Chapter 67

Lucca turned off the ignition and sat, for a moment. Valerie did not immediately move to leave the passenger seat, but she stared fixedly through the windshield at the back wall of the garage. She looked like she was trying to find the words to say something; Lucca might have been doing the same, but they already knew there was nothing they could say to help.

After a minute or two, Valerie exited the car and disappeared inside the house.

Lucca followed a minute later, heading to their bedroom, burning with guilt, shame, and anger.

They wished there was something to say to take away Valerie’s hurt, some way to convince her not to go back to Dana; but they had nothing to offer, neither wise words nor the kind of support she wanted. The kind of support she needed. Needs.

They felt powerless. Surrounded by all the comfort and prosperity they had scraped together for themselves, they felt evil in a way they could not honestly refute.

Lucca had not kept their ambitions a secret from Valerie, but the subject had not come up in prior conversations. She had never asked, and Lucca had never raised it, perhaps because they knew how much of a betrayal the answer would be. The timing was unfortunate to the point of unnecessary cruelty.

They had seen the way their honesty had crushed the light behind her eyes; but lying would not have made anything better for the girl. They owed her honesty, at the very least.

Lucca scrubbed their face clean, glaring angrily at the visage in the mirror. The water washed away the layer of dust and salt that had accumulated throughout the day, and their skin felt clean and soft afterward. The sensation felt wrong, and undeserved.

They hated the person they saw in the mirror, the callow and manipulable young man that lurked behind those eyes, who had let themselves be lead along by such an obviously manipulative asshole. That child had nothing to say in his defense, so greedy for a simulacrum of love that he had damned not only Lucca, but so too those they most desperately wished to help.

Lucca had let Matthew treat them so very poorly, had believed the thinnest lies he had told, because they lied to themselves, too; choosing to believe the performance of love that he would wear for them like a mask. They had always known, on some level, that he was false, but nobody else had ever made them feel wanted, as he had. The knowledge that they had chosen to read his want as love burned their soul to so much worthless ash.

Were they any better, they wondered, choosing their own financial security over the possibility of really, meaningfully, helping someone that truly needed it?

They turned away, killing the bathroom and bedroom lights, and threw themselves into bed. They tossed and turned for hours, their thoughts consumed by the same shame, guilt, and anger that had accompanied them their whole life.

Valerie had never landed a break that did not come with strings attached, razor sharp wire cleverly disguised as a gift box ribbon, and every time she managed to pry herself free, broken and bleeding, someone else came along and offered her a hand up, while their other hid another gilded snare.

Lucca had given the girl no other choice; they had sent her back to Dana as surely as if they had locked her into the crate themself. They had tried to give her as much as they could, a measure of peace, and safety, even if temporary, but perhaps they had only given her false hope. Maybe their vaunted honesty was just a convenient way to disavow their own guilt.

Sleep slipped farther and farther out of their reach; frustrated and bleary, they downed a couple painkillers they had stashed after one surgery or another, and let the drugs push their thoughts down into the darkness.

They had no idea how long their alarm had been going off when they finally cracked their eyes open, with difficulty. The outside sun glared in through gaps in the curtains, bright and painful. Their mouth was dry and felt uncomfortably fuzzy.

The alarm’s electronic drone had woven itself into the background of whatever dream they had been dreaming, like an anxious itching seeping out of the cracks in whatever hallucinated reality they could no longer remember.

By the schedule, Valerie should be gone already. Lucca’s phone had logged several notifications from the front gate, but they had slept through each one. Dana’s transport company would have been stuck at the gate, unable to collect their charge.

And yet, the hangar was empty; only a neatly folded stack of Valerie’s clothing. They skimmed back through the recording of the camera feed that covered the gate, and watched both the arrival and departure of the van, an hour before. They had arrived late.

After several minutes sitting at the gate, the driver had leaned over and punched a code into the keypad, and the gate had swung open. The logs reported that they had used Dana’s code; Lucca disabled it in the system.

The hangar was new enough that they had not yet installed cameras watching the inside, reasoning that for the time being, their exterior cameras would capture anyone coming and going.

The recordings showed that the men entered the hangar, spent a few minutes inside, retrieved a furniture dolly from their van, and then a few minutes after that, wheeled the crate, with Valerie presumed inside, out and then into their van.

A few minutes of shadowy flickers in the van’s back windows were the only sign of their activity, until finally they departed. Lucca watched the recording of the van drive back down the driveway, windows down despite the dust and already unpleasant heat of the day.

The tracking on Valerie’s collar showed she was already halfway to Tahoe and the California border. Lucca sighed, frustration and disappointment. They had truly hoped Valerie would make another choice, even though in truth they would have been surprised if she had.

They watched the blip on the map track along the highway, an approximate circle unevenly but inexorably marching westward.

There was work they could take care of, the kind of management-level logistics that meant hours of staring at spreadsheets and estimating workloads and timelines. Lucca hated the work, and it felt appropriate to burn their weekend staring at a screen. As penance, it felt inadequate.

Late morning, Lucca took a break and checked the tracking data again. The highways ahead of Valerie’s position had started to turn red with traffic warnings, a consequence of their late arrival and later departure.

The van diverted onto a side road, stopping first at a cluster of fast-food restaurants and gas stations, and then continuing to wind along a smaller mountain road that rejoined the highway some distance later, bypassing the traffic along the main road.

They forced down plain cold cuts on slightly stale bread for lunch. They had ingredients left for a few more meals before they would need groceries again; plus leftovers for the casserole that Valerie had made.

Dinner the night before, in Reno, had ultimately felt strange and uncomfortable. The moment they had set foot into the casino, Valerie had been instantly and obviously overwhelmed, even just traversing the floor to reach the restaurant. Lucca knew the feeling, and regretted not turning around then and there and sorting out anything else, even just fast food.

Their aim had been to give Valerie one last joyful experience before they left, but she had been too anxious, and too trapped in her thoughts. Lucca had watched her stare blindly at the food on her plate for minutes at a time, incapable of pulling her focus into the present moment.

After lunch, Lucca checked the tracking again. The collar showed a static position about ten miles along an even smaller local road. The first detour, Lucca had interpreted as a traffic bypass; but this side road went nowhere in particular.

The section of road was isolated; there were no rest stops, service stations, or even trail heads; no reason for the tracking beacon to be there in the first place, much less to stay there.

Jagged, wrenching dread coursed through Lucca’s veins. Best case, the van had suffered some kind of breakdown; but why would they be so far along a road that lead nowhere? The more troubling explanation was that the two men had driven Valerie somewhere secluded, for purposes that Lucca knew intuitively but did not dare to name.

The worst possibility, of course, was that they had already done these things, and the randomly flickering location marked a grave.

Lucca knew they were responsible. They could lie to themselves and Valerie that they had no choice, but the girl had already called them out on it as soon as she heard the story.

Lucca’s pipe dream of a personal mission had no path to reality. Their best hope was that Matthew would fall in love with someone else and demand a divorce; or perhaps simply die. Lucca had never known him to engage in anything other than a stream of toxic and vapid hookups, so the prospect of love seemed as believable as the idea that he would spontaneously wake up a good person.

Lucca had simply chosen their own creature comforts, at the end of the day; chosen possession of their toys and projects and distractions. And, now, someone that they had grown to see as a friend might be dead or dying so that Lucca could keep a plot of land and an airplane.