31
STELLA
THE MOTION OF THE CAR shook me awake. I must have fallen asleep somehow, my exhaustion finally getting the upper hand over fear. I couldn’t have slept long, because it was still dark outside.
My eyes immediately went to the dashboard clock. 5:30 a.m. I’d been out for less than an hour, and from the looks of it, we were still on the highway. We practically had the road to ourselves, the city so far behind that we’d passed through two more on our journey north, though they were smaller.
The sun was starting to rise, turning the distant horizon a dusky pink.
Maybe I’d get a chance to flag down a passing motorist. Yes, it was risky, but I couldn’t come up with a better alternative. We were driving too fast for me to barrel-roll out of the passenger door. And it wasn’t like I had a phone to call for help—mine was probably lost or stolen at this point. No one even knew where I was, so if Theo—or whatever the fuck his name was —did end up murdering me and dumping my body, it might really be weeks before it was found, if ever.
I didn’t know where we were going, how much longer we’d be driving, or what would happen when we arrived at our destination. What was worse, I had no idea if Blake had made it out alive, because the man beside me refused to answer my questions.
He’d fucking kidnapped me. I should have been terrified, but more than anything, I was pissed.
I sighed and pretended to shift in my seat, turning my head away from “Theo,” my eyes slitted just enough to see. The glove box didn’t have a lock on it, and the car’s registration might be in there. With his real-ass name on it. I’d have one chance at this, so I had to make it work, had to fight back my fear of what might happen and do what I had to.
I took a deep breath through my nose, steeling myself, and then another.
“Watch out!” I yelled, jerking upright and pointing left.
He slammed on the brakes and yanked the wheel right to avoid the nonexistent obstacle. My instinct was to freeze, to curl up, to brace myself for the scream that would follow, but I pushed myself through it and shot forward in my seat. The car swerved, and my fingers missed the glove box latch, but I got it on the second try, yanking it open and grabbing as much as I could.
He reacted faster than I expected, straightening us out and ripping the papers away. But it was too late. I’d already seen it. I knew who he was.
“Tyler Neumann,” I said, my voice shaking with adrenaline.
He made an angry noise and threw the papers back into the glove box, having to lean into my space to slam it shut again.
I inspected him with fresh eyes. The name Tyler fit him well, seeing as it was one of the douchier ones in existence. The only thing worse would be a J name.
He sat back and said nothing, but I could tell from the way his jaw jumped that he was furious. Good, I’d finally scored one against him, and since he hadn’t hit me or threatened me with the gun again, maybe he wasn’t as homicidal as I feared back in the tunnels, when his rage had been visceral.
I looked him over, wondering where the gun even was. We were still in our party clothes, and he was coated in yuck from our trek through the city’s underground, his white tuxedo shirt smeared and torn, a pant leg ripped from snagging it on a pipe. He’d used a cleaning wipe on his hands before touching the steering wheel, but did he give me one for my soon-to- be-infected-wounds? No. Proving how much he didn’t care about me and never had.
God, I’d been so stupid. I hadn’t ever fully trusted him, but I’d let him in enough to help him. To fuck him. Which I would never forgive myself for.
Runa was going to start charging me by the hour after I unloaded all this on
her.
If I got the chance to see her again.
Shit, Runa. If I died, who would pay her medical bills?
My thoughts went back to Aunt Cordy’s fundraiser and the way Dad had pleaded to cover some of the cost for Runa’s TMR surgery. Was that just
because he wanted to help his struggling daughter? Or out of the pure goodness of his heart? Would he step up and do the right thing even without me there?
I wanted to say yes, but after all these ugly revelations with Theo—no, Tyler—I was questioning my own judgement. I knew Maddie was bad, but murder? And Keith committing elder abuse? I never would have seen that coming. Jessica, however … I mean, she’d always rubbed me the wrong way, but I’d assumed it was because of her type A personality mixed with being an insufferable kiss-ass.
At least Tyler had allowed me a brief phone call to Derrick (on speaker because he didn’t trust me not to talk in code or something) to make sure Amos was taken care of. So, he wasn’t an animal killer, at the very least, but all other bets were off. And sure, he’d said he was taking me to someone who could prove Richard was a shitty person, but did I trust him?
