Max vaults the desk, and he’s at my side, not pulling me back, just standing with me, listening to Aimee whimper. My gut seizes and my legs tremble, and I want … I don’t know what I want. To hide. To save her. To save her and to hide, to help her and yet not to do something stupid and pointless, like run out there and get myself and Max killed.
“Why?” she says. “Why me?”
“Because your job here is done, Aimee.” It’s Gray, his voice moving closer. “These kids aren’t going to need therapy. And we don’t need any loose ends.”
The gun fires again. I jerk back. Max grabs me. Then I see the door, still cracked open, and I go to close it, but before I do, I look. I need to look. I peer through the crack. They’re right there, ten feet away, at a junction. Aimee on the floor, dead. Gray stands over her …
Before I shut the door, I see that Aimee must have mistaken Gray for Aaron—he’s about the same height and wearing the same color clothes. Then she’d noticed the mask.
Max’s fingers close tight around my arm, and he guides me back behind the desk.
He talks to me, whispering so low I can barely hear him through my shock. I don’t think it matters what he’s saying. His tone is soothing but firm, and it says that we’re going to get out of here, I need to trust that we’ll get out of here.
After a moment, the numbness fades and I hear his words. He’s not telling me vague reassurances that we’ll get out. He’s outlining the steps, giving me a concrete footing.
“Promise me something,” I whisper when my mental feet are firmly on the ground again.
A quirk of a smile as he whispers back, “Depends on what it is.”
“I need to know that if something goes wrong—if we’re out there, like Aimee, and I freeze up in a flashback—you’ll keep going.”
He pauses. “Is that what happens? Flashbacks?”
“That’s not the—”
“Is there a trigger? Blood, I suppose, obviously, and guns.”
“Max …”
“Is there something that will snap you out of it? Talking to you? Squeezing your arm?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Actually, yes, it is.” He pops his head over the desk. “Seems quiet. We’ll talk later. With any luck, we won’t need to.”
“Max, I asked you—”
“I ignored the request and will continue ignoring it.” He pushes to his feet. “We can circle back to avoid seeing—”
“No. We’d need to go all the way back around, because I’m not sure how else to get to the therapy room. You want to see what a flashback looks like? How I might endanger your life by freezing up? Then we’re going past Aimee for a full demonstration.”
I’m being sarcastic, but he nods. “Good idea. They’re long gone, and this gives us a safe opportunity to test how to deal with it.”
I shake my head and climb over the desk.
CHAPTER 11
Aimee is dead. Aimee, Gideon, Maria, and if we don’t get to a phone Lorenzo will join them, if he hasn’t already. I don’t think about that. About the likelihood that no matter how fast we move, it’ll be too late for Lorenzo. I have to keep telling myself that we can save someone. Because I didn’t save Maria or Gideon. Or, now, Aimee.
The sight of Aimee’s body does not send me tumbling back into the horror of the Porters’ murders, possibly because I’m too busy keeping my dinner down. Gray shot her in the chest the first time, but it seems that a random shot to the chest doesn’t instantly kill. Like the Porters.
They had names. Claire and David. Does it make it easier to lump them together as “the Porters”? Maybe. I don’t know.
Is it okay to make it easier? Or is that hiding? I don’t want to hide—really, really don’t want to hide—but I do want to be okay. When I hid under the bed, I was doing both, hiding and “being okay,” except in the end I wasn’t okay, was I? I’m alive, though, and that’s more than they got, so I should be grateful.
Round and round we go, guilt nipping at my heels with every step I try to take toward “being okay,” which means maybe I never will be, and I should have talked about that more with Aimee. And now she’s dead, and I shouldn’t think that, shouldn’t think how her death affects me, because that’s wrong, wrong, wrong. Like thinking that I’m sad the Porters are dead because it means I’ll never get to babysit Darla again.
But all that—all that thinking, the endless thinking—it comes later, after we’re past Aimee, because when I see her, I can’t think anything. Can’t form thought, really. Because when the chest shot didn’t kill her, Gray …
I’ve heard the term before. I can even remember the first time. Dad was playing poker with three coworkers. His regular monthly game, always at our house, because “You’ve got a nice house, Jim. A normal house. Hell, you’ve got a normal life too. Good wife. Nice kids.” I remember them saying that, or variations thereof, and I never quite understood what it meant, but I think now it was exactly what they said: that we seemed normal.
We were normal—it wasn’t a facade. My parents loved each other and they loved us, and we weren’t rich, but if I wanted something and it was a reasonable request, I got it. Not an extraordinary family in any way. Very ordinary, except, maybe, not so ordinary after all, because you don’t get that nearly as often as you should, and maybe that’s what I’m paying now, the price for normal, first my dad and then the Porters and now this.