” I demand, shifting my focus away from empathy and back to hard evidence.
He pauses for a moment, and I want to scream at him.How hard can it be to just take me back to the place you decided to hijack my life!
“Adas, take me to my fucking car.”
He exhales heavily, somehow feeling the pressure mounting from a tiny woman who can just barely walk far enough to get herself a glass of juice from the fridge. “Okay, fine. I’ll take you. But if you start to remember stuff, it might scare you. The scene where you almost died might be too intense for you,” he replies hesitantly.
I pick up a stapler and hurl it at his head. “Take me back to my goddamn car, or I’ll have you recite your deranged little story to the fucking cops. Even if they never found out about your mafia shit, kidnapping me and keeping me locked up in your house would get you an instant life sentence.”
His eyes widen as he glances back at the place on the wall where the stapler hit, denting the drywall a little. “Okay, okay. Fine. We will go right now.”
I try as hard as I can to walk on my own without his help as we leave the office. We take the elevator straight down to the underground garage, and the car I stole is already back in its original position. Adas really has everything down to a science here, which is probably how he was able to get away with this for so long.
We take a different car, a bright orange Tesla, and Adas speeds out of the garage like he’s trying to escape from his own goons.
We’re both silent the entire way there. I want to speak up, to somehow make this all feel okay, but I can’t think of anything I could say that wouldn’t come across as passive-aggressive or hostile. I’m already getting what I want without the intense corporal punishment I was expecting to get from him.
The drive to the location of the shooting is exactly the direction I was heading before I was caught, but the rain has let up enough for me to really see my surroundings. We even pass the parking lot where Gregory apprehended me, which makes me sick to my stomach. I never want to experience that kind of abject terror ever again.
Will I be able to promise myself that if I stay with Adas?
At this point, I can’t think of anything that would make it feel worth it to continue with this fucked up fantasy. Not the money, not the baby, not the security. Nothing.
Eventually, we pull off the highway and start meandering through side streets where the houses are run down with front yards littered with rubble and broken appliances. There doesn’t appear to be anyone out on the sidewalks, which is strange for a neighborhood like this in the middle of the day.
As we continue onward, I start to feel a different kind of nausea in the pit of my stomach.Is this where I lived? Why the hell would I live here?
I confirm my fears by pulling up my apartment address on my phone, realizing that we’re less than four blocks away.
I suddenly feel the compulsion to go back to the estate. If this is my home, I don’t want to be home ever again. There’s a heavy feeling over this neighborhood, like a dark, eternal storm cloud of grief. I feel like a little kid who has lost my family in a crowd and fears I’ll never see them again, and I want to bury myself in my sleeves and cry.
“We’re here.”
I look to the left of the car at an overgrown parking lot behind an abandoned hospital, or maybe it’s a school. I’m not sure.
There’s nobody here right now, so it’s clear that the car sitting vacant across from us is mine.
It looks at least fifteen years old, a burgundy color that I haven’t seen any modern cars come in since I’ve been out of the hospital. The body of it seems vintage, retro at best, but it’s rusting out at the seams.
“That’s your car. That’s where I found you. These two asshole medics were treating you like a ragdoll. I had to step in somehow,” Adas says, his voice solemn and far away. “It all just felt so inhuman, seeing all that blood spilled with nobody reaching in to give a fuck about whether you lived or died. I could tell they were ready to give up on you.”