Page 13 of Plain Sight

He’s all warmth and intensity like lightning. He always seemed barely contained. This kidnapper is nothing by comparison.

The man takes out his phone.

Looks at the screen.

Taps.

Is he texting?

Holy mother of the Constitution, he’s texting.

While he texts, he nudges at one of the tarps with the toe of his shoe. How many murders have those shoes seen? Does he seriously do this every day, or are there different crimes for other days of the week?

Am I losing my mind?

I might be. My stomach keeps twisting and untwisting like it can’t decide if I’m in mortal peril or just being played with.

The kidnapper lowers his phone, then bends to rearrange one of the tarps even more.

When he straightens up, the line of his shoulders is different. He frowns at his phone.

Okay.

I’m freaking out a little. That’s normal in these circumstances.

And the texting is starting to seem incredibly sinister.

However, the more time he spends texting, the more time Jameson has to get to me.

Because Jameson is going to get to me. That thought hadn’t occurred to me in full until this moment. Jameson’s not going to shrug his shoulders and go back to his old life. His ring is on my finger. He followed it up with a genuine proposal, and the order of those two things is just details.

If I know anything about Jameson Hill, it’s that he’s on his way to find me right now.

Stalling it is.

I spend a few precious seconds debating how I want to open the next phase of conversation. I didn’t watch much TV during my academic career because I needed all the time I could get for studying and because I thought taking myself seriously meant avoiding all the unserious things my friends did in their downtime. I didn’t watch racy movies and I didn’t watch crime shows. I tried to stay away from pop music.

What was I thinking?

Now isn’t the time to regret my past choices, although they’re not helping me now.

My limited secondhand knowledge of crime shows, however, says the topic I choose won’t make the difference if this person is determined to kill me.

Since.

Since this person is determined to kill me.

My one vice before Jameson was dancing. All that practice didn’t give me a magical skill in escaping from kidnappers, but it did provide me with plenty of opportunities to improvise.

It’s fitting, isn’t it? Dancing was an escape. For a few hours a week, I escaped a life that never felt right no matter how hard I tried. When I was suspended in midair, I had control over my body and my life. I was myself.

I know how to get to the end of a complicated routine. I know how to outlast the music and finish with a smile.

On four—one, two, three, four.

“Did you kill my mother?”

The kidnapper is the one who handed me her death certificate. No—not a death certificate. An email printout that claimed to be a death certificate. It’s not proof of anything except that this man—and my grandfather—want me to believe my mother is dead.