Page 83 of Z For Butterfly Man
My heart skips a beat.
“From the beginning, from the second you woke up on that table, you played dumb. You were so committed to convincing me you truly believed Butterfly Man and the detective were the same person, and I kept wondering how someone like you could be so far off from the truth.
“Then the way you were absolutely sure if Jacob didn’t find you, he must be dead. You knew, beyond doubt, if he was alive, he would most definitely find you.”
His thumb brushes over the small bandage on my left arm. “And that… That was my definitive proof. Every time you woke up, every time you were in more pain than usual, the first thing you looked at was your left arm, like when I put your IV in, when you woke up here…”
“You knew exactly why I was reflexively checking on the implant. You said it yourself. Women freak out about getting pregnant.”
He looks at me directly. “That chip wasn’t Nexplanon.”
“Of course it was.”
“You can’t get pregnant, Reagan.”
I blink once. My throat bobs to swallow the lump blocking it and fails. How does he know that? Every person who knew about this was gone. And how could he throw it at me like that, like it’s a simple matter of stating facts, like it’s a way to win?
“That’s not true.” The lie falters on my trembling lips.
“Yes, it is. You told me yourself. The weight that lingered behind your confession, the lies you told after aboutcontraception to hide what must have been a very painful truth, proves it.”
What does he know about painful truths? “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But I do.” He holds the implant between us. “This is a tracker. The kind that runs parallel to the contraceptive casing so it reads as a standard hormonal implant on any basic scan. I checked it myself. That’s why I destroyed it in the tunnel before we left on the boat. I wonder who has access to that kind of gear.”
“Jacob had nothing to do with it.”
“C’mon, Reagan. Jacob had nothing to do with it, butRJdid.” He scoffs. “You think I didn’t catch that? The way you called his name to save you. It wasn’t Jacob or Reid. It was RJ, like you’ve known each other for a while, not just getting to. Because you did. You’ve known the detective for quite some time now, and he gave you the tracker. Before any of this happened. Before I took you, as if you knew. As if both of you knew this was going to happen. He put that chip in your arm so that when the moment came, when I finally had you, he would know exactly where you were. You would lead him straight to me, andhewould killme.”
“If that was the case, why did he not find me sooner?”
“Because you forgot one thing in your plan. I run military-grade jammers that block signals for miles in every direction. I had one on me when I took you from your house and another at the sanctuary. But the jammer has a tolerance threshold. The system cycled for a fraction of a second, maybe less, enough for the chip to ping, enough for him to get a coordinate. That’s how he found us. One malfunction. One fraction of a second I did not anticipate.”
He takes off the last piece of his mask. “How long, Reagan?” he asks very quietly. “How long have you been planning this with him?”
CHAPTER 38
Jacob
Three Months Ago
The job does something to you after enough years. It’s not the evil things human beings are capable of doing, not the hours, not the paperwork that reproduces itself overnight like something alive and resentful. It’s the smaller thing underneath it all. The way you stop expecting anything good to be waiting for you on the other side of a door. A closed door is just a closed door. You open it, you go in, you deal with whatever the room has decided to be tonight.
As I turn my key and enter my house, the room tonight has decided, after seven years, to put me face to face with her again.
“Hey, RJ.” She smiles. “I hope you don’t mind. I used the spare key.”
I stop in the doorway. She’s sitting on my couch with her knees pulled up and her shoes off and her hair—jet black—down, and for a moment that is long enough to embarrass me, I just stand there with my keys in my hand and the door open behind me and seven years of carefully maintained distance dissolving in the space between us like it has never been there at all.
Reagan Fletcher.
Birdie Abel.
She looks up at me with those eyes that have always made me question everything I’ve ever believed, even my very existence. “I wasn’t sure if you still lived alone. I checked the driveway first. No cars.”
I close the door. Then I set my keys on the hook the way I do every night because some part of me needs to be mechanical right now, needs something to do with my hands that isn’t reaching toward her. I take off my jacket. I hang it up. I turn around.
She looks terrible. She looks like the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years. Both of these things are equally and inconveniently true. I’ve been managing the inconvenience of Reagan Fletcher since the first time Blake brought her to the precinct, not as a victim but as his girlfriend, and I shook her hand and smiled. Then I went home, sat in this exact living room and had a very honest conversation with myself about the things I was going to have to get very good at not feeling.
