the club. The next morning, she’d woken up in the Alley, which was blocks from the 40 Watt, which made no sense until she stood up and felt the wet stickiness between her legs.
She had bruises on her thighs. She felt raw inside. There was a cut on the back of her neck. She had skin under her fingernails. Someone else’s skin. Her lips were tender. Her jaw was tender. Everything was tender until she found a guy packing some equipment into the back of a van and he gave her a bump and she gave him a handjob and she crawled back home in time to get yelled at by her parents—not for being out all night, but for not being home in time to walk Claire to school.
Claire was fourteen years old. She could walk herself to school. The building was so close to the Boulevard house that you could hear the bells ringing for class changes. But back then, all of her parents’ anger seemed tied up in Lydia’s failure to take care of her last remaining sister. She was setting a bad example for Claire. She wasn’t spending enough time with Claire. She should try to do more things with Claire.
Which made Lydia feel guilty, and when she wasn’t feeling guilty, she was feeling resentful.
Maybe that’s why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-preservation. You couldn’t resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear.
Which is exactly what she had done eighteen years ago when Lydia had told her about Paul. Instead of confronting the truth, Claire had taken the easy route and made herself disappear from Lydia’s life. She had changed her phone number. She had refused to respond to any of Lydia’s letters. She had even moved apartments in order to erase Lydia from her life.
Maybe that was why Lydia hadn’t been able to forgive her.
Because, really, nothing had changed in the last eighteen years. For all of Claire’s tough talk—her seemingly sincere apologies and blunt confessions—she was still keeping one foot out the door. The only reason Claire had reached out to Lydia last night was because she had started to unravel Paul’s lies and couldn’t handle it on her own. She had said it herself this morning—she wanted her big sister to make it all better.
What would Claire do now? With Lydia gone, there was no one else to call. Helen couldn’t be relied on. Huckabee was useless. Adam Quinn was probably in this thing right alongside Paul. Claire couldn’t turn to the police because there was no telling who else was involved. She could turn to herself, but what would she find? A kept woman who was incapable of keeping herself.
The car slowed again. Lydia could feel the terrain turn from asphalt to gravel. She splayed her hands to keep from being jolted around the trunk. A large pothole slammed her into the sheet-metal. The cut in her forehead opened. Lydia blinked away the blood.
She struggled with the bad thoughts that were pinging around her brain. And then she stopped struggling, because what was the point? This was no longer a matter of an unhealed rift between her and Claire. This was life and death.
Lydia’s life.
Lydia’s possible death.
The brakes squeaked as the car rolled to a stop. The engine idled.
She braced herself, waiting for the trunk to open. No one knew where she was. No one even knew she was missing. If she left this all to Claire, Lydia knew that she would never make it out alive.
It had been like this all of their lives—before Paul, even before Julia.
Claire made a choice, and Lydia was the one who paid for it.
FOURTEEN
Claire listened to the click as Paul hung up the phone. She put the receiver back on the hook. She went outside and sat on the back porch. There was a notebook and a pen beside her leg, but she had given up listing questions when Paul had made it clear that he wasn’t going to answer any of them. Every time he called, he waited to hear her voice, then he disconnected the line, and the timer