You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

see something on the trail behind her. Nothing there. Convinced again that it was her mind playing tricks on her, she continued hiking, this time walking a little faster than before.

“Up here,” she heard, and this time the voice was as clear as a bell. She hadn’t been imagining it. “Karin!” came the shout. She looked up, toward the top of the sandy embankment to her left. There, looming over her, was the figure of a man.

“Don’t be afraid, Karin,” said the voice, which she now realized belonged to her stepfather. “It’s just me, Martijn. Wait right there. I’m coming down to get you.”

Chapter 20Perfectly Reasonable Explanations

Grace had driven this route so many times, with extreme leisure, while listening to a podcast or one of her favorite Stevie Wonder albums, cracking open the window for a bit of fresh air and just coasting.

But this time she sat upright on the edge of her seat, with nothing on but the GPS man, entirely focused on the road, and no distractions, to get there as quickly as possible. The highway stretched out in front of her like an Alfred Hitchcock circle that twisted into infinity. It was so close, and yet it seemed like she would never get there. No matter how hard she stepped on the gas pedal or how much her mind willed her to get there faster, it would still take as much time as it would take.

She was way past the speed limit and aware that if she got too out of control she’d risk getting stopped for a ticket—time she definitely couldn’t spare at all. Every second was space, the space between herself and Karin. How would Grace be able to find her now, in the dark, in the sprawling Veluwe, without a phone?

Grace had done her best to convince herself that nothing was the matter, that there must be some “perfectly reasonable explanation” for the fact that Karin’s T-shirt had blood on it, that it was found in the woods, and that the Scout leaders on her trip had not seen her. And a perfectly reasonable explanation for Martijn’s refusal to pick up the phone, even though she had tried calling him now at least a dozen times. And a perfectly reasonable explanation for why he had those photos and why he had that file and why he had been behaving aggressively toward her and why their marriage seemed to be built on a foundation of confusion and lies.

The perfectly reasonable explanation completely eluded her—that’s what it was. These things might not all be connected, but then again they might. And the perfectly reasonable explanation might encompass all of them at once. Or it might not. Truth be told, the perfectly reasonable explanation might just be that she was going mad. That all of these factors tying her stomach up in knots and making her head feel like it was about to burst a blood vessel were figments of her imagination and signs of her highly troubled mind.

If that was the case, she was okay with it. In fact, that would be good news. Because that would just mean that she would be diagnosed with something and she would get the help she needed, and that everything else in the world was all right. That Karin, most of all, was all right.

As she drove, she kept dialing him again and again, glancing over at the phone briefly and trying not to crash the car in the process. It just rang and rang and rang and rang. Why?? How idiotic it had been, how utterly stupid of her, to let Martijn go as a supervisor today, of all days, instead of just going herself. She’d wanted to trust him—she’d tried to trust him, beyond how much she actually trusted him—and that was why. But she needed to trust herself. She needed to trust only what she could trust.

As she pressed the gas pedal to the floor, trying to rev the engine of her stupid, ancient urban secondhand sedan, she wondered if the answer to all of her questions was just that: that she’d gone mad. What kind of madness was it? Was it schizophrenia, manic depression? Could it be post-traumatic stress disorder? She had experienced trauma. Or was it generalized anxiety—that was a thing, wasn’t it?

The car’s GPS man was informing her in his polite British accent that she was supposed to get off the expressway here.

“In two hundred meters, merge into the right lane and take the next exit,” he said. Grace was doing her best to be compliant and follow orders, but she knew this wasn’t the right exit. She steamed on straight ahead. The voice interjected a few moments later, “In eighty meters, turn right. In fifty meters, turn right.” The Brit became increasingly insistent—“Turn right here. Turn right here”—but Grace ignored the turn, speeding off, and then veered into the left lane to pass a slow-moving truck ahead of her.

The caller lived in Wolfheze, a small town off a long roadway called the Parallelweg. Grace remembered that it was somewhere near that private golf course, not far from Ede.

Grace had been there exactly once, when she and Pieter had had a weird Sunday outing to the town, with lots of cameras in tow, because he thought the town might be a good subject for a photo documentary project. The place housed a nineteenth-century insane asylum, and later the town had added a home for the blind. It had some important World War II history, but she couldn’t remember that part of the story.

How ironic that she was driving herself to an insane asylum. These days they would call it a “residential care setting for the mentally disabled,” or maybe there was an even more “woke” expression for it now. Pieter had wanted to shoot there, but they had felt so strange walking through it, like they had arrived at the setting of The Shining or something. Pieter had looked up and pointed