Grace Unchained

12: Going Home

She had Jason drop her at South Station, which was in the opposite direction from the Yasna townhouse. He'd put up the divider between the backseat and the front to give her privacy, so she couldn't see his reaction, but it took him a few minutes to turn around. She sighed with relief when he did. She wasn't ready to go back there yet. She wasn't ready to face Darius. Everything was jumbled up in her head, and she vacillated between feeling like the victim of a crime and feeling like she'd done something horribly, unforgivably wrong. She needed to organize her thoughts before she tried to explain anything to anyone. That meant that Kevin, who was undoubtedly on the phone with Yasna Group right now, would get to tell his side of things first, but there was nothing for it. If she had to talk about the incident now she'd just collapse into a shaking puddle, which was of no use to anyone, including herself.

She thanked Jason, who had rolled down the passenger's side window, from the curb.

"Are you all right?" he asked. Fuck no, she answered silently.

"I will be," she said out loud. "I just...there's something I have to do. Can you tell Darius...tell him that I—"

"I'll tell him," Jason interrupted, nodding comfortingly. "Do what you need to do." She felt inexplicably grateful for not having to explain herself to the driver.

"Thanks," she said, and then she watched him drive away.

Standing in front of the train station, she realized that her purse, along with her wallet and her credit cards and her ID were back in her locker at Yasna. She didn't even have the key to her apartment, a small studio in the North End that she barely saw but to sleep in. And she didn't want to go back there anyway. Yasna had that address. They might come looking for her there, and she wasn't ready to talk yet. She was scared, though she didn't want to admit it, because she had no idea what this meant for her job with them. She had to go somewhere else for a few hours, just to get her head straight.

Luckily, the standard Yasna field kit—as the girls called it, half-jokingly—included a wad of emergency cash sufficient to take care of pretty much any incidental needs she might have in between going out on an appointment and returning to headquarters. There was a company credit card, too, but she didn't want to use that. It would tell Darius exactly where she was going.

Grace wondered for a moment why she was so concerned about Darius knowing where she was—he'd never been anything but civil to her. He'd never threatened her in any way. On the contrary, he had all but asked her not to take the job, despite the fact that he'd been the one to offer it to her in the first place. Why was she suddenly ducking him like he was some street pimp she owed money?

The little voice was unexpectedly silent, which was somehow more ominous than the alternative.

Heading into the cavernous hall of South Station, she bought a commuter rail ticket and made it onto the 8:20 train just as the doors were closing.

The car she entered was empty but for an old woman reading a copy of the Boston Herald. Dropping into one of the cracked, patent leather seats, Grace suddenly felt exhausted. She had to fight not to fall asleep—she didn't want to miss her stop and end up in Worcester. Instead she looked out the heavy glass train window and watched the lights of the city roll away. Something inside of her relaxed for the first time since she'd left Marcus, or maybe even earlier.

Fifty minutes later she got off the train at Natick and walked to the house she'd grown up in. Her mother would have come and picked her up, if she'd called, but all she had was the Yasna phone and the idea of calling her mother on that felt...wrong somehow. She also didn't want Darius to know anything about her family, if she could avoid it. It was only a couple of miles, anyway, and the night wasn't too cold.