Chapter 32 WHAT CUTTER KNEW

Chapter 32 WHAT CUTTER KNEW
POV: Anna De'Leon

She did not leave that day.

She was not ready that day and leaving without being ready was the kind of thing that produced the photographs Victor had shown her, the kind of thing that ended in a shallow grave in the Nevada desert with the buzzards doing the work that the burying had not bothered to complete. She had seen what happened to people who made impulsive decisions in Victor's world. She was not going to be one of them.

She was going to be careful.

She went back to the trailer and she went through the motions of the day, the reports and the observations and the performance of compliance that she had been building for six weeks, and she did it with the same care she had been bringing to it and she did it while carrying the new weight of what Cutter had told her, and she discovered that carrying it was not as different from carrying everything else she had been carrying as she would have expected.

She had been carrying the shape of it for six weeks without being able to name it.

Now she had a name for it. That was the only thing that had changed. The weight was the same.

She sent Victor his evening report.

He sent back the single word that meant it had been received.

She looked at the word on her screen and she thought about her father's hands on a Sunday morning with a polishing rag and she thought about the phone call the night before the mountain road and she thought about Cutter's voice in the early morning garage saying I don't know for certain and she thought about the necklace against her throat.

She did not take the necklace off.

Taking the necklace off was a decision that would be noticed and decisions that were noticed produced conversations she was not ready to have. She left the necklace on and went to work at the diner and served coffee to truckers and tourists and the occasional Iron Wolves member who came in for breakfast and she smiled the smile she had been building and said the things that were required and put her tips in the small zippered pocket inside her jacket where she had been keeping them for two weeks.

She had been saving before Cutter told her.

Not with a specific plan, not with a destination or a timeline or anything that could be called a strategy. Just the small instinct of a person who understood at some level below conscious thought that having money that Victor did not know about was a form of having something that was hers, the same instinct that had kept her hand off the phone for one afternoon before the photographs broke her.

Now the saving had a purpose.

She counted what she had on the third night after Cutter told her. Twenty-one dollars and thirty cents in the zippered pocket, accumulated over two weeks of carefully pocketed tips, the kind of money that disappeared into a diner's daily count without notice. She needed more. She did not know exactly how much a bus ticket to Phoenix cost but she knew it was more than twenty-one dollars.

She worked three doubles in the following week.

She told Victor she had picked up extra shifts because the money helped and because being at the diner meant she was observing a different cross-section of the compound's world, the men who came in for breakfast and the conversations they had when they thought they were in neutral territory, which was useful to him. This was true. It was also true that she was building the fund in the zippered pocket with the focused intention of a person who had found a door and was working toward it with everything she had.

She wrote to Jason twice more during this period.

His letters kept coming, the left-leaning handwriting and the questions about their father getting more direct, more concerned, the careful prison-trained patience of a man who was running out of patience. She wrote back with the same careful brightness and the same selected truths and the same four words that anchored each letter to the lie she was building around him to keep him alive.

Everything is fine here.

She wrote it and she thought about Cutter's voice and she sealed the envelope and she did not look at her reflection.

On a Tuesday morning three weeks after Cutter told her she counted the money in the zippered pocket and found twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents and she looked at it in her palm and she made the decision she had been building toward and she put the money in her jacket and walked to the Greyhound station on Henderson Boulevard and she bought a ticket to Phoenix and put it in her pocket next to the money and walked back to the compound and performed the rest of the day with the ticket against her leg, the paper warm from her body, the ink spelling out a destination she had never been to and did not know and did not care about except that it was not here.

She did not tell Cutter.

She could not tell Cutter because telling Cutter put him in the position of knowing, and knowing put him in the position of the photographs, and she was not going to do that to the only person in this compound who had trusted her with something true.

She went to sleep that night with the ticket under her mattress.

She lay on her back in the dark with Victor's necklace on her throat and her father's pen in her jacket pocket on the chair beside the bed and Jason's most recent letter on the table and she stared at the ceiling and she breathed and she thought about Phoenix and what it might be and what she was going to do when she got there with twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents minus the cost of the ticket and no plan beyond the bus stopping somewhere that was not here.

She did not sleep.

In the morning she got up and she put the ticket in her jacket pocket and she packed a backpack with the things she could not leave behind, the letters from Jason, her father's photograph from the dresser where it had been since she moved the phone to the nightstand, three changes of clothes, the pen from her father's jacket pocket. She left the silk in its bag and the jewelry box on the dresser and the phone on the nightstand face down.

She left the necklace on.

She told herself she left it on because taking it off would leave a mark on her throat that Victor would notice if he saw her before she got to the bus. She left it on and she told herself that and she did not examine the other reasons.

She walked to the Greyhound station with the backpack on her shoulder and the morning desert heat already building around her and the ticket in her hand and she felt the thing she had not felt since the night before the garage, the thing she had believed the photographs had taken from her permanently.

Hope.

Specific and fragile and probably foolish and entirely real.

She handed the ticket to the driver and boarded the bus and found a seat in the back and put the backpack between her knees and watched the Nevada desert begin to move past the window as the Greyhound pulled out of the station, and she breathed the diesel-thick air of the bus and she thought about Phoenix and she let herself feel the hope for the length of one mile marker and then another and then another.

She was almost to Henderson when she saw them.