Page 26 of Tangled Past
They’d spirit Maya away now. Somewhere safe. Somewhere monitored and warm and wrapped in reassurance. They’d sit around a table and ask her gentle, probing questions, and she’d try to drag words up out of deep water.
She’d get some of them wrong.
But she’d get some of them right.
He didn’t fear the memories themselves; he feared the moment she remembered the tone of his voice.
“There’s nowhere on this island I haven’t been,” he said softly to no one. Not the barn. Not the roads. Not the so-called safe places they thought he couldn’t touch.
If they wanted to move the game to a safehouse?
He’d be there, too.
???
By the time they reached the SUVs, Maya’s teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.
It wasn’t just the cold. She knew the difference between winter shaking and the kind that came from somewhere deeper—an aftershock in her bones.
Asa opened the rear passenger-side door and waited for her to climb in first.
She slid onto the seat, his jacket still wrapped around her, the familiar scent of him clinging to the fabric along with coffee, something clean and sharp beneath it. He closed the door firmly, shutting out the wind, then came around to slip into the seat beside her.
Rachel and JT got in up front. JT started the engine. Warm air began to creep from the vents, slow but steady.
Maya stared out the side window at the growing storm. She could still feel the rough boards from the barn under her palms. She could almost feel a crucial memory tugging at the corners of her mind. Why was she at the barn alone with Raymond?
Her gut screamed something had happened to her parents. Something bad. Her chest tightened. She pressed her fingertips against her eyes until color flared.
“Talk to me,” Asa said quietly as they pulled onto the narrow road leading back toward town.
She dropped her hands and blew out a shaky breath. “He knows I’m remembering, doesn’t he?”
“Probably,” he said without pulling punches.
She swallowed at the certainty in his voice. It should have terrified her, and it did, but there was something else under the fear now. Something harder. Anger, maybe. Or the simple, stubborn refusal to be prey anymore.
“I keep trying to make sense of it,” she said. “He could have killed me and you that night. He could have finished it. Why risk leaving a witness alive?” She remembered something and sat up straighter. “He threatened me, too. He told me if I told anyone about what happened, he’d kill her.” She swung toward Asa. “My mother. He took my mother.”
Surprise widened his eyes before he tapped Rachel’s shoulder to get her attention. “You’re sure?”
She closed her eyes briefly before they flew open. “I’m sure he said if I told anyone, he’d hurt her.”
“This is big, Maya,” Asa said. “He used your mother as control over you. He needed you silent more than he needed you dead. A dead child would have raised a different kind of heat. A living one that he could scare into silence was cleaner. Safer for him.”
She stared at the blur of trees slipping past in the snow. “And my memories obeyed him.”
“After witnessing what you did, I can understand. At least for a while,” Asa said softly. “But fear can’t hold everything forever. Eventually, something breaks loose.”
“Lucky me.” She tried to smile and failed. “I feel like I’m falling into pieces instead.”
He glanced at her, the weight in his gaze steadying. “Falling isn’t the same as breaking, Maya. Sometimes it’s just the process of landing where you were always supposed to be.”
“That’s very philosophical of you,” she said, her voice wobbly.
“Don’t tell JT. He’ll make fun of me.” Asa winked at JT in the rearview mirror.
She managed a small, shaky laugh.
