It’s an oar.
“I thought we’d go kayaking,” he says, his eyes darting over to the water. I turn, looking at the small opening where the trees part and the swamp water peeks through. Next to it, partially hidden behind the foliage, is a wooden rack with four kayaks perched inside, covered in leaves and dirt and spiderwebs. I exhale.
“This place is pretty hidden, but it’s been here forever,” he says, holding the oar sheepishly in his hands. He steps closer and holds it out for me to take. I grab it, feeling the heaviness of it in my arms. “The kayaks are free to use, you just need to bring your own paddle. It wouldn’t fit in my car, so I took your keys and loaded it into your trunk this morning.”
I look at him, studying him closely. If he were planning on using this thing as a weapon, he wouldn’t have handed it to me. I look down at the paddle and then back to the kayaks, the stillness of the water, the cloudless sky. I glance over at the car—my only way out of here, I know. The keys are in his pocket; I have no other way home. So I decide in this moment—if he can act, so can I.
“Daniel,” I say, dropping my head. “Daniel, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“You’re tense. And that’s completely understandable, Chloe. That’s why we’re here. So I can help you relax.”
I look at him, still unsure if I can trust him. I can’t ignore the flood of evidence over the last few hours. The necklace and the perfume, the way Cooper had glared at him at Riverside, as if he could sense something in him that I couldn’t—something evil, something dark. My mother’s warning. The way he had grabbed my wrist yesterday, pinning me to the couch; the way he had snapped at me this morning, dangling my keys just out of reach.
But then there are the other things, too. He had a security system installed. He took me to Riverside to see my mother and threw a surprise party and planned a day for just us two. It’s exactly the type of romantic gesture that he has always done from the moment we first met, lifting that box out of my arms and hoisting it onto his shoulder. The type of gesture I was looking forward to enjoying for the rest of our lives. I can’t help but smile as I take in his self-conscious grin—habit, I suppose—and that’s when I make up my mind: Daniel may hurt people, but I don’t yet believe that he would hurt me.
“Okay,” I say, nodding. “Okay, let’s go.”
Daniel’s smile grows wider, forging ahead to the kayak stand and lifting one down from the wooden pegs. He drags it across the forest floor and brushes off the debris, clearing out the cobwebs that have collected in the center before pushing it into the water.
“Ladies first,” he says, holding out his arm. I let him grab my hand and take a shaky first step into the boat before instinctively clutching his shoulder as he helps lower me down. He waits until I’m situated before he jumps into the seat behind me and pushes us off from the dirt, and I feel us floating away.
Once we pass the clearing, I can’t help but gasp at the beauty of this place. The bayou is wide and lazy, peppered with cypress trees emerging from the murky water, their knees breaking the surface like fingers reaching for something to grab. There are curtains of Spanish moss cascading the sunlight into millions of twinkling pinpricks, a chorus of frogs croaking in unison with their wet, guttural sounds. Algae floats sluggishly along the surface, and out of the corner of my eye, I see the slow creep of an alligator, his beady eyes watching an egret before it lifts gracefully from its skinny legs and flaps into the safety of the trees.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Daniel is paddling quietly behind me, the sound of the sloshing water pushing past the kayak lulling me into a daze. My eyes stay on the alligator, on the way it lurks so silently, hidden in plain sight.
“Gorgeous,” I say. “It reminds me of…”
I stop, my unfinished thought hanging heavy in the air.
“It reminds me of home. But … in a good way. Cooper and I, we used to go to Lake Martin sometimes. Watch the alligators.”
“I’m sure your mother loved that.”
I smile, remembering. Remembering the way we would scream through the trees: See ya later, alligator! The way we would catch turtles with our bare hands, counting the rings on their shells to learn their age. The way we would slather our faces with mud like war paint, chasing each other through the brush before slamming through the front door of our home, getting scolded by our mother, snickering all the way to the bathroom before she scrubbed our skin until it was fleshy and raw. Pushing our nails into our mosquito bites, little Xs peppering our legs like human tic-tac-toe boards. Somehow, only Daniel could draw these memories from me. Only Daniel could coax them out of their hiding place, out of the hidden recesses of my mind, out of the secret room I had banished them to the moment I saw my father’s face on the television screen, crying not for the six lives he had taken, but because he had gotten caught. Only Daniel could force me to remember that it wasn’t all bad. I lean back into the kayak and close my eyes.