Page 58 of You Found Me
She gaped at him. “Was I living under a rock?”
“You know what I mean.”
She waved his concern away. “I’m not me. I get it. Don’t worry. I pretend to be other people all the time in videos. But don’t you think it’s going to be a little difficult to trick your family?” She flipped down the passenger-side visor, grimaced at herself in the mirror, then flipped it back up. “I mean, parents like to know everything about significant others. I know my dad would have grilled you like a steak if we’d tried to pull this on him.”
“They won’t do that.” His dad was a man of few words, and his stepmother would be curious, but not invasive. He could run interference there. It was his kid brother he was worried about. What were the odds a music-obsessed teenager didn’t recognize Della Bellamy, no matter what color her hair was? He shoved that to the back of his mind for now. “We need to go over the ground rules.”
Della opened the glove compartment and shifted through the contents. “Ofcoursewe do. I doubt you’ve ever lived a day without rules. I bet when you were born you saluted the doctor and handed your mom a manual calledRules for Raising a Warden.”
“I’m not…” Ward took a deep,deepbreath. “This entire operation is pointless if you don’t take it seriously.”
“I know how serious this is. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” She closed the glove compartment and looked around. “I’d be somewhere a hell of a lot more fun, with people who at least pretended to like me.”
There was a lot of bitterness loaded into the muttered statement that he didn’t think was entirely his fault. He let it slide in favor of focusing on the task at hand. “Rule one. Don’ttalk about anything too personal with anyone. Keep it light. Shallow. You should be good at that.”
“Ouch.” She put her hand over her heart. “That hurts. You think I’m shallow?”
Ward held up two fingers. “Two. Don’t go anywhere without me. Ever. Not even for a walk. If you need to go somewhere, we go together.”
She started to sing. “We go together like?—”
“Three,” he said over the top of her song. “No. Singing.”
She gestured to the mostly empty road. “There’s only the two of us here.”
“If you sing and someone hears you, your cover is blown. If your cover is blown, he finds you. He finds you, it’s game over. I can’t stop a guy determined to get to you if you show him a road map. Get me?”
She shrank back into her seat. “I got it.” Her voice cracked.
He’d scared her. It felt like kicking a puppy, but it had to be done. “Lucy Carmichael is tone deaf. We clear?”
She raised her hands in submission. “No singing. Got it.”
He sped up to go around a car traveling way too slow. A few miles slid by in silence while she contemplated the sunset and he inched the speedometer up a little higher.
“Tell me about Wires Crossing,” Della said. “What’s it like?”
Her expression had softened into something almost sad. He had no idea what that was about. “It’s a typical small town.”
“What’s that even mean? I travel all over, and one thing I know for sure is that no place is typical anything. Every place has its own thing that makes it unique. So what makes your hometown special?”
He thought of the old theater downtown where budding Broadway stars learned their craft. The annual apple festival that brought people from all the surrounding states. The fields of sunflowers that had been featured in national magazines.
Then he thought of the bridge and the car that had been forced over the edge.
She didn’t need to know about any of it. They wouldn’t be there long enough for it to matter.
“Let’s go over your backstory again.”
“Why? It’s not like you’ll let me talk to anybody. You’ll probably stick me in a basement and lock the door.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Start with your name.”
“Fine.” She huffed out a breath. “My name is Lucy Carmichael. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
“I did what?”
“Come on. You’ve never seenThePrincess Bride?”