Page 10 of When She Unravels
“Do you think they’re following us?”
“If they’re not already, they will be.”
The international terminal is right here. I pull to a stop in a no-parking zone, and we get out.
“Won’t they tow your car?” she asks.
“We’ll be quick.” Let them tow it. I’m not coming back to it. Once we get the girl’s ticket, I’ll buy my own to somewhere far from here.
We stop by the departures screen, and she points to a flight to Barcelona. “That one. I’ll be able to get picked up from there.”
It’s leaving in an hour.
“Let’s go,” I say and lead her to the ticket counter.
For all our worrying, the agent doesn’t bat an eye as she issues the girl her ticket.
Clutching her passport in her hand, she turns to me. Her hazel eyes meet mine.
There’s one last thing left for me to say. “Don’t ever come back to New York. Ever.”
She sucks in a ragged breath. “This city can go to hell.”
Her pink-soled Converse shoes slap against the floor as she jogs to the security line.
I wait until she’s out of sight and then walk over to a different agent.
When I tell him I’ll take any flight leaving in the next hour besides the one to Barcelona, he shakes his head. “Every other flight we have leaving in the next hour is full,” he tells me. “You can try going to a different airline to check what they have. Terminal two.”
I grind my teeth. There’s no time to run around the airport. Papà might already be figuring out what happened. “But there’s availability on the flight to Barcelona?”
“We have one seat left in business class,” he confirms.
Converse girl managed to get the last economy seat. I’ve started calling her that in my head, because it feels strange to have lived through the most intense hour of my life with someone who’s name I don’t even know. She’s Converse girl from now on.
“How much is it?”
“It’s three thousand five hundred and two dollars.”
My eyes bulge. Jesus, it’s expensive, but that’s what I get for buying a ticket minutes before the flight boards. I don’t want to go where she’s going, but I don’t really have a better choice. I hand him the money.
The two and a half grand I have left in my purse feel like nothing, especially since I don’t know what I’m going to do once I get to Europe. How long is that going to last me? I have no idea how to find a job. The only “job” I’ve ever had was helping Mamma organize charity events, and I didn’t have to interview for that. What skills do I have? I don’t think keeping secrets, cooking a mean lasagna, and looking pretty screams “hire me”.
The agent’s voice saves me from descending into a total meltdown.
“Here’s your boarding pass.“ He hands me a slip of paper. “You should hurry to the gate.”
I bolt through the airport, pass through security, and duck into a store to get myself a hoodie and a hat. My dress is too recognizable, and I don’t want Converse girl to see me and think that I’m tailing her.
At the gate, I spot her sitting in one of the seats, so I make sure I’m not in her line of sight. It’s all families and excited tourists mulling around, but every time I see a single male, my heart skips a beat. Is he reaching into his jacket for his phone? Who’s he calling? Did he just look at me for a second too long?
The paranoia is brutal. I force myself to take deep breaths. There’s no way Papà could’ve tracked me down this quickly. Even if I only inflicted a flesh wound on Lazaro and he got up as soon as we left the house, he’d need some time to track me down. He can’t know where I went.
Unless they tracked the car.
Oh God. I’m so stupid.Of course, they’d track the car’s GPS signal. If Lazaro can see I dropped the vehicle off at the airport, that means he knows I’m here. He’s probably on his way now. He might be at the terminal already.
By the time they start boarding, I’m barely holding it together.
