Page 90 of Truth, Lies, and Second Dates
“You know it is! Stop pretending otherwise.”
“I’m not pretending anything, Pete. I have no idea what you’re going on about.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Pete, you’ve got the right script, but you’re reading the wrong lines. Why areyoudoing this tome?”
“You know, Ava! You even taunted me about it at the memorial. Bad enough to find out you were alive, bad enough to have to come back here and end up face-to-face with my worst fucking nightmare—”
“Hey!”
“—but you just had to get your little digs in.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking—” But then she did.
Did you hear Shady Oaks finally had to shut down?
Shit.
I guess the drug thing—the latest drug thing—was a bridge too far.
“Are you a pharmacist now?” he mimicked. “You fucking well knew I wasn’t.”
Would the truth—that she had no inkling of his career path—help or hurt?
“You must have figured out why I left by now.”
She was still wrestling with her dilemma. Tell the truth?I didn’t notice when you left. I didn’t care when you left. I didn’t think of you while you were gone. And I barely remembered you when you came back.
She strove for a reasonable, measured tone. “You said you moved abroad after you got your degree.”
“Yes, from Inver.”
“An associate’s degree,” she realized aloud, because Inver was a community college. “Two years. And you’re two years older than me. You didn’t leave because you got your degree—that was just how the timing worked out. You left because you wanted an ocean between you and your murder. But I still don’t know why you killed Da—” He visibly twitched at that, and she rapidly rephrased. “—why you wanted to kill me.”
“You found my stash. You sent me an e-mail about it. You were going to report me.”
It was finally coming back to her, but in pieces. She might have remembered sooner, if Pete had been the slightest bit memorable and if she had been the slightest bit less self-absorbed. But he wasn’t, and she wasn’t. Back then she had been too wrapped up in her own grief and, after her parents died, her own need to get far away.
“I only sent it because I didn’t know what was going on. I found all this stuff from residents who died, and when I looked up the paperwork, you were on shift each time and… shit, I didn’t know. Shady Oaks was slacking off even then, and when I asked around, nobody seemed to know what you were doing, or even gave a shit.”
“Stop it. Don’t pretend you didn’t know I was doing something wrong.”
“Why would I? Come on—a seventeen-year-old volunteer sent one measly e-mail asking about a Tylenol-Three stash, which you explained. I mean, I knownowyou were lying, but I didn’t then. I believed you. I dropped the subject. I didn’t even save the e-mail! You couldn’t have thought you were in any danger.”
But he had. And he’d acted accordingly.
“It was a little more than Tylenol-Three. It was Xanax and Klonopin and Tranxene and benzos and oxy. And that doesn’t count the shit that was already in my system. That was just what I boosted from the Oaks that month.”
She rubbed her eyes. “And you fucked with my drug test.”
“I was sure that would jog your memory.”
“There wasn’t anything to jog!” Wait. Rephrase. “In your e-mail you said you were… God, what was it?”
“Reappropriating.”
“Yes! That. You said the patients didn’t need their meds anymore but you’d pass them down to ones who did needthem. Like residents who didn’t have good insurance, or however you put it. And I believed you, Pete! Again: seventeen. Not a medical professional. Stuck in a job I couldn’t quit. Resentful and pissy, as only teenagers can be.” Well, teenagers and cats.
