Page 115 of The Quiet Tenant

She’s still here. By your side, where she’s supposed to be.

No longer tugging, no longer resisting. Her stride mirroring yours.

She turns her head back. You don’t know what she sees. Your best guess: her father, furious, his face a mask of betrayal. A man she knows but doesn’t recognize.

This is the part only she understands.

For reasons that belong to her alone, she does it. Her father’s footsteps close in on you. And the girl, she runs. She runs with you.

CHAPTER 79

Emily

I start the Honda again.

He’s fast. The fastest runner I’ve ever seen.

He finds them. The woman and his girl, running from him. Together.

I’m about thirty feet away when it happens. It unfolds in the beam of the Honda’s headlights.

First, the girl. He reaches for her, snatches her back.

This is it, I tell myself. This is when he stops and holds her tight and tells her how worried he was, so scared he almost died, so terrifiedhe almost killed.

But he leaves her.

After he’s taken her back, yanked her by the wrist, detached her from the woman, he starts again.

Like a man who will never hear another sound. Like a man who will never think another thought.

He runs after this woman like she’s the only thing that matters.

I stop the Honda.

“Aidan!”

I’m standing outside the car. Yelling his name with the entire force of my lungs, straining my vocal cords.

“Aidan!”

He turns around. First his face, then his upper body.

“Aidan, get back here!”

It doesn’t matter what I’m saying, only that I’m saying it.

He slows down, then stops. The briefest moment, but enough. Enough to wonder. Enough to consider me.

My breath catches. I’m gasping for air even though I didn’t run. It’s the terror of it, the gaping abyss of it.

The hope is that he will turn around. That he will stop chasingher.

The hope, I realize, is that he will start chasing me.

His legs twitch. The shadow of a sprint, the start of a Plan B. The first word of a story in which he changes his mind. Where he just goes for it. Me. Where he just goes for me.

Reality pulls him back in. Or is it hope? Hope that he will catch her? That he will stop her, wherever she’s headed?

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