Chapter 155: Confession

In the bathroom, George Harvey had been quiet for the last twenty minutes.

Del sat on the edge of the bed. Oliver stood near the door, arms relaxed at his sides.

He’d explained it to her in bits and pieces earlier, while he was going through George’s pockets. He told her about the Hollow Pines Community Shelter. He’d volunteered there long enough to learn how things worked. Who came and went. And George.

Most of the kids there were teenagers, boys around fourteen to seventeen. The kind of kids the shelter system had already failed twice before George got to them.

"He'll talk," Oliver said, not to her specifically. More like confirming it to the room.

"And if he doesn't?"

Oliver glanced at her. "He will."

Del looked at the bathroom door. The lock on it was the standard motel kind — the kind that locked from the inside, which meant Oliver had done something to the handle on the outside to keep it shut.

Oliver moved to the chair near the window and sat down. She'd expected pacing.

"Why does he have to confess?" Del asked.

Oliver looked at her. "What?"

"You already know what he did. You spent…I don’t know…weeks, months finding out. Why does saying it out loud matter?"

Oliver was quiet for a second. "Because you need to hear it."

Something about the way he said it made her chest tighten.

"I don't need anything from George Harvey," she said.

"You need to know I'm not making it up."

"I've never thought you made things up," she paused. "I've thought you decided things for yourself and then found evidence to support them."

Oliver opened his mouth and then closed it again. The closest she'd seen him come to not having an answer ready.

They both looked at it. A sound from inside the bathroom—not words, just movement, the particular shuffle of someone running out of options. They both looked at it.

Oliver stood.

"I want to talk to him," Del said.

He turned. "No."

"Oliver."

"Del, that's not —"

"You said I needed to hear it." She held his gaze. "Let me go in and hear it."

Oliver studied her face for a long moment. Then he stepped aside.

Inside, George Harvey was sitting on the floor between the toilet and the wall. He looked older than she'd expected. Soft around the middle, reading glasses were still folded in his shirt pocket. He could have been someone's uncle.

That was probably the point.

He looked up when she came in. His eyes did a quick calculation—taking in that she was alone, that she was young, that she was maybe an opening.

"He sent you in here to talk to me?" George asked.

"He didn't send me." Del leaned against the doorframe. "I asked to come in."

George studied her. "You're with him."

"I'm here, aren't I?"

"You seem like a smart girl. Too smart for this." He shifted slightly, adjusting his position on the floor. “He's going to get you killed. Or arrested. Whatever happens to him, you're standing right next to it. Is that what you want?"

"You've been in there working out which version of this conversation gets you out of the room," Del said. "Whether it's appealing to me as a woman, or as someone who might want out, or as someone who might be scared of him. You've been running through them, and this is the one you landed on." She tilted her head. "How'd that work out?"

George's expression shifted. The uncle look dropped a notch.

"We're not the same," Del said. "In case that was the next one."

He said nothing.

"He told me you did," she said. "Not the specifics. But enough. And I know that you've been in here hoping that I'm the weak point, because that's what you do—you find the weak point, and you work it." She straightened the doorframe. "I'm not it."

George looked at her for a long time. Something moved across his face.

"So that's it," he said. "You're just going to let him."

"I'm going to stand here," Del said, "until you tell the truth. Because he's not leaving this alone, and you know that, and the only variable right now is how long you make it take."

She watched him do the math. The particular arithmetic of a man who had spent years finding exits and had finally run out of them. She should have felt something more complicated about that. She wasn't sure why she didn't.

"Fine," George said. His voice dropped. Flat, now. No more performance. "What do you want to know?"

And he talked for eleven minutes.

Del stood in the doorway the whole time. She kept her face still. It wasn't hard, exactly — it was more that there was too much of it to react to in real time, so her face just stopped doing anything.

Oliver listened from the other side of the door. She could feel him there.

When George finished, the bathroom was very quiet.

Del stepped back into the room. Oliver was watching her, not George. He always watched her.

"Okay," she said. Her voice came out even, which surprised her.

Oliver held her gaze for another second. Then he moved past her into the bathroom and closed the door.

Del walked to the window. The parking lot outside was empty. A light above the diner sign buzzed in an irritating rhythm. She kept her eyes on it.

She heard very little from the bathroom—just the sounds of a struggle. George’s desperate grunts as he tried to fight back, a few hissed curses, and the wet smack of flesh against tile. Then silence. It was over almost as quickly as it had begun.

When Oliver stepped back into the room, he was quiet, almost unnaturally calm. His hands were freshly washed, but a faint smear of pink still lingered along the creases of his knuckles and under one fingernail, stubborn against the water.

Then he sat down across from her. Didn't say anything.

"Don't," Del said.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good."

The parking lot light kept buzzing. Del stared at it and hated it for being there, for getting that confession from George. She also couldn't find it in herself to say she regretted it. That was something she was going to have to sit with.

Oliver reached over and touched the back of her hand. She didn't move it away.

Outside, a car pulled into the lot and parked. Someone got out, went inside the diner, and the lot went quiet again.

"We leave in an hour," Oliver said.

Del nodded.

She didn't look at him. She kept her eyes on the light above the diner sign, still buzzing, and she thought — not for the first time and not for the last — that she genuinely had no idea who she was becoming.