And this was a convertible, I realized dazedly as the car zoomed by. This was a convertible that would show up nearly every convertible on the planet. The top was down, despite the impending storm. Chic, sleek, and fast. I caught the prancing horse emblem on the shiny red of the paint, and then the car zipped around a curve and behind a mountain.
I gasped, my lungs unfreezing. Only a split second had separated us from crashing together in a fiery mess of metal, but she’d been unfazed. She’d never even glanced around. The red replayed in my mind’s eye like a speeded up, repeating film clip, played faster and faster, the mechanics of the recorder losing control.
Chic. Red. Fast.
Elizabeth.
“Noah had given her a rare, vintage Ferrari Spider when she got her driver’s permit. Cherry red.”
Light from my darkness.
You are no outsider to this place, Anna.
The thoughts came at me like mortar fire. I didn’t know if they were mine, or someone else’s. That’s what scared me the most at that moment.
Thunder shattered the very air around me, seeming to split atoms in half. I cried out, grabbed the wheel tighter, and butted my forehead hard against it.
I welcomed the jolt of pain.
Chapter Nineteen
That’s how Evan found me, gripping the wheel like I thought it was a life preserver in a stormy sea, my forehead pressed against it, my body shuddering.
At first, I didn’t register much of anything from the outside world: not the rain pounding on the windshield like it was being hurled in buckets by some giant above me, not the roar of the wind, nor the sound of Evan opening the car door and calling my name.
I didn’t come back to any sense of reality until he touched my shoulder.
Turning my head on the wheel, I met his stare. His palpable alarm cut through me. I started and straightened. The hand on my shoulder moved, kneading the muscle, doing that dance of reassurance with which I’d become so familiar.
“Take it easy. Keep your foot on the brake.” He reached in front of me. I watched, as if from a distance, as he moved the gearshift to the Park position. I’d had the vehicle in Drive the entire time, my foot jammed on the brake.
How long had I been sitting there, gripping that wheel?
I turned to Evan, searching his face and body, as though they could give me clues for my own bizarre behavior. My strange thoughts. I learned nothing. He looked reassuringly solid standing there, bent over and staring at me, even if he was soaking wet, his dark hair plastered to his head, the fabric of his shirt clinging to his shoulders and chest.
“I think I just saw Elizabeth,” I said.
He glanced out the window where I pointed before giving me an odd glance. Then he touched my forehead. His brow furrowed. “You’ve hit your head, Anna. Are you hurt anywhere else? Are you in pain? Are you dizzy?”
I shook my head.
“Can you get out of the car all right? I’ll drive us back to the house.”
“But… how did you get here?” I asked, my feet swinging to the side of the seat as he straightened and took my hands in his.
“I ran,” he said simply. “Something told me I should.”
He pulled me gently out of the car, and I joined him in the torrential downpour.
I don’t remember much about returning to Les Jumeaux in that storm. I don’t think it was because I’d purposefully hit my head on the steering wheel during a fit of bewildered grief. Maybe my partial amnesia was emotional overload. All I recall is walking down the wood floor hallway upstairs, Evan’s arm around me. He guided me toward our bedroom, and my feet halted.
“No. Not in there,” I stated flatly.
Evan paused only for a second before we continued down the hallway. He opened the door to another room. I’d seen it before, when I was choosing a guest room for Valeria. It faced the pine forest at the back of the property. Like our bedroom had been before we arrived, it was devoid of personal photos or keepsakes: comfortably anonymous.
I pushed on Evan’s forearm. His hold fell off me. I walked like a robot to the en suite bathroom and shut the door.
The rain had chilled me to the bone. I turned on the shower, stripped, and got in, all without thinking. When I got out, I wasn’t surprised to see a towel and a robe laid out for me, obviously by Evan. I felt dull and heavy.