Free The Girl in the Wall by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Daphne Benedis-Grab Page B

could I tell them that? Yet if I don’t, someone, possibly me, will be shot. I feel like my head is going to split open.
    “What’s going on?” he asks.
    I don’t want to tell him. It’s enough that I’ve burdened him with the phone when I barely even know the guy. Though on the other hand, I’m not sure I can handle it alone. I sit up, as always careful to keep my arm with the phone turned in.
    “You’re scaring me.” Hudson is looking at my face closely and he rests his hands on top of mine. For whatever it’s worth, in this moment he really does know me.
    I take a deep breath and glance around to make sure no agents are nearby. “I know where Ariel is.”
    Hudson gives out a low whistle and sits back. “Okay,” he says slowly. “That’s a lot of information to have.”
    “Too much. I feel like I have to choose between Ariel or one of the hostages, maybe even me, and I just can’t decide because—”
    Hudson pats my hand softly and I realize I am talking a mile a minute and my face is heating up.
    I take another deep breath. “If I tell them where she is, who knows what they’ll do to her,” I say it a bit more calmly, but then I am shocked when tears prick my eyes. “But if I say nothing, I’ve killed someone else.”
    “Not true. You’re not killing anyone. The people with the guns are doing that.”
    “I know, but—”
    He raises a hand to cut me off. “I know what you mean. But you can’t think about it like that because it’s not what’s actually happening. They’re going to kill someone at midnight and you have no say in that. All you have is some information, nothing more. All the choices are theirs. They might say they’d only take Ariel, or only shoot one of us, but they have all the power. They can kill anyone at anytime and whatever you say or don’t say won’t change that.”
    He’s right and thinking about it this way is both better and worse. But the question is still there. “So do I tell them or not?”
    I want him to make this choice for me, to take it out of my hands, though I know him well enough now to know he won’t.
    “What do you think?” he asks.
    I take a moment to picture what would happen if I tell them where Ariel is. Agents would crawl into the tunnels, the walls would echo with their footsteps as they hunted Ariel. She would hear them, try to run, to hide, but there would be no escape. She would be trapped and they would find her. And then what would they do with her, now that her dad, the only one who could get the company money—at least as far as I know—is dead? I don’t want to know the answer to that question.
    Ariel was the one who stayed up with me all night long the night I was seven and our cat Snickerdoodle got killed by a neighbor’s dog. She called me twenty times a day during the two-week period when my mom left my dad, and then called me every Tuