Chapter 4 - The Man Who Owned Her Silence
The phone quit after the seventh buzz. We both kept staring at it like it might jump.
"Does he have that number?" I asked.
"Nobody has that number," Nora said. "I bought it three weeks ago. Cash. The only call I've made on it was to the dental office."
"And the dental office called me."
She looked up.
"They had my number down as your emergency contact," I said. "Which means it was on a form. Which means—"
"Which means somebody could've read the form." She was already standing. "We need to move."
"Move where? Nora, you just got here. You just sat down. You can't bolt every single time a phone—"
"You have no idea what he'll do." She snatched her jacket off the chair. "You've never watched him get angry. You've never had him look you in the eye and lay out, real calm, exactly what he's going to do and to who."
"To whom," I said, and instantly hated myself for it.
Nora almost smiled. For half a second she looked twenty-three again.
Then the buzzing started up. Same unknown number.
I grabbed it before she could stop me. "Hello."
A pause. Then a man's voice — smooth, in no hurry, the voice of someone who had never once had to raise it to get his way.
"You must be Erin," he said. "Nora's told me so much about you. Well — she didn't tell me. But I've always made it my business to know things."
My hand clamped down on the phone. "Who is this?"
"I think you already know." Another pause. "Tell her I'm not angry. Tell her I only want to talk. She and I have unfinished business, and it's gone on long enough."
"There's nobody here by that name."
He laughed — low, patient, almost kind. "Erin. I watched the two of you walk out of that clinic. I watched you take the long way home. Smart. Not quite long enough, though." A silence. "Put her on."
Nora was already reading my face. She'd gotten everything she needed off it. She held out her hand.
"Don't," I said.
"Give it to me."
I gave it to her.
She put it to her ear and said nothing for a long moment. Then: "What do you want, Adrian."
Not a question. A flat line. The voice of someone who'd asked it a hundred times and never liked a single answer.
I could hear him talking but not the words. Nora listened. Her face didn't move, but her free hand found the back of the chair and squeezed until the knuckles went pale.
"No," she said finally. "That's not happening."
His voice again. Longer this time.
"Then do it," Nora said. "Go ahead. Every single thing you swore you'd do." A beat. "Because I'm done. I'm done running. And if you go anywhere near my sister, I will walk into the closest police station and tell them everything I know about you. Not just what you did to me. The others."
The line went quiet.
Nora's grip on the chair eased.
"That's what I thought," she said, and hung up.
The room sat very still.
I looked at her. She set the phone down, pressed both palms flat to the table, and breathed.
"The others," I said. "What others?"
She straightened up slow. "I wasn't the first person Adrian Cole talked into vanishing, Erin. I figured that out about three years in." She turned to face me. "There was a woman before me. Marisol. She'd been gone six years before I even knew her name."
"Gone like you were gone?"
"Gone different." Her voice stayed level. "She didn't make it out."
The word sat there in the room and didn't leave.
"Nora," I said carefully. "How much do you actually know about what he's done?"
She held my eyes a long time. "Enough," she said. "Enough that he can't let me walk into a station."
"Then why hasn't he stopped you before now?"
She picked the phone back up and checked the screen. Nothing new. "Because until today," she said, "he didn't know I was ready to do it."
She laid the phone face-down.
"There's something else," she said. "Something I should've told you the second you came through that clinic door."
May you like
I waited.
"The crash, ten years ago." Her jaw tightened. "Adrian wasn't just driving that road by accident."