Never again.
My stomach growled. Loud enough to be heard over the road noise. I’d already eaten the emergency crackers in my clutch, but they were running thin, and the acid was starting to build. Just when I’d started to make some progress and get a little relief, my life went to shit again and my stomach right along with it.
“There are snacks in the back,” Tyler said.
“I can’t eat them.”
“The ones on the right are gastritis-friendly.”
I stared at his profile. He had food I could eat. Why? “Been planning my kidnapping for long?”
He made a dismissive sound. “Now who has a big ego?”
“Then explain the facts, man formerly known as Theo.”
He shot me an annoyed look and kept his mouth shut, just like he had this entire four-hour ride. I had never wanted to kick someone in the face more, but the cramped quarters meant there wasn’t enough room.
Carefully, I turned in my seat, cautious of any sudden movement from him because there was nothing to say this wasn’t some sort of trap, and glanced in the back. At first, I didn’t see what he was talking about, because his gym bag was covering it and it was still mostly dark, but a passing streetlight revealed a row of boxes peeking out from behind the bag.
I slid it away and stared. Plain, unsweetened, squeezable applesauce.
Rice crackers. Raw almonds. Single-serving packages of dried bananas.
Unseasoned potato chips fried in light olive oil.
“How long have these been here?” I asked.
Silence.
“Tyler!” I finally snapped, at wits’ end.
He must have heard the murder in my voice because he actually
answered me. “Since Cordy’s dinner.”
That was weeks and weeks ago.
And I hadn’t noticed because he’d conveniently hidden them behind his gym bag.
“Why’d you buy them?” I said in a small voice.
He sighed, the next words spoken low, like he didn’t want to say them. “I read that you have to eat at regular intervals, and saw how restricted the diet was, so I bought them in case we got stuck in traffic or something and you didn’t have anything else on you.”
I finally turned back around in my seat.
He glanced over as we passed beneath another light, eyes steely. “Don’t read into it. This is more about me than it is about you.”
“Isn’t it always?” I sniped, but regardless of why he bought them, I was grateful, because I needed to put something in my stomach.
I turned again and snagged some applesauce and crackers. Sounds of crinkling filled the car as I opened them. They weren’t my usual brands— these were organic—but the ingredient lists looked fine.
“What was your plan?” I asked, popping a cracker into my mouth.
Tyler’s forearm flexed as he squeezed the steering wheel, the only sign he’d heard me speak.
“With the employees,” I pressed, unwilling to let the conversation drop no matter how hard he tried to ignore me. “You were going to blackmail them, right? Force them to give you information?”
Silence.
I bounced a cracker off the side of his face.
He flinched sideways like I’d punched him, and shot me a look of
warning. “Don’t do that again.”
“Then answer a question!”
“Why, so your brother will have more to give to the cops?”
“Does that mean he’s still alive and free to do that?”
His expression turned cagey.
My fingers curled as the urge to strangle him became unbearable. “Just
fucking tell me.”
More silence.
“Pull over,” I said.
“Why? Are you carsick?”
“No. I want to slap you but recognize it’s not safe to do so while you’re driving.”
He shocked me by actually slowing down. And then pulling to the side of the road.
He hit his hazards and faced me. “Do it.”
I stared at him, hating that the rising sun had turned his skin golden, making him look angelic when I knew he’d been sent straight from hell to torture me. My hand shook with the urge to actually follow through. To pull back my arm and not just slap him, but punch him in the face, over and over again. This man had looked me in the eye while lying to me more times than I could count. He’d flirted with me, danced with me, forced me to parade him through my parents’ house, all while planning to burn the life they’d worked so hard for to the ground. I couldn’t even bring myself to think about all the other things we’d done together, or I might actually get sick.
“Do it, Stella,” he repeated, looking like he meant it, like he wanted it.
I shook my head. “No. I’m done giving you what you want. Get back on the road.”
He checked his mirrors and pulled back on, and we were quiet for a while, him focused on driving, me working through my snacks.
“I need you to tell me what happened to make you like this,” I said.
“Every single step along the way that made you hate your father so much you were willing to fuck over so many other people in order to get to him.
And I’m not just talking about my family. I’m talking about all the other people who owe you money. Everyone you planned to use.”
