“They’ll know. The second she calls me and she hears it in my voice, she’ll know you’re near.”

“That’s what everyone fails to understand, Kyla. I want her to know I’m near. I want her to know I have you with me under duress and I want her to know she underestimated me. These things don’t bother me. They fuel me.”

So they did. The idea of Ashley being washed over with the realization that she had mistaken my love as weakness shivered me to my core with an unhealthy dose of absurd pleasure. My pleasure was rare these days. I toasted many plastic hotel cups filled with cold soda to the phrase “take it where you can get it” and thought often of Ashley’s face as she saw me before her after all these months. Like I said, these things fueled me. Her displeasure my only pleasure.

“Tell me about Aiden.”

“What about him?”

“Anything. Anything at all.”

“It won’t help you, but fine,” she said, adjusting uncomfortably in the passenger’s seat, “he’s a smart guy.”

“Is he?”

“You should know better than most.”

I was no longer a person whose presence filled her with guilt. I was no longer worth gentle words and soft apologies. Because now I was the nameless, faceless enemy that had her against her will. She only felt at ease knowing death was coming. She liked the panic, the drama of last moments, the cold sweat that crept and landed at the base of her neck. There was a heroic beauty in being murdered by the woman she had fooled. There was nothing heroic about being kidnapped and driven across America’s highways bound in rope and buckled in.

“I should, shouldn’t I?” I say with a smile she can’t see, “maybe you should tell me anyway.”

“He’s rich, good-looking, smart…he knows what he wants and he goes for it.”

“This I know.”

“Yeah, well…I told you.”

“He’s also a rapist, Kyla. In case you had forgotten in your haste to wipe the slate clean and start anew in hot suburbia.”

“I knew that I couldn’t forget, ok? I never forgot about you and what happened. I thought about it all the time actually. And when either of them would call, it only reminded me of what happened in that house.”

“But you take money from him. You survive on the money he gives you in exchange for your part in all this. You feel bad, but not bad enough to turn down the coin. I see.”

“I guess I reasoned it away by telling myself that if I didn’t take the money…if I saw no benefit…then it really was all in vain. I commit the biggest sin of my life, only to walk away with nothing to show from it? No…” she says, shaking her head.

“Perhaps those are the moments when you should’ve called me and told me where my niece was. Maybe that could’ve been your benefit. Fucking up, but fixing it!”