The Woman In the Hotel by Cathryn Grant

Author:Cathryn Grant [Grant, Cathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781943142750
Published: 2023-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 42

It’s strange how a few simple words, the most thoughtless, unimportant comment, can grow into something that threatens to take over your life, to strangle you until the breath is gone from your body. How is that possible? Even a simple yes or no can have consequences that change the course of a person’s life, the course of history, if it’s taken far enough.

That’s how it was when I answered Ned’s question without thinking—none of your business—four words that seemed perfectly reasonable.

It turned into a physical altercation.

That’s how it was when I spoke four words to Eileen—you could do better—and came close to expelling myself from my luxury apartment.

With Hunter, it was the words I hadn’t spoken. I had four siblings. Now I have three. There was no good answer, and I didn’t want to explain the discrepancy. It’s not that lies don’t slip easily off my tongue, they do. But what was the correct answer to that question, and more importantly, would I ever want to change the answer? If I did, it would require a lot of explaining. It seemed simpler to avoid answering.

And now, I’d started a crisis that he was not going to easily recover from.

He had twisted himself into knots over words I hadn’t even spoken and was imagining all sorts of wild scenarios. He was so obsessed with the topic, I wondered if he had already hired someone to investigate me. If that were the case, it made me very uncomfortable. If that were the case, I might have created a much bigger problem in my life than simply being required to talk for the first time about the death of my sister.

And, how would I know?

I very boldly told him I would notice if someone followed me. I have good instincts, a freakish awareness of what was happening around me. But did I really? Rada had managed to locate my apartment. She’d stood outside my office building and I hadn’t known she was there until she told me ever-so-casually that she’d followed me. Maybe I was only aware when I had reason to be concerned about it, when I was planning to kill someone, or had just done so.

But day-to-day? Was I really watching every person who passed by, every man or woman sitting nearby in a restaurant or entering my building? Did I clock every face that I’d seen before and register its familiarity?

Absolutely not.

It was possible that Hunter had had someone following me from the first time he became upset that I wasn’t being forthright with him. And it didn’t even have to be a physical presence. Just as I’d fabricated a story for Eileen about an ex-boyfriend who was good with technology, there were plenty of people who could creep through the wires of the dark web and potentially find out things about me.

I’d done my best to keep myself from having a lot of online information, but as I’d gotten older, that had become more difficult. The days when I paid for everything in cash and didn’t use a cell phone were long gone.

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