She ran with not a question in her head as to where she would go.
Marcelline was out of sight, with John screeching off behind her before Carly was halfway across the parking lot. Owen’s car was a silver smudge as she passed it, and she hit the restaurant’s door, pulling up barely enough to keep from crashing right through the glass.
She flung it open, and every head snapped up to the urgent rush of her into the room.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Owen said.
She stopped herself, hands slapped onto the table as brakes.
“You have to help her.” Carly was gulping air.
“Would you like to have a seat?”
“No! We have to go! He’s chasing her!”
Owen turned toward the growing attention of the amazed staff behind the counter. “Would someone please bring her a Coke.” He swung back to Carly. “Clearly, we’re not going anywhere until you tell me what you think is going on.”
“He’s chasing her!”
“Stop yelling. And sit down.”
It felt weird to Carly that she had no inclination to do it. Her body didn’t betray her own judgment. Her legs weren’t trembling to fold into the seat just because he said so. Her hands didn’t want to fidget. She was freaking out and she was also fine.
Carly didn’t defy grown-ups and she didn’t hassle people, especially when she wanted them to do something. She wasn’t stupid. But she had exactly zero impulse to sit down at the moment. So she didn’t.
“Or you can just stand there, I guess,” Owen said, unruffled. “So you’re saying Jonathan just showed up and they drove off and left you here. With me.”
“She didn’t leave me here.”
“And yet here you are. Instead of her.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Tell me, how do you think Jonathan knew to be here? Are you suggesting I told him?”
She was surprised that she could be surprised today. She’d just taken it as a given that Owen would jump up and follow her out on the rescue mission. How did John know? “Maybe he followed you,” she said.
“Maybe he didn’t need to.”
“Marcelline didn’t tell him.”
“And you know that how?”
“She wouldn’t.”
“You’re a mind reader, too?”
“No, she just wouldn’t and she couldn’t have.”
“She didn’t make any calls? Send any texts? You were with her every second?”
Of course Marcelline could have. Carly knew very well that they hadn’t been together every second. She searched for the words to explain why she knew it hadn’t happened that way. Owen, helpfully, gave them to her:
“They’re playing you.”
Her spine pulled her straight to her full height. She looked down on this man. Huge. Dismissive. And completely wrong. She leaned in, her indignation burning up through her without catching on any checkpoints of embarrassment. “I don’t get played.”
He pulled back just a little. She marked it with a soaring recognition that it had been automatic for him. He couldn’t help it. He saw her.
The victory gave her the okay to sit down. Her legs were tired. This day was hard. She pulled out the chair and dropped into it. A girl with a ponytail under a logoed ball cap put a drink in front of her, and Carly took a long pull of the bright, cold fizz.
“You’re a regal little thing, aren’t you?” Owen said.
“She didn’t set this up.”
“You do realize I’ve been in this position before with the two of them?”
“I don’t know what happened before.”
“Right. You didn’t even know your times tables back then.”
“She didn’t do this. You have to help her.”
“But I don’t.”
“She’s a good person. It’s your fault if something happens.”
“I can promise that you’re testing the wrong string if you think I’m worried about it being my fault.”
“You don’t care if something bad happens to her?”
Owen blinked at her.
Carly raised her eyebrows to answer him.
He cleared his throat. “Everything about this looks like an ambush. They wind you up and send you in here. I bet you a million dollars we get a message soon telling us where to meet them.”
It was the only time anyone had said “bet you a million” that Carly believed there could be that actual bet, on his side at least.
“She’s only afraid of you. She thought you might take the painting or even hurt her.”
“Do you imagine that’s reassuring? Is there anything more dangerous than an animal that’s afraid?”
“Do you think I didn’t notice that you didn’t say you weren’t going to do any of those things?” Carly took a sip of her soda. The bubbles went all the way into her blood.
Owen played it like tennis. “And you think I should just take your assessment of the situation? You think it’s reasonable for me to forget what I know about Marcelline and her very bad judgment when it comes to this particular thing?”
“But you don’t know it. You just wonder about it. Besides, don’t you have to buy it no matter what? Isn’t that your job?”
“All I have to do is say that it didn’t work out. Do you imagine anyone’s going to call me a liar?”
Carly looked at him over the lid of her tilted cup. The sweetness was outpacing the wet in the third sip. She wasn’t thirsty anymore.
She sighed. “I can tell that you like being different from everyone else. It’s your thing. That’s always your advantage. Well, almost always. Sometimes it sucks being a unicorn, doesn’t it?”
The idea she was having came with a pause here that she only sort of understood, so she took another unwanted sip for something to do while it worked in her.
He shifted just a little in his chair and tilted his head like he was bored-listening. But he was listening just the same.
“But it’s not working out the way you planned. And because it’s me sitting here and not her, you’re mad. You’re saying she’s being tricky. And that she might be planning to hurt you. You’re saying that she’s doing what you would do in this situation.
“So you’re different when you want to be, but when you don’t want to do something, all of a sudden, everyone’s the same.”
“Did you just call me a chicken?”
“No. Nobody wants to get attacked. I don’t blame you. But I don’t count. I’m just a kid, not a fancy loner guy.” She waved her hand at his slick blue suit to punctuate the point. “It’s easy for me to see how you’re different from Marcelline. She’s not going to attack you. She just wants to go home.”
“And what does Jonathan want?”
Carly thought toward John. There wasn’t much there. “I don’t know.”
“So you’ve known Jonathan for years and Marcelline for a few days, but you understand her more than you understand him?”
Carly found herself a sudden fountain of hot tears, not because it was true, but because she was tired and because it was frustrating not to find the words to explain why it made sense. What she knew about John was muddled with memories from both before and after she knew how to really look and listen. Everything she knew about Marcelline, even about how tricky she could be, Carly had learned the right way.
Owen snatched napkins out of the chrome holder on the table and extended them to Carly. “Oh, for God’s sake.”
• • •
Owen stopped on the sidewalk in front of his car and snap-flexed his suit sleeves into place. Carly stood next to him, done with crying and wishing she hadn’t started. Embarrassing. She felt dumb and blotchy.
He pointed down the road, down the way Marcelline and John had raced away. “So you want me to just drive that way until something else comes up to give us a clue?”
“Yes.”
Owen sighed hugely. “If you’re right, you understand that it really makes more sense for me to just let one of them kill the other and buy the painting from the one who’s left. Then I can go home.”
“That won’t work.”
He looked down at her. She looked up at him, but the sun behind him made her squint. She looked back down the road.