Page 6 of The Trap by Catherine
But there was blue sky. And a thick, dry heat. And when she moved, a shooting pain in the side of her neck.
“You all right in there?” a muffled voice asked.
A man she didn’t recognize was looming over her, frowning. When she didn’t answer his question, he rapped his knuckles on the glass between them.
For the second time, she realized now.
The first was what had woken her.
The last, lingering tendrils of sleepy fog dissipated and Lucy was finally able to put it all together: she’d fallen asleep in her car. Which she’d parked outside the local SuperValu. The man standing outside was wearing a high-vis vest over his T-shirt that saidSecurityon the chest and, judging by the blinding sun, the number of people pushing trolleys across her field of vision and how utterly shite she felt, she’d been here for far longer than she’d planned to stay.
“Yeah,” she said. She lowered the window and said, “Yeah,” again. “Everything’s fine. Just, you know... Long drive.” She smiled; he didn’t. “I thought I was going to fall asleep at the wheel so I pulled in for a power nap.”
“You were here when I got in,” he said flatly. “That was two hours ago.”
“Two...?” The clock on the dash only came on with the engine and she didn’t know where she’d put her phone. “What time is it?”
“Just gone nine.”
Which meant she’d been here for at leastthreehours.
She was only five minutes from home, but she’d been so late—or early—getting back, she hadn’t wanted to risk going straight there. If Chris had heard her pulling in at five o’clock in the morning, he’d have known exactly where she’d been and what she’d been doing there.
And she’d promised him she’d stop doing this.
Told him shehadstopped, already.
“Shit,” she said. “Really?”
The security guard was stony-faced, his lack of sympathy betraying the fact that he didn’t recognize her—which she didn’t mind at all. Lucy would take anonymity over pity any day of the week.
“Go in and get yourself a cup of coffee,” he said, jerking his chin toward the store, “and then get going.”
“I will. Thank you. Sorry.”
But she had absolutely no intention of going inside. She hadn’t darkened the door of the SuperValu in months—or any other local businesses, for that matter. She did her best to avoid her neighbors.
She did her best to avoid people in general.
The world, she’d discovered, just wasn’t designed for people with open wounds. Instead, it seemed packed with the privileged and their petty problems, their shitty attitudes, their blatant ungratefulness. Pressing on their car horns because the lights had gone green one whole second ago and the car in front hadn’t seen it yet. Asking to speak to a manager because the food they’d ordered from a location half an hour away from their home had arrived not-quite-steaming hot. Relentlessly offering uninformed opinions no one asked for all over social media, and then taking offense whenever anyone more informed disagreed with them.
Ever since Nicki had disappeared, Lucy felt as though she was constantly trying to swallow back a silent scream, to stop it from coming to a ferocious boil in her throat.
Don’t you realize how bloodyluckyyou are?!
What she wouldn’t give for one single moment of peace, one in which Nicki was not gone, or even just one in which Lucy knew where she’d gone (and how, and why), and here were all these people with nothing but those moments, and they were squandering them. She wanted to grab them and pinch them and make them realize how good they had it.
And then she wanted to go back in time, to the Lucy that had existed before Nicki disappeared, and do the same thing to her past self.
The security guard turned to walk away.
“Sorry,” Lucy said again, to his retreating back.
She pulled on the rear-view mirror, angling it toward her until it showed a bleary-eyed, puffy-faced woman whose smudged mascara was only accentuating the dark circles under her eyes. Her hair was frizzy and one cheek was bright red from where she’d slept with it pressed against the window.
She couldn’t go home looking like this. She may as well walk in the front door carrying a neon sign flashingLiar.
There was a bathroom inside the store. And a beauty aisle. She could buy some make-up wipes, toothbrush and -paste, and something to tie her hair back with. Splash some water on her face and make herself look like she’d got a night’s sleep. Or any sleep. And then, on the way out, grab a bucket of coffee to drink until she started to feel like she had.
