“What did Elizabeth ever do to you?”
“She betrayed me,” he spat in a harsh voice.
“Elizabeth?” Simon asked in bewilderment. “She was the sweetest, loveliest girl. I cannot believe it.”
“She was, yes, but she was also my girl.”
Simon stiffened at that. “When?” he asked.
“At the same time that I found out she was going out with you.”
Simon closed his eyes. “So that is what this is all about?” He groaned. “You think I two-timed you with her?”
“Well, she two-timed me with you,” the guy said, a raspy laugh coming to hide that he still suffered from the heartache.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“I wondered about that. I thought about it long and hard, wondering whether it was something that she would have told you or was quite happy to keep it all to herself.”
He didn’t want to bad-mouth her. When he had been with Elizabeth, she’d been very confused, tormented, overwrought, and needed whatever comfort anybody could give her. Simon certainly didn’t begrudge her another lover, if that’s what she had wanted or needed or thought she needed at the time—or even was incapable of understanding what she was doing.
He wasn’t giving Elizabeth a free pass, but, at the same time, emotionally she hadn’t been in a good place. He’d known it, and he’d been okay with her walking away to get her life together because that’s what you did when you cared about people. At least he assumed that’s what everybody did. Apparently it’s only something he did. He didn’t know what to say for a long moment, and, while he waited, hoping the other guy would say something, there came a happy sigh.
“I’m hoping this will be it.”
“No, it won’t be,” Simon declared. “If you were doing this out of revenge or a sense of justice or whatever craziness that you’ve been convincing yourself of”—he took in a deep breath and let out a harsh sigh—“there is no enough because there was no need to torture people, no need to send Patricia to the police station with a message and then turn around and kill her.”
“I couldn’t exactly let her carry on, … not on her own. Chances were very good that she’d get weak again and that she would end up doing something or recognizing something, and I couldn’t have that.”
At the wording, Simon tried hard not to show any sense of excitement, but that was the first inclination that something was going on here that connected them. “What about Samantha Cole?”
“Do you know her too?” Then without waiting for an answer, his tormentor continued, “Well, Samantha is still my guest. I have to decide what to do with her.” Another heavy sigh came. “That’s the problem. You do this, and you try to make people get better, help them out, but then they pull some shit that you can’t live with. So you have to change it. You have to do something to make it better. Yet there is no making it better,” the guy explained, with a sneer. “Because these people … just don’t want to get better. It’s too easy to be an asshole and to be part of this stupidity for the rest of their lives.”
“And yet, for you, there is a chance of getting better?” he asked, looking for insight into what was making this guy tick.
“I wasn’t out to get better. However, something starts this, and then you have to deal with it, even if it’s not what you want to do.”
“Do you though?” Simon asked. “If this isn’t what you want to do, then you could have walked away from all this.”
“Sure, I could have. Could have is an easy answer, but it’s really not the answer, is it? These people have been given so much help.”
At that wording, Simon froze, understanding this guy’s frustration. “And they didn’t appreciate it, huh?”
“Damn right they didn’t,” he said, again with that sneer. “So it was pretty easy to go from one issue to the next, but, in truth, … it’s really not all that connected. I just connected it.”
“Because you like this, you like the power, then the control that you have over somebody’s life. You like the fear that you create. Why? Because were you also at the back end of somebody else’s manipulation at some time in the past?”
The kidnapper gave a broken laugh. “I can hear you trying to psychoanalyze me. Don’t bother. Really nothing to it. My life was an open book, until all the shit hit the fan, about the memories of what happened originally and what triggered it all.”
“Well, that’s the part that I don’t understand. What’s the trigger in all this?” he asked. “Elizabeth, I get that, and apparently because I helped her leave.”
“Yeah, sure did. She was the best thing I could have ever possibly had, and I was rather desperate to keep it. But nope, no, that wasn’t what she wanted, not after talking to you, and … you put her on this path. I can help you get out of here. I can help you start your life again, and all that BS. She told me how you would help her get away. And then she came back to town, and she didn’t call me. I saw her by accident. And when I say by accident, I mean by a car accident. I was returning from errands, and she was outside, almost as if looking for the women’s shelter that she had spent some time in. Maybe she was looking for me? I don’t know. But I hopped out and raced toward her.”
“And? What did you do then?” Simon asked, still confused and wondering why Elizabeth had returned.
“She was surprised to see me. I thought maybe she was happy to see me, but, after I brought her here, I found out that she had been just the opposite,” he shared. “I thought maybe she had come looking for me, ready to pick up where we’d left off, and I had been so angry before and so lost and so hurt that I was ready to forgive her in a heartbeat—only to find out that she wasn’t here for me at all. She wasn’t here for anything other than to settle her own memories, and she said to find herself a little bit more and to say goodbye. Goodbye,” he cried out.
“Dear God, how was any of this a goodbye?” he asked in an incredulous tone. “It wasn’t a goodbye for me. It shouldn’t have been a goodbye for her. She didn’t understand how devastated I was. I tried to explain it to her, tried to get her to understand, but then she kept telling me about you, and I didn’t even really know all you did. I didn’t know that you had been behind her leaving and that you were the one responsible for my loss,” he said, with a broken cry.
“I’m sorry, but she didn’t tell me about you. I didn’t know anybody else was in her life.”