Page 48 of Conrad

She kept talking, and he managed to keep driving, his eyes on the road, his hands on the wheel, instead of doing the one thing he wanted to do—stop and maybe pull her into his arms.

Just hold on and steady the terrible thunder in his chest.

It was possible he was taking this harder than she was. Because she was sitting next to himjust. fine.

“I was nine. My parents were out of town—I don’t know where. Tia was two years older than me and had her own room, and that night she was sleeping over at a neighbor’s house. It was just me and my nanny and, of course, Edward and his mom. They actually had rooms in our house—he had a single mom, and she was with our family until she died, not long after Edward. Cancer. Or grief.”

She took a breath.

He swallowed the terrible boulder in his throat.

“Anyway, I was asleep, and woke up to someone putting duct tape over my mouth, and then, while I tried to scream, they taped my hands and feet and pulled me right out of my bed.”

She spoke so differently than she did in her podcasts, without drama or sound effects. Like she might be giving a police report.

“They hid me in our house. We have an old house—built in 1887—and it has a creepy basement and a huge attic and even a dumbwaiter that moves from floor to floor, and that’s what saved me. They put me in the basement—I’m not sure why. Maybe so they could tell my parents where to find me once they’d delivered the money. But we had this old cold-storage room where our housekeeper stored our apples and potatoes and other canned goods—she was from Germany and was this amazing cook?—”

“Pen.”Oh,he didn’t know why he’d interrupted her. “Sorry.”

“No—sorry. Not a podcast.” She glanced at him and he caught her eye. She could steal his breath, and not just with her story but with the striking beauty she probably didn’t know she possessed, wearing a white puffer jacket, leggings, and boots, that dark hair spilling out of her white hat. He still couldn’t get the image out of his brain—her wearing that ridiculous helmet, lopsided on her head, grinning into the camera, her eyes glowing.

He’d gotten himself in trouble then, conjuring up things for them to do on their I-guess-not-a-date.

Whatever.At least he’d gotten her into the car with him, and now?—

“So, anyway, they wrapped me up in a blanket and shoved me into the cold cellar, way in the back?—”

“Who is they?”

She eyed him. “I’ll get to that.”

He huffed, a sort of laugh. “So it is a story.”

“It has to be. Because if it isn’t, I’ll end up in therapy all over again.”

Oh.

“So there I sat, all night. The next day, I had to go to the bathroom, really bad, and ended up . . . you know. At least it was warm.”

“Aw . . .”

“I was mortified and really scared, but also had spent most of the night working off the tape on my mouth. They’d wrapped it around my head, so I lost some hair getting it off, but I got it free and then started biting through the tape on my wrists. Took me the better part of the next day, probably, although it was pitch dark in the room, so I had no idea. I finally got free, and then I realized that not only was I locked in but no one could hear me.”

“You must have been terrified.”

He crossed the Hennepin Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi, the waters gray, just a few boats on the river.

“I was. And then, after a while, I wasn’t. I sometimes hid there when Edward and I played hide-and-seek, so I ate some apples and then opened a jar of pickles . . . To this day, the smell of pickles brings me back to that.”

He nodded, his mouth tight. GPS spoke up and told him to take a left on University Avenue.

“Two days in, the door unlocked. It was Edward. He’d figured out where I was, but he said I wasn’t safe, that I needed to hide.”

“Why?”

“Because the person who’d kidnapped me was my nanny. And Edward knew it. He’d overheard her talking with one of the security guys, Nicolai, who was in on it, and apparently my parents were negotiating the ransom, and he thought . . .” She sighed.

“He thought they’d kill you.”

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