Lover on Loop: Her Cruel Revenge Game novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Cold Coffee

Asa walks into Greer's greenhouse with the cast on and says Benji's name first. She sets her terms.

The surgeon pinned my hand at two in the morning, and by ten I was walking up Mill Road with a cast to my elbow.

Lathrop Plants stood at the end of it, a long glass greenhouse and a gravel lot behind a hand-painted sign.

Greer's mother had built it, and Greer had kept it open through the worst year of her life.

I had stood in that lot eight times and never walked through the door on day one.

This time I pushed it open with my shoulder.

It was warm inside and smelled of wet soil and tomato leaves.

Greer stood at the potting bench at the far end with her back to me.

She was driving stakes into pots with a claw hammer, one blow each.

The yellow flashlight sat on the bench by her elbow, switched on.

I stopped three feet behind her.

"I know you're there," she said, without turning around. "I heard the door."

"Good morning, Greer."

"I'd have thought a man with that hand would have the sense to stay in bed."

"I came to say something."

She turned around.

Her hair was tied back, and there was dirt on her cheek.

Her eyes went to the cast, then to my face, and stayed on my face a moment too long.

She was holding the hammer at her side.

"Say it, then."

"Benji hated peas."

Her face went still.

"He cut them out of everything. He'd put them in his raincoat pockets. I found them in the washing machine in April, and you laughed so hard you had to sit on the floor."

"Don't."

"He wouldn't wear anything but the yellow raincoat, even in July."

The hammer came up an inch.

I didn't step back.

I looked at it, and then I looked at her.

"You can use that," I said. "You know I won't stop you. But I came a long way to say his name to you, and nobody else is going to."

She stared at me.

The hammer stayed where it was.

I'd had eight cycles to learn her, and every one of them had started with her swinging at my hand.

She had never once stood and let me talk.

"You said it was your fault," she said finally.

"I did."

"In the hospital. I was awake enough to hear it. You said it right over my bed."

"Yes."

"Say it again."

"It was my fault."

"Louder."

I said it louder.

She put the hammer down on the bench, very carefully, next to the flashlight.

"I don't forgive you," she said.

"I didn't ask you to."

"I want to make that clear."

"It's clear."

"Then here's how this goes." She wiped her hands on her apron and looked at me properly. "You stay where I can see you. There's a cot in the potting shed. You'll sleep on it."

"All right."

"Every day you tell me one true thing about that night, or about him, or about you. One. I decide what it costs."

"What if it's a lie?"

"Then I take the other hand."

She said it flatly, without any heat.

She meant it.

I thought about the surgeon's gray thread on the screen.

"Do you want it written down?" I asked.

"Don't be funny."

"I wasn't."

"I'm not letting you go, Asa. Not for ninety days or ninety years. You walk out of here without my say and I swear I'll find you."

I went cold.

She'd said ninety days.

She couldn't know the number.

I watched her face, and she was only talking, and I let it go.

"What's today's?" she asked.

"I told you. Peas."

"That's not about that night."

"You said about him."

Her mouth twitched, and I saw it, and she saw me see it.

"Fine," she said. "That counts."

She picked up the coffee cup beside the flashlight, found it cold, and drank it anyway.

I put my good hand in my pocket so she wouldn't see how I was holding it.

Then I looked through the glass wall of the greenhouse.

A black sedan was turning in at the gate, slowly, and the driver was already looking toward the door.

I knew the car.

It was Darren.

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