Homewrecker

66 - 𝓫𝓻𝓾𝓽𝓪𝓵

The longer I sat there, perched on the edge of the cinderblock steps in front of his camper, the stronger I felt in my decision to be there that night, waiting for him and adorned in the athletic clothes I found in a department store with Andi the other week when we were supposed to be looking for wedding shoes, the box of the running shoes I was wearing right then tucked under my arm as I lied to her, commenting that I wanted to start working out. Which I had, but not because I wanted to be in shape or rival the size of Ethan's biceps, but because I knew I might need the extra upper body strength, although I wasn't sure how much good ten days did.

I started jogging, timing how fast I could run, how many miles in how many minutes, and I started running through the stretches of pine trees around the lake house, trying to increase my agility and how fast it took me to get up if I fell, something that always seemed to happen to any Final Girl running through the woods from a deranged murderer. I even purchased one of the shirts with sleeves that went down over my wrist and looped around my thumb so the twigs and brush wouldn't pierce as easily through to my palms.

My hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail that ached against the back of my head, but I wanted to see if I needed to, and I had a plan for it inside of his camper if he let me in whenever he got home. The car keys I had taken from Andi were in one of my pockets, the right one, and I put a small cut of scotch tape over the panic button in case I needed it to find it in the dark.

My phone was in my other pocket, already recording because I didn't want him to get suspicious, and there was a pocketknife in my bra against the underwire. I had been testing the audio on my phone, recording random conversations and listening to how degraded they were, learning how to get the clearest quality.

For the past several days, I had been watching self-defense videos on YouTube, learning how to plant my feet on the ground and how to curl my fists into a punch, where the weakness were on the human body and how to use your own to inflict the most damage. It wasn't like I was suddenly now completely and physically competent in defending myself, but I had memorized the basics in between running wedding errands for Jason and Kimberly.

I left a note on the kitchen counter, writing that there had been a call-in at Starbright and I left to go pick up an extra shift. Andi didn't work that night, but if something happened and I wasn't home the next morning, they would know I had never been there. They would follow the GPS on the car I took from Andi to where it was parked in front of Kingston's camper.

While I had been waiting for him, I touched the outside of his camper. I touched the door, making sure that my fingers and palms were pressed carefully and evenly against it, then the windows and the ashtray on the cinderblocks. I even spit in it just in case. I looked at where my trailer had been just across from his, the space now bare and the metal recovered, but the dirt underneath was still exposed and grass hadn't grown back.

Pieces of debris were still scattered, fragments of my flowerpots and glinting chips of glass. Some of my gardening equipment was still there, the weed killer and the shovel, still tossed in with the downed trees in the woods. I went over and grabbed them while I waited, threw back over where my trailer had been, deciding they might be useful.

I could burn his eyes and give him cancer at the same time.

I sighed, leaning against the roughness of the cinderblocks. It wasn't like that was something I wanted—it sounded good in theory, to think of the things I was planning and how I would get out of whatever he thought of—but that wasn't what I was there. I was there to coax a confession out of him about my mother, maybe ask him some of the questions I had been ruminating on for the past few weeks, and then leave to take the recording to the police.