Page 83 of Flight Risk

You regret Lily?

“No,” I admit to the bird, with whom I’m now having a complete conversation. “I can’t say I regret all of it.”

Lily stays asleep for a long time, and I chill with Snowball in the living room until he’s fluffing his wings and circling in my palms, obviously tired. We go back to the kitchen.

When I go to transfer him into the cage, he opens one eye and tweets at me.

“You’reup in the middle of the night.”

Go to sleep.

“I can’t.”

You need to sleep,he tweets, settling into the beginnings of the nest he’s made in the cage.You are talking to a bird.

I close the cage door and let out a breath. “Yeah. I get it.”

Snowball goes to sleep.

Water runs in the bathroom. Lily in the shower, I think. I’m frozen in the kitchen with Snowball.

Even if I hallucinated our entire conversation, which is likely, he has a point. I need sleep. I needmorethan sleep. I’m extremely unraveled. This revenge plot seems less like revenge every second. It’s turning into the kind of emotional collapse I didn’t think I’d have in front of another person.

“I don’t have a problem with men crying,” I tell Snowball. “I’m not sexist. It’s all the revealing I’m morally opposed to.”

My bird opens his eyes, glares at me, and tweets once as if to sayshut the hell up, Jameson.

It’s exactly the right advice. Ishouldshut up. Give somebody a chance to talk, and they’ll talk themselves into hell. I’ve spent years hiding a lot of stuff about myself for the good of my family and society, but the biggest thing I hide by far is my emotions.

I’m always too much. My emotions are always as strong as they were when I was sobbing on the beach all over the woman I’ve kidnapped. I don’t get irritated at injustice. I get angry. Furious. Enraged. I always want to go too far. Shit happens, and I’m instantly committed to the most extreme version of revenge. I’d have killed that prick who hurt Remy, and I wouldn’t have felt a second of remorse. All I can imagine feeling is relief that he’d never touch her again, and relief that I got to complete the full loop from injustice to justice. I’m all in, no matter what.

I can play that off as noble, as long as I’m directing that energy into fighting for people and animals who can’t fight for themselves. The terrible, inescapable flip side is that I’m like that with everything. I threw myself into this kidnapping with so much intensity that I haven’t bothered to call either of my brothers and tell them I’ll be out of work. Mason was so proud of me, and I made it one day in the new job before I self-destructed.

I’m not going to call, either. I already lied to Remy, and when my siblings find out what I’ve done, that’ll be it. They’ll hate me forever. That’ll make things easier for them to lose me to jail or…

However else.

“Jameson?” Lily’s voice is soft, but it startles me. Every inch of my skin goes cold. It spins up all the memories from the nightmare, and all the memories of what happened. They flicker through my mind in the time it takes for her to come into the kitchen with the sheet from the bed wrapped around her shoulders. I focus on her face, on her hair, the sleepy tilt of her mouth. Lily Hayes has never appeared in any nightmare I’ve ever had. I’m awake. I’mawake. She tilts her chin to look up at me. “What didn’t you tell me on the beach?”

“Um, what?” I let out a laugh that falls about a mile short of sounding amused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Lily shakes her head, her hair shaking with her, catching even the low indoor light. Jesus, it’s heart-stopping. “There was a missing piece.”

She’s unbearably cute like this, with her hair messed up and wearing a bedsheet. I love that she’s done it even more because it’s a pain in the ass to put the sheets back on. Lily has to know that, but she dragged the sheet off anyway. She knows I won’t be pissed. I might pretend, and that’ll be hot, but I won’t really care.

“What’s the missing piece?” she asks.

“Truce over,” I say. The last thing I want to talk about is the stuff that came up on the beach.“You’re back to being kidnapped. Go to bed.”

Lily rolls her eyes. “No way. You’re out here talking to Snowball. I can come out here, too.”

“Snowball’s asleep.”

“I know you’vebeentalking to Snowball. You left something out at the beach. What was it? It’s going to drive me nuts.”

My stomach sinks. That’s the thing about people like Lily. Give them any time at all, and they’ll see the breaks in the pattern. The empty spaces where something’s supposed to be. They’ll worry at it, turn it over and over in their minds, fuss with it until they understand.

I know, because I’m the same way. I keep trying to fix the unjust bullshit in the world. Trespass after trespass. Petty crime after petty crime. It’s a way to burn off my endless, overwhelming energy and put Band-Aids over the broken places.

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