Page 87 of The Thinnest Air
Six Days Ago
“Wake up.” Ronan’s voice in my ear pulls me out of a deep sleep, and when I open my eyes, I’m surrounded by darkness.
“What time is it?” Not that it matters. I don’t know how long I’ve been gone. How many hours I’ve slept. But I think if I ask normal questions and not the kind of panicked questions a victim might ask, it might help in the grand scheme of things. “I’m so hungry.”
Yet another attempt at normalcy.
Ronan strokes his hand through my hair, his fingertips tangling in the matted strands. “I bet you are. Anyway, I brought you something.”
I begin to sit up before realizing I’m still tied, spread eagle. He chuckles.
“You’re going to eat at the table,” he says. “You need to move, or your muscles will atrophy.”
He snips the zip ties, keeping a watchful eye on me, and then he takes my hands in his, pulling me out of bed. There’s an ache in my low back that radiates down the backs of my legs, and my muscles stiffen with each step, but I suffer through it, determined not to lose my strength because it’s the only thing I have right now.
Ronan’s fingers interlace mine, our palms fused, and he leads me to the kitchen, one slow step at a time. My head is light, the floor beneath my feet seeming slanted. I must be dehydrated.
“Sit here.” He kicks a chair out before lowering me, and without hesitation, he retrieves more zip ties from his pockets, slipping them around my ankles.
A cardboard box rests on the stove. The overwhelming aroma of garlic and greasy pizza floods my senses, followed by a wave of nausea, but I’m starving. Ronan places a piece before me on a bed of recycled paper napkins and grabs a bottle of water next.
I inhale everything.
My stomach twists, gurgles, but I want more.
“I’ll try not to be gone so long next time,” he says. “Your sister, she’s something else. Stopping by unannounced, asking stupid questions.”
I pretend not to care, staring ahead at a photo of mountains buried in snow mounted on the kitchen wall in a cheap, crooked frame.
“She’s really looking for you, like relentlessly. Probably even more than your husband.” He sniffs, chuckling. “It’s cute, really. Let’s just hope she doesn’t become a problem.”
“You won’t hurt her,” I manage to say, shooting him a narrowed glance. “If you love me, you won’t hurt her.”
He places his hand over mine, leaning toward me. “I do love you. And that’s why I’m willing to do whatever I have to do so we can be together.”
My eyes water, and I swallow the roughly chewed bite of pizza in the back of my mouth. It’s tasteless, threatening to come up if I don’t get myself under control.
If he’s crazy enough to snatch me from a grocery store parking lot in broad daylight, he’s crazy enough to hurt my sister.
Greer’s persistence has always been a great strength. I imagine it’s stronger now than ever before. If I know my sister, she’ll stop at nothing to find me.
She once fought off a group of four men who tried to mug us in Brooklyn on our walk home from the park. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. They swiped at her purse. The next thing I knew, fists were flying, feet were kicking, and Greer was screaming at the top of her lungs.
She looked insane. Clinically insane. It was enough to scare them away.
Ronan won’t scare her.
But unfortunately, I don’t think Greer will scare him either.
“You know, I was thinking,” I say, attempting to iron out the rough kinks in my trembling voice. “I’m coming into some money at the end of the month, on my birthday. Maybe we could use it to start over? Start a new life together? I just, you know, wouldn’t be able to collect it if I’m missing ...”
Leaning back in his seat, he rests his chin on his hand, observing in silence, breathing hard.
“We don’t need money, Meredith,” he says a minute later. “I’ve got it all handled.”
“Everybody needs money.”
His mouth presses into a straight line. “Money only makes good people do bad things and bad people do worse things.”
