Page 112 of Gone Tonight
“I thought it would be easier for you this way. Ethan was your first big love—I was worried about what it would do to your self-confidence if you knew he was cheating. I thought it would be better if you were in control of the way you broke up.”
“But I wasn’t in control.” I tell her. “Youwere.”
A thought tickles the back of my brain: She could be lying again.
I need proof.
“The girl who texted him,” I begin. “What was her—”
It’s like my mother knows what I’m thinking before I even say it.
“Kaitlin,” she replies. “I’ve never forgotten it.”
That’s the name of the woman Ethan is with now. The same one I’m almost certain is the blond waitress who seemed to send poison in my direction whenever I came in to see Ethan.
I never once mentioned her to my mother. She must be telling the truth.
So Ethan deceived me, too. I must be pretty gullible.
Exhaustion falls over me like a weighted blanket. My brain feels completely overloaded. It’s shutting down.
My head is too heavy to hold up, so I tilt it back against the hard wooden slats of the chair.
My last vision before I close my eyes is of my mother getting up from her chair and beginning to patrol the grounds.
When I open my eyes again, there’s a throbbing in my temples, and the sun is lower in the sky. I check my phone and see it’s after 5 p.m.
My mother is sitting next to me, but she isn’t sleeping. She’s writingsomething in a green spiral notebook that looks a thousand years old. She notices me watching and she closes it and slips it into her big purse.
“Did I miss anything?”
“Someone came out and drove off in the Cadillac a few minutes ago,” she says. “A couple—he had white hair and she was wearing a pink dress and used a cane.”
“George and June. They’re probably going out to dinner.”
She nods.
“No word on anything else,” I say.
It’s a statement, not a question. I only have to look at my mother’s face to know the story of James’s arrest hasn’t broken.
We just have to wait a little bit longer, my mother keeps saying. I stand up and stretch, then go into Sunrise to use the bathroom. I walk into the main-floor break room and take a few cookies off a giant plastic tray that someone set out for the staff, then fill up two cups of water from the dispenser.
When I return to my mother, she puts down her phone. She bites into one of the oatmeal raisin cookies and washes it down with a big sip of water. “Thanks.”
Time ticks forward. My mother’s face grows a little tighter. Her posture stiffens.
The sun is sinking lower in the sky. A few floors above us, the Memory Wing residents must be growing agitated.
Something about this phase of night triggers their sense of danger.
I’d hoped to be home by now, taking a long, hot shower. I’d like to close the door of my bedroom and be alone with my thoughts.
But twilight is falling, and we’re trapped in limbo.
“We should walk around back,” I finally say. We’ve been sitting out here a long time, and by now most of the residents are inside, finishing dinner and settling in for the night. The grounds are nearly deserted. I don’t want to attract attention.
My mother gets up and we circle around the building. It’s far less attractive back here. Instead of manicured flower beds, the trash andrecycling are stored in huge metal containers. There aren’t any chairs or benches, so we stand.
