Page 62 of Sinners Atone
“Last name? Job? Fucking date of birth?”
She shrugs.
“Why doesn’t she drink?” I grit out.
She rolls her eyes and saunters over to the workbench. “I don’t know, but I’ve never known her to drink.”
“And why doesn’t she drive?”
Rory’s pause is brief, but it crackles on the nape of my neck. She lowers her gaze and traces a finger along the wood grain. “I don’t know.”
My sister-in-law is a psychopath. She’ll smile and swear she didn’t key your car, or serve you a coffee and not even flinch as she watches you drink her spit.
She’s a flawless liar. Until she’s not.
“Rory,” I warn.
“I don’t know!” she says with an impatient huff, her cheeks reddening. “One day she was driving, and then the next day she wasn’t, okay?”
A chill works its way through my veins. I swallow and force out my next question as calmly as I can muster.
Though I have a creeping suspicion I already know the answer.
“And when was this?”
She lifts her eyes to meet mine, guilt swirling in the brown. “Just after her eighteenth birthday.”
Her words crawl across the table, push into my chest, and hammer puzzle pieces into place.
She stopped driving just before she met me.
Just before her glossed lips brushed mine, her breath warmer than the wind.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
Though I’ve always obsessed over her secret, it’s always been to satisfy my own fucked-up addiction, not because I’ve ever thought it’d be anything worth uncovering. I’ve always been certain it’d be petty. Stealing a nail polish from the mall, or something equally as dumb.
But to suddenly stop driving?
I’ve given up the pretense of polishing now. Heart thudding and ears burning, I glare at Rory and wait for her to continue.
“It was all a bit strange. She’d gone out of town to celebrate her birthday with her Seattle friends, and when she came back a few days later, she no longer had a car.”
“So she had an accident.”
“She swore up and down she didn’t, and she didn’t look hurt or anything.” She glances up at me with a sheepish smile. “Ididn’t believe her, but I googled car accidents in the whole of the Pacific Northwest, and nothing came up.”
I drag a knuckle over my jaw, my mind racing. “And now she doesn’t get into cars at all.”
“Nope. Sometimes, she’ll take the bus, but most of the time, she walks everywhere. But that’s not all. When she came back, she was…different.Not in a bad way,” she hastens to add. “She was just nicer.”
I run my tongue over my teeth. “Meaning?”
“She started volunteering in Cove, then at the hospital. At first, I thought it was just so she had something to put on her college application, but she’d already secured her place. And then I thought, maybe she’s found God or something.” She lets out a little laugh. “But that doesn’t explain why she suddenly started wearing so much pink.”
My skin is fucking fizzing. The driving, the volunteering, the sudden niceness. There’s a linear story there, asecret, one more depraved than petty theft, and I’m so close to finding it out I can taste it on her strawberry lip gloss.
“Anyway, shouldn’t you know all of this already? Denis found Rafe’s banking login for me in ten seconds flat.”
