You'll Thank Me for This Nina Siegal (red white and royal blue hardcover .txt) 📖

the way something metal is sharp. Like the corner of a box made out of metal. She couldn’t see it, of course, because her back was to the tree, but when she felt around, it did seem like it was not something you find in nature. And it seemed to be tucked into a hole in the trunk of the tree.

She had to keep Martijn talking. “What are you saying, then? Are you telling me my dad was a spy? That he was a spy? You’re a liar. He was not like that.”

Karin had heard too much dumb stuff from too many people about her dad and Syria and the stupid war over there and what he was doing there and accusations that he worked for ISIS or for the CIA or whatever…It was enough. Her mom had told her to ignore it all. It was all a big lie. “You’re either a liar or you’re just an asshole.”

Even though Martijn was like some weird, crazy stranger now, he suddenly looked like he totally understood her. He looked like he was trying to tell her something. “I know it’s really hard to understand, Karin,” he said. “It will take a long time for you to really understand it. Maybe you never will.”

“I don’t want to hear any more,” she said, thinking now that she had to get his eyes off of her. She had to figure out what this sharp thing was behind her back. A metal box hidden in the tree. Could it actually be what he was searching for? “You’re just going to lie to me, like everyone else.”

“I need you to help me or else I’m going to get in a lot of trouble. The photographs your father took could exonerate me. They’ll show that we knew before the government knew, and that we tried to inform them. I need the photos or the negatives. If I don’t find them, I’ll be arrested. I might go to prison. I don’t know what will happen. They’ll definitely put my name in the paper and expose me as the one who paid off the jihadists. That’s why I want to tell you now, so you’ll hear it from me. Karin, I have been trying to find a way to tell you for a long time…”

“Tell me that my dad was a spy? I don’t even believe that. That pictures he took could save you? But they didn’t save him?”

“He wasn’t a spy, Karin,” said Martijn. “He was helping the government to get information. That was good. We needed to know. Your father was doing the kind of work he wanted to do—to help reveal the truth.”

“But the jihadists found out and that’s why they killed him?” she said.

“Not exactly,” said Martijn. “No.”

“Then what?”

“Your father’s work revealed something that the Dutch government didn’t really want to know. Something sensitive, that they didn’t want him to share with the public.”

Karin understood all of a sudden why her father had been so anxious for months before he was killed. How he couldn’t sleep, and she would hear him wandering around in the living room in the middle of the night. Maybe why he’d been drinking all the time. He’d told her that he was going back to Syria and that he had to “make something right.” Then he’d insisted on coming out here, to the forest, to photograph the mouflons one more time. It had seemed a little weird then—he hadn’t even been trying to sell his nature photographs to National Geographic anymore. But it was time they could be together, and alone, and that was what made it special.

Maybe even then, she thought, he’d known that if he went back someone would try to kill him. Maybe even then he’d thought it was the last time he would be able to share with Karin. Maybe he had wanted to get out here to bury something—could that be? Could it be that this sharp-edged box she could feel with just the tips of her fingers, in the hollow at the base of this tree, was what he had hidden? What Martijn was looking for?

“He told you the photos were here?” Karin said.

“He said he buried them in a place he loved.”

Karin thought this over. That was her father. She knew he was like that. He might say something like that, a kind of riddle.

She remembered what her father had told her that last day when they were here, in this park, on their last camping trip before he died. “Life gets too complicated sometimes,” he’d said. “You think you’re doing the right thing, but it turns out you’re on the wrong side. And then you have to find your way back.”

Karin looked at Martijn’s face and saw that he was paler than pale. He was a ghost. She figured it out. He had followed her here because he believed that her father had already told her where he buried the photographs. He thought she would lead him to this place. He had planned this all along. He had come on this dropping with her to…to…get it back. And now they were here, and without trying to—she was pretty sure now—she had actually found what he was searching for.

It was all so creepy and terrifying. Who had he been all this time? Did he ever love her mother? Did he ever want to be her stepdad? Or had all of this been an act for the last few years? Was everything about him just completely phony?

“You didn’t work for the government,” she said. “You had him killed, didn’t you? It was you.”

His pale face glowed in the dark, and he shook his head slowly. Something about him no longer looked like he felt bad about anything, or like he was trying to convince her of something.

“Why? Why isn’t anyone there at the campsite?” she asked. “I thought you said they were already tucked into their sleeping bags. Why isn’t anyone there yet?”

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