“I’m not his—”
“Stop lying!” I screamed. “For once in your fucking life, just tell the truth.”
He was quiet for so long that I didn’t think he would do it, but then he ran a hand over his face, looking exhausted, and let out the longest sigh I had ever heard. “Maryanne Margaret Neumann,” he said. “That was my mother’s name, but everyone called her Meg. She was nineteen when they met. Richard was thirty-five.”
I frowned because I was thirty-five, and nineteen-year-olds looked and acted like children to me.
“There are bigger age gaps out there, but she was young for her age,”
Tyler said, and I felt my stomach drop. “And she was naïve, easy prey for someone looking to take advantage of her. She was also new to the city, had scraped and saved just to get there, barely escaping the poverty she’d been born into. Her parents ran a dairy farm that had been in her father’s family for over a century. By the time she came around, it was underwater, and she and her seven siblings were doing most of the manual labor themselves. It … wasn’t a good childhood. Her parents were strict, deeply religious, and fucking mean. The worst combination.”
“At fifteen, they forced her to drop out of high school and toil in the fields during the day. At night, she worked at a twenty-four-hour diner serving handsy truck drivers and saving every single cent she could hide from her parents. It took her four years, but finally, she had enough for a bus ride to the city and the cheapest studio apartment she could find.”
I shifted in my seat, thinking how I’d been born with a silver spoon in my mouth and had the audacity to be mad about it growing up. No wonder Tyler hated me. Hell, I hated past me, still, even after the hours I’d spent in therapy trying to unpack my resentment.
“When I was little,” he continued, “and we didn’t have much food in the house, I remember Mom telling me at least we weren’t mixing ketchup and hot water to make tomato soup like she had when she was a kid.”
“Tyler, I’m—”
“Don’t say it,” he snapped. “I don’t want your pity.”
I shut my mouth.
He took another deep breath. “She was a waitress in the city, saving up to take community college courses, when they met. Mom was pretty spare on the details. All I know is that Richard came into the restaurant one day and swept her off her feet. She said he’d been charming, wealthy. That they’d had a whirlwind romance and she’d fallen quickly. Not that I could
blame her. She’d never had anything nice in her life, and suddenly here was this man, buying her expensive clothes and taking her on impromptu trips.”
“It wasn’t until several months into the relationship that she learned he was married, but by then, she was deeply in love. But it was okay. He swore he was going to leave his wife for her. He just needed time to get his affairs in order first. So my mom stayed with him, waiting, hoping. Believing. And then she found out she was pregnant with me. She told Richard right away, sure the news would be the final push he needed to file for divorce, but instead, he stopped taking her phone calls. Pretended not to know who she was when she publicly confronted him. Claimed she was nothing but a random woman trying to cause a scandal. And everyone in his life believed him, which must have included your parents since they were his best friends.”
The man from Tyler’s version of events was so different than the one I’d known all my life that it sounded like two different people. Literally. I was tempted to ask if Tyler was sure he’d found the right Richard, but one thing I’d learned about Tyler was that he was meticulous, so I had no doubt that he’d done the work to confirm it. Plus, the city might be a big place, but I highly doubted there were two Richard Lawsons who owned real estate firms with a twenty-five-year-old long-lost son.
“That is very different than what I remember,” I said, carefully.
“You were a kid, and you overheard whispers. This is my fucking origin story, Stella. I think I know what I’m talking about.”
I fell quiet again, because he was right.
“After the ordeal, Mom moved back home. Broke, pregnant, and heartbroken. She was so desperate that she went to her parents for help, even though they’d done nothing but abuse and neglect her all her life.”
I braced myself, sensing what came next.
“They turned her away because she’d had premarital sex,” he said. “So we stayed with my aunt Jenny in her shitty apartment over a laundromat.
We moved around a lot after that. There are huge gaps in the welfare system, and we slipped through them. The nearest food bank was half an hour away, but Mom worked two jobs and didn’t own a car, which meant she hardly ever made it there, and when she did, it was so picked clean that there wasn’t much left for us. I was never starving. But I was always hungry.”
I swallowed down the rising lump in my throat, hating how easily my mind conjured an image of him, much younger, too thin, scared and hungry.
