Page 82 of Z For Butterfly Man
The mask stares back at me the way it always has, blank and absolute, but the body that holds it has gone still, the kind of still that realizes defeat before it registers in the mind.
It is the most satisfying thing I’ve felt in days.
“Zacarías Cáceres.” I let myself look at him the way I couldn’t before, or rather, the way I wouldn’t let myself before. Some part of me already knew but wasn’t ready to sit with what that meant. “The boy who is always huddled over his sketchbook. I’ve been trying to remember when I first saw you, but I kept hitting a wall because you were always so deliberately forgettable, weren’t you? That was the art of it. Always at the edge of the room. Always hunched over those drawings, silent, but so observant.
“But I remember now where we first met. Not on Martha’s Vineyard. Not in Jacksonville. It was in Miami, but not at the school.” I pause. “The coffee shop… I smiled at you once because you looked like you needed it. I recognize a desperate, broken soul when I see it. It takes one to know one.
“That day, you had the pleasure of meeting Aaron at his finest. He was giving you a hard time as I left. I heard some of the things he said. I prayed to God he wouldn’t hurt you.”
He leaves my side and stands, his shoulders tense. A tremor passes in his hand as it hovers over his left side before it rests on his hip. “I was new in school. You weren’t one of my teachers. You didn’t know who I was, and neither did I. But that pervertrecognized me. I’d heard rumors about him.” He shrugs. “I didn’t care if he hurt me. All I could think about was you.”
“The very next week you were enrolled in my class. I thought it was a coincidence. Isn’t that embarrassing? I, a woman who constructs complex plot twists for a living, looked at you sitting in the third row with your sketchbook and thought, ‘What acoincidence.’” I glance around the room with its floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, my books, all arranged the way mine are at home, every detail mirrored back at me like a funhouse reflection. “In my defense, eight years ago, I only had a few short stories and novellas published in small magazines, and one manuscript that was forever a work-in-progress because while agents loved the concept and the potential, it wasn’t quite ready for publication yet.” I snort.
“I fell in love with you the second we shared a space. It was like you enchanted the air. Before I saw you, before I heard you, something in me already bent toward you. Then I heard your voice, learned your name, saw your face…and there was nothing else. There was no me. There was no world. There was you and only you.”
“You didn’t fall in love with me. You were sickly obsessed.”
“Because you possessed me.” He dashes toward me like a rabid animal. “Because, I, too, recognize a desperate, broken soul when I see it. You needed me as much as I needed you, and I knew one day you were gonna love me as much as I love you.”
“Zacarías…” I roll his name on my tongue and say it like a spell. “Oh, my apologies. I forgot you prefer Tristan.”
He stops in his tracks, and his hands ball into fists at his sides. “Reagan—”
“It suits you better, actually. Tristan Morra.” I take over the conversation with the condescending composure of a woman who has the upper hand and knows it. “Zacarías always sounded like a name that was waiting to become something else.”
“All I’ve done was for you. Everything I’ve become was to earn you.”
“You want to know the worst part?” Momentum is the only weapon I have left, and I intend to use every ounce of it. “I looked at the man I thought I knew and trusted, the man I thought I loved and who loved me back, the man who had chosen me, protected me, and I broke up with him with my heart in shreds. My heart was broken over you, Tristan.”
“Then why did you end it?”
“Because you tried to destroy a good man. You manufactured evidence against Jacob, you were going to get him killed, like you were doing me a favor. No one gets possessive obsession like I do, and I’m not going to lie, I fucking love it. Erasing abusive husbands and perverts and thieves for the woman you’re obsessed with,” I put my fingers in front of my lips and kiss them, “chef’s kiss. It’s toxic as fuck but delicious. I eat that shit up every time. That’s why I fell for you, Tristan, but to kill an innocent man and call that protection?”
He’s about to speak again, but I don’t let him. “And here we are now. You kidnapped me, tortured me and fucking raped me. You put pins in my skin and strapped me to a table that fucked me in the ass… And you killed Jacob.” My voice shakes on his name, but I won’t let it crack. I won’t give Butterfly Man that. “And somewhere in that magnificent, broken mind of yours, you believe this is the version of events that makes me love you back.”
The silence goes on long enough to ask myself if I’ve provoked him too much, if I’ve pushed something that isn’t ready to be pushed.
“Are you done?” he whispers.
“You can take off your mask now. It’s fallen. Take off the last of my restraints, too, and let me go. This is the end.”
He folds his arms across his chest and towers over me. “Are you done with your lies, Reagan, or are you making up some more?”
“I’m not lying. Not anymore. Everything is out. You wanted the truth about Shane and Mason, you have it. You wanted me to remember you and say your name, I’ve said it. It’s done. You’re done.”
“You’re still lying, butterfly, because you didn’t remember who I was.” He takes one step toward me and bends his forehead to mine. “You can’t remember what you’ve never forgotten.”
Something cold pinches my heart. I keep my face exactly as is, though. I’ve learned how to hide my emotions well over the years. “Cryptic much?”
He reaches into his pocket and sets something on the bed next to me. The implant. Fried and dead and small, sitting there like an accusation.
“I’ve been thinking.” His voice changes register, quieter and more precise. “How the fuck did the detective find the sanctuary? He should have been running from the police. He should have been fighting a manhunt, managing a frame, scrambling. And yet he showed up at that cabin with eleven officers, a sonar unit and a battering ram.”
He sits beside me and twirls the implant in his hand. “I kept asking myself who tipped them. Who had specific enough information to send him to that exact location.” He tosses the implant and starts to dismantle his mask piece by piece, starting at the bottom. “Then I ended up thinking about you instead. It’s always you, Reagan. Always you.”
“What the hell are you talking about now?”
The mask part he’s removed drops on the floor with more force than needed. “You are so good.” It sounds almost like genuine admiration underneath the fury that is building below the surface. “You have been doing it your whole life. Hidingclues in plain sight. Every book, every character, every detail that seems decorative until it isn’t. I’ve read every word you’ve ever written, and I still almost missed it.” He picks up the implant again, holds it between two fingers, his face half-hidden. “Almost.”
