stomping down for coffee with her hair in crazy tufts. The night he had proposed, I’d told Davis, I’m not the kind who’ll ever leave you. Those words had held more than their legal meaning. I’d been saying I was his, that I would not betray him. I wouldn’t make those words a lie. I was getting too good at lying already.
I was sorry for that girl who had loved Tig, but she was gone. I’d tried to bury her in her own meat, I’d tried to starve her out, tried drugging her to death in California. Before I’d found a way to kill her, she had gone into the water. She’d gone into the water, and I’d come up, new.
“I’m married,” I told Tig. I was blushing hard.
“Okay,” he said, smiling.
“Happily. With a baby.”
“Okay,” Tig said, holding his hands up again, palms forward. An easy surrender. “It was just a thought. Nostalgia. Look, I’m letting it go.”
He held the thought up in a pinch between two fingers and then blew on it. I could practically see it fly away.
Still, I stayed where I was, the counter between us. I didn’t want to smell him, so familiar. I was already bargaining with that dead girl in my head. No sex, she told me. Just a kiss. But that was a hard no. I would not play chicken with betrayal, trying to get right up to the line. If I kissed him, I would be no better than Tate Bonasco at a barbecue.
“So why are you asking about Ange? You clearly know her,” he said, changing the subject. He was making it easy for me to be decent, and that was damned attractive, too.
“It’s complicated,” I told him. I set down the coffee I didn’t want by the sink. “I need to leave in less than half an hour, and I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to explain it all, even though I owe you that. I’ve done this morning all wrong. I even sat here and let you apologize to me, which is crazy. You can’t know how much it’s meant to me, to come here and see that you’d already forgiven me. But now I need to apologize.”
He looked almost alarmed. “That’s crazy. For what?”
A thousand things, and he should know them. My eyebrows came together,
“Because I never said anything. I let the cops blame you. I sat there, silent, and you lost three years.”
Tig waved one of my three great shames away with a lazy hand, like it was nothing. “What would you have said? Name one thing you could have said to help me.”
Was he being disingenuous? It didn’t seem like him. But maybe he just wanted to hear it. Out loud. I had given it to Roux, those words, and she was using them as weapons, hard against me. They were already in her hands. I could do no more damage to myself here, and I owed him this. Him more than anyone. I stilled my body, cleared my mind. I looked him in the eye.
“I should have told them I was driving,” I said.
He actually laughed. A disbelieving little sound. He shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands out.
“But you weren’t,” he said, and then he saw my face. “You know that, Amy, right? You weren’t driving. It was me.”
11
The thing that stayed with him, the one thing he knew for sure, was that moment on the railroad tracks. On the way to the clearing, I’d eased us over them so carefully that he’d teased me. Pussy move, Smiff. On the way back, rocketing down the inexorable path that would intersect with Mrs. Shipley, we had taken the tracks at such high speed that we’d soared.
Jumping the tracks was his move. He always jumped them. So he thought he’d been driving.
He’d never questioned it, though he did not remember his hands on the wheel, his foot on the gas. His last clear memory was kissing me. We’d pounded down more wine and smoked more, after, and we’d already been wrecked. For both of us, the walk to the car was little more than a slide show. The drive itself was a black patch with that single airborne moment in the middle. The next thing he remembered was weeping on his knees beside the wreckage.
“I had the keys,” I argued. We’d been over this already. “I got in behind the wheel.”
“But you don’t remember driving.” He said it like a challenge.
“Neither do you,” I shot back,