“Mom must have been hungrier, because she always gave me the larger portions, but she never complained. Sometimes, there were men to help out, but they didn’t last long, and they were even worse to her than her parents. I wasn’t able to keep them off her when I was younger, but I tried.”
My mind went back to the first time I saw the circular scars on his back and wondered what they were, thinking they were exactly the circumference of a cigarette. I couldn’t imagine how awful someone would have to be to do that to a child, and god only knew what they’d done to Meg. It was horrible, what she and Tyler had been through. More than anyone should have to endure.
“She ran herself down to nothing,” Tyler said, shaking his head. “It was like she was disappearing right in front of my eyes. The fall I turned sixteen is when I really remember looking at her and starting to worry. Well, more than usual, at least. She was only thirty-five, but her hair had gone completely gray, and yeah, I know genetics and blah, blah, but none of her siblings had gray hair, so no one can convince me it wasn’t caused by stress. She was just so frail, always exhausted, never able to catch up on sleep. At that point, I was old enough to get a job and help out, but even after she went down to working normal hours, she kept getting worse. We didn’t have insurance, but I forced her to go to the doctor anyway. Two months later, she was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer.”
I had to turn my head away and bite my lip. Somehow, the story just kept getting worse.
“No one visited her in the hospital,” he said. “I think the nurses felt bad for us, because they broke the rules and snuck a cot into her room so I could sleep over. One of her oncologists caught me once, early in the morning, but he must not have said anything because the cot stayed put.”
I braced myself, because I knew Meg was no longer with us, but I’d demanded Tyler tell me every single step that led to him becoming who he was, and now I had to face the full reality of that.
“The nurses did their best to prepare me for the end. It was kind of them, but there’s no way to prepare a child to watch their parent die.” His voice grew quieter. “Even before the diagnosis, mom was so frail that everyone said it would be over quickly.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t. Or maybe it
was, but it didn’t feel that way to me, because she was dying and there was nothing I could do to save her. All I could do was sit there and say goodbye to her in stages. The day she lost the ability to speak, I remember staring down at her hand while I cried. Her skin was so transparent that I could count every single vein.”
A tear slipped down my cheek. Yes, I hated this man, but it didn’t mean my heart wasn’t breaking for him.
“It was in her lungs, at the end,” he said, staring out at the highway with unseeing eyes. “I still hear the sound of her gasping in my nightmares. I think she was trying to stay as long as she could for me. I can’t explain how else she hung on for as long as she did. The day she slipped into a coma, I finally found the courage to tell her to let go. I told her it was okay to stop fighting. I lied and said I’d be all right, that I couldn’t watch her suffer anymore because it was killing me, too.”
I reached out and threaded my fingers through Tyler’s free hand, dragging it into my lap, squeezing it so he knew that at least he wasn’t reliving this alone.
“She must have believed me, because she passed that night. Afterward, I sat with her body for over an hour before the nurses were able to lead me from the room, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
He shook his head. “Because we didn’t have any money. I tried to go to my grandparents, but they refused to claim Mom’s body or help with her funeral costs even though they’d sold the farm and actually had money by then. She wanted to be buried,” Tyler said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But in the end, she was handed over to the state and cremated because no one would help me.”
He cleared his throat, sniffed, and the sound of him trying to hold it together was enough to make me lose the fight against my own tears. I turned my head away so he wouldn’t see, because what right did I have to cry?
Listening to Tyler’s story was enough to make me want to burn the entire world to the ground. No wonder he was so angry, so mean, so unwilling to let people in. Why would he when all anyone had ever done was hurt him?
“It wasn’t until senior year of college, after I hosted my first big poker party, that I had enough money to do right by her,” he said. “I found a nice
plot of land in a cemetery overlooking a lake and bought it for her. It took another party for me to afford the kind of coffin she deserved. Another one before I could buy her headstone. She has everything she wanted now, and I even pay a groundskeeper to buy new flowers every week and place them
by her headstone.”
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I said.
Tyler turned toward me, but instead of grief, I saw a deep, cavernous well of rage in his eyes. He yanked his hand out of mine. “I don’t want your apology, Stella. I just want him to hurt as badly as she did.”
