Page 31 of A Girl, Unbroken
Nathan shook his head and looked around warily, which increased the uneasy feeling inside me. “We’ll talk in a minute.” He quickened his pace until we were almost running, and only when the hut appeared in the fog in front of us did he slow down. It was the hut where we had made love less than two hours ago today, but it felt like it had been years ago.
From the inside, Nathan locked the door with a hook from days gone by that certainly couldn’t withstand a punch from Pan.
I walked to the middle of the room. “Why are you locking us in?” I whispered automatically because he had never done that before even when we had been intimate.
Nathan peered out the window intently as if he was looking for someone before turning to me. “You have to tell me the truth now, okay?”
He sounded so tense that I nodded mechanically.
He approached me seriously and put his hands on my shoulders. They were strong and warm and I instantly felt protected. “My cell phone. You used it.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But I only dialed the New York area code. Nothing else…”
Even in the darkness of the tiny wooden hut, I could see that he raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t do anything else?”
“No. I don’t even know if I would have dialed our number because Troy caught me…”
“So Noah caught you dialing?”
“Yes.”
His gray eyes widened. “You didn’t delete the call history?”
“No…why?”
Nathan let go of me and peered out the window again. “Oh, damn it!”
“What is it?” His behavior made me uneasy again.
For a few seconds, he seemed to be trying to sort out his thoughts. “Kjertan…Pan…he’s not the traitor.”
“Excuse me?” Now I didn’t understand anything at all.
“Any of the four here could have lost the ointment. At any time, couldn’t they?”
“Basically, yes.”
“It could have been lying in the grass for a long time without you or me noticing.”
“Yes, but…”
“Do you remember that Noah used to walk to the huts alone for a while because he wanted to look for usable stuff?”
“He was searching for tools and stuff, yes. He gave me the ring that he found once.” And that I had taken off at some point even though it was pretty. A dark suspicion rose in me.
“It could be that he lost the ointment right at the beginning when we were searching everything for clothes and canned goods. And after that, he just kept going out because he wanted to find the ointment. He rarely came back with anything useful.”
“Troy?” I suddenly felt ice cold. “That can’t be.” That couldn’t be true, just like with Pan.
Nathan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, pressed a button, and held it in front of my nose. He looked at me intently. “If you didn’t delete the call history, he must have because it’s empty. It’s as if I haven’t made a single call.”
Chapter 8
“What?” I stared at the blank screen as if stunned. “I didn’t do that, Nathan. I swear. Troy caught me when I had only typed in three digits. I gave him the phone because he wanted to return it to you.”
“That’s when he must have spoken to someone,” Nathan said darkly. “And since he didn’t want me to notice, he deleted the history. I bet if I asked, he would definitely blame it on you.”
Nausea rose in my throat. “He spoke to Isaac.” Nathan grimly jutted out his jaw. “That would also explain why he was always so vehemently against Stanton: to draw attention away from himself. And he always had an explanation for everything.” He put the phone back in his pocket. “Besides, he definitely sent me in the wrong direction to search for you on purpose.”
