Page 86 of The Tenant
I clasp a hand over my mouth. “Oh my God, how awful! Do you have any idea why he would do that?”
“Because he’s out of his mind!” she sobs. “He’shorrible. He’s always leaving me these nasty notes, and he looks at me like he wishes I were dead.” She looks over her shoulder at the bed, where there are indeed rotting apples covered with writhing maggots all over her blanket, which will probably now need to be thrown away. I never thought he’ddo anythingonce he found the fruit bag. “I don’t think I can take much more of this. I…I might have to move.”
This is not good. Amanda wants to leave, and Blake has been talking about selling the brownstone. I’m going to have to accelerate the timeline.
“Where will you go?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” she says helplessly. “I burned out all my friends staying on their couches before I moved in here. I feel like I can’t ask again. And…I don’t have much money.”
Amanda is confiding in me. This might be a good time to admit what I know to her. I want her to be able to trust me, and this is an important step. But most importantly, I need her to admit what she did. Because I have to be 100 percent sure.
“Listen.” I slip into her room and close the door behind me so that we’re alone. “I wanted you to know that…I know.”
Fear flickers in her eyes, but she tries to maintain her composure. “What do you know? What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean…Amanda.”
She gasps and takes a step back. “I… I don’t…”
“I have a friend in IT who told me your driver’s license looked fake, so he did some digging,” I say. “But don’t worry. Blake doesn’t know. I didn’t tell anyone.”
Her brows scrunch together. “You didn’t tellanyone?”
Bingo.
“Not a soul.”
Amanda drops down onto the edge of the bed, avoiding the apple and the maggots. She buries her face in her hands. “I don’t know how this happened. How did my life becomethis?”
“If you want to talk about it…”
She raises her face from her palms. “You swear you won’t tell anyone?”
“I swear on my life.”
And that part is entirely true.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and a pair of twin tears roll down either cheek. “My mother had cancer. Stomach cancer. The prognosis was horrible, especially without treatment. But the treatment… It wasn’t cheap, and her insurance didn’t cover it.”
“Oh,” I murmur.
“It’s not the kind of thing where you can go to a bank and get a loan for chemotherapy,” she murmurs, not meeting my eyes. “So I borrowed it from somebody else. Somebody who didn’t ask too many questions.”
“I see.”
I had assumed Amanda was on the run for nefarious reasons. Instead, it’s because she was trying to raise money to pay for her mother’s cancer treatment. Somehow this irritates me even more. She had a mother who loved her enough that she would do anything to keep her alive. That’s a hell of a lot more than I ever had.
“And then, of course, she died anyway.” Amanda laughs mirthlessly. “All that money and the chemo port and the vomiting and the hair falling out, and she didn’t even live as long as her prognosis without treatment. And then I was on the hook for all that money.” She winces. “It’s not the sort of thing where you can declare bankruptcy, you know? If I didn’t come up with it, they were going to kill me.”
“So you changed your name…”
“I used what little money I had to buy a new identity,” she explains. “Whitney Cross was some teenager who disappeared a while back, probably murdered or something. She wasn’t using her identity, and I needed it.”
I grit my teeth. I wasn’tmurdered, for God’s sake. As if! I simply wasn’t using my identity for a little while. But that didn’t give her the right totakeit. The fact that nothing has happened to her since becoming Whitney Cross means that it would have been safe for me to slip back into my old identity.
That is, if she hadn’tstolenit.
“So that’s my whole pathetic story,” she says. “If you tell anyone, I’m obviously dead. So I hope you don’t.”
