As the firelight gets smaller behind him, he sees a figure approach, a feminine form.
“Hey,” she says. She’s wearing a bikini, has a nice figure—he’s never one to miss that. She wears an unzipped sweatshirt with the hood over her head, shadowing her face.
“Howdy,” he says.
“Leaving the party so soon?” she asks, looking out toward the bonfire.
“No room for an old rocker like me,” he says, trying not to sound pathetic.
She pauses, like she’s studying him, making a realization. “Hey, you’re that guy.”
“And what guy is that?”
“The, um, rock star who got drunk and fell off the cruise ship.”
Donnie chuckles. He’s had three albums go platinum, yet this will be his legacy. A trivia question for “Stump the Trunk,” a story in Metal Edge.
“Have a good night,” he says, giving her a mock tip of the hat. He’s had enough humiliation for one day.
“Wait,” she says, reaching for his arm. “Don’t go,” she says. “It’s a nice night for a swim.”
Before Donnie replies, she’s pulled off the sweatshirt and untied the suit top and is running toward the water.
She dives in and comes up, pulling her hair back, her bare breasts shimmering in the moonlight.
“Come on in,” she calls out to him.
He ponders this. He’s no fan of swimming. But he’s also not one to run from a beautiful naked woman.
He kicks off his shoes and tugs down his jeans. He decides to leave on the underwear. It’s a little cold out, so who knows what’s going on down there.
He approaches the water, incoming waves lapping at his feet.
That’s when he gets the first good look at her face in the silver light. And before he can form a conscious thought, a streak of terror races through his body.
And he turns and runs like hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
JENNA
They arrive at the cabin at eleven thirty. There are no neighbors for five miles on either side. The structure, a classic log cabin with a rustic fa?ade that masks a luxurious interior, is dark, no car out front, but Simon would’ve pulled it into the barn.
Jenna looks at Willow, who’s managed to fall asleep, either from exhaustion or as a coping mechanism.
She puts a gentle hand on Willow’s shoulder and her stepdaughter jerks awake.
Willow seems to be out of it for a minute. As if asking herself whether the last eleven hours were an awful dream. A weird nightmare where the stepmom she can’t stand turns out to be some type of criminal or Jason Bourne.
Willow’s expression turns crestfallen with the realization it was not a Wizard of Oz fever dream.
She won’t wake up with her family, Toto, and her life back to normal.
Jenna opens the Jeep’s door, but before she gets out Willow grabs her by the arm.
“You’re not gonna, like, tell Dad about me skipping and, uh, drinking at the 7-Eleven?”
Teenagers. After everything that’s happened tonight, she’s worried she’ll get grounded.
“I think it can wait, don’t you?” Jenna will tell Simon when the time is right. She won’t lie to him. He deserves to know. Not tonight, though.
Out of nowhere, a silhouette appears from the side of the house. Simon, carrying a shotgun. He leans the gun carefully against the cabin and scoops his older daughter in his arms as she races into his embrace.
He whispers something to her; she nods, hugs him again, and goes inside. Jenna feels her heart shatter a fragment when Willow doesn’t say goodbye.
Jenna approaches. The sky out here is so clear, the stars brighter. In the half-light, Simon looks tired, like he’s aged ten years in a single day. She swears there’s more gray hair.
“I’m so sorry,” Jenna says.
Simon doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Finally: “I thought you said you were done? That they said you were out. Free.”
She doesn’t like the accusation in his tone. “I told you everything.”
He thinks about this. It was never real before, she understands now. Sure, Simon believed what Jenna had told him about her past. He understood that she’d worked for a shadow outfit that did contract work for the government. But it was an abstraction. A construct that seemed more out of a spy
movie or thriller novel, too farfetched to ever happen.
But that was before he saw the fear in his daughter’s eyes. Before he’d had to slink away and hide like a fugitive. Before he truly understood that Jenna has done awful things that could come back to haunt her.
“What now?” Simon asks.
Jenna almost smiles. The taxman always wants a plan.
“I go figure out who’s behind this.”
“And when you do?”
Then I kill them. Each and every one of them.
“Then I try to get our lives back.”
He looks at her skeptically but doesn’t say that he knows that will never happen.
“If anyone comes, you go to the safe room.” They built a hidden panic room on the main floor.
The entrance is a secret panel in the back of the kitchen pantry that leads to a room armored with Kevlar panels.
Simon nods.
“I’ll call when it’s safe.” The cabin has no internet, but the burner phone is untraceable. As long as no one used it to call any line connected in any way to Jenna.
Simon nods again.
“And if I don’t hear from you?”
“You will.”
“But if I don’t?”
Jenna tilts her head to the side. “Then go to the FBI and give them this.” She puts the manila envelope in his hand. The insurance policy she created when she got out of The Corporation, long buried in that lockbox. “And make clear that you had no idea until today when I told you.”
She goes inside, finds Lulu sleeping in her room, decides not to wake her. She leans over and kisses her on the head. She stops by Willow’s room to say goodbye, but the door is shut. She puts her hand on the door but turns and leaves.
Downstairs, Simon hands her a travel cup of coffee for the road. He gestures to the Glock on the kitchen table.
“You keep it,” Jenna says. She has the gun from the lockbox. It’s all she needs.
At the doorway, she looks at him and says, “I love you.”
For the first time in their marriage, Simon breaks Jenna in two when he says nothing in response.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE TWINS
“He’s pissed,” Casey says into the phone. She’s ditched the Camaro and is driving a stolen Nissan on I-95.
“Expected,” Haley says. “And, I mean, he’s got a point.”
Casey laughs. Mocking their client’s voice, she says, “He was like, Dumping a guy in the ocean? Blowing up a coal mine? I know I said make it look like accidents, but haven’t you ever heard of a car accident or drug overdose? ”
Haley laughs too. “Wait till he finds out about you using that cattle killer on those douchebags at the 7-Eleven.”
They have always been on the same page, Casey and Haley. They met in college. On Casey’s first day on campus, people kept waving at her, saying hey, like they knew her. This is the fucking friendliest place on earth, she concluded.
Then, a girl in a sorority shirt came up and hugged her, referring to her as Haley, not Casey.