“I don’t,” he shrugs, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. “Those are based on his movements for the week he’s been here. Obviously they’re not much more than guesses, but I think we’ve got some solid starting points.”
“Have you been tracking him?” I say, then turn toward him in alarm. “Jesus, you didn’t put a tracker or something on his—”
“No,” he laughs, and flashes me a grin. “Though I could, if you wanted. It’s not hard.”
“Please don’t.”
“These days you don’t even have to know the right people,” he goes on, like I said nothing. “They market them to civilians who lose their keys, and I’m told that just about anyone can strip the security features.”
I take a deep breath and close my eyes, shivering a little in the cool air blasting from the vents.
“Silas,” I say. “Don’t stalk my ex-fiancé.”
“If you insist,” he says, and lets it drop.
I peruse the schedule once more, simultaneously delighted and… not horrified, but taken aback. On the one hand, I’m a little surprised that Silas is capable of this much planning, forethought, and care. On the other hand, this is all in the service of emotionally manipulating someone else, and even though I’m pretty sure that Evan is evil and deserves whatever we do to him, that’s weird.
I feel a little like I’m looking at some kind of battle plan. Like each coffee date is a sniper lookout, each dinner a tank rolling through town, the whole thing laid out with a precision and directness that make me surprised it doesn’t read 0600: Caffeine Duty.
“Why do you hate him?” I finally ask.
Silas is quiet for a moment too long, staring out the windshield as he drives. I wait.
“Because he’s a dick,” he says.
I don’t say anything, just watch him. He licks his lips. His hands tighten on the steering wheel, his forearms flexing under the soft reddish-brown hairs, the scattered almost-freckles. The white spots of a few old scars.
“We were in Afghanistan together,” he goes on, after a moment, eyes locked on the road. “And Meckler… was a dick. Did the bare minimum, like was above work. He’d steal shit out of care packages from back home. He’d find pictures of other guys’ wives and girlfriends and look at them.”
“Ah.”
Silas clears his throat. “Those pictures.”
“I see,” I say, definitely not blushing. I don’t ask whether Silas ever got pictures or who they might have been from, because I have no interest whatsoever in knowing.
“Nobody was sorry that he didn’t re-enlist. He was an asshole who always got away with it, you know?”
“And that’s why you made me a very nicely formatted itinerary and suggested a tracking device,” I say. “Because he took your peanut butter cups and looked at naked pictures he wasn’t supposed to?”
“Levi’s mom made me hand pies sometimes,” he says. “And she’d have to ship them special, in a cooler, and pay extra for two-day delivery, and he stole three. Three. I didn’t mind sharing, but the bastard stole them and then lied to me about it with crumbs on his face.”
His hands get tighter on the steering wheel, tight enough that his biceps bunch beneath the sleeves of his t-shirt. His face looks like a mask. I’m not even sure he’s seeing the road.
“And,” he starts, after a pause, his voice hard. “A couple years after I got out, another buddy of mine, someone we’d served with… died. Michael Hernandez. And since Hernandez and I..” Silas trails off again, staring ahead like he’s made of stone. “It fell to me to make those calls,” he finally says.
He swallows convulsively, the cords in his neck standing out.
“And when I told Meckler, he just snorted and said he was surprised that Hernandez had lasted this long.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, my stomach clenching, my head spinning.
Did that happen when I knew Evan? When we were dating? Was it before? I don’t want to believe it of someone I agreed to marry, but I do. I believe every word.
“And he wouldn’t let me post my eulogy to our Facebook group,” Silas goes on, the words coming faster now. “He ran it—runs it, I guess, I left—and after the funeral I tried to post and that fucking bastard deleted it because he said it didn’t honor the spirit of the other fallen warriors, and I know how fucking petty it sounds to complain about Facebook bullshit, but—”
He exhales hard, pushes a hand through his hair.
“But there it is. I’m still pissed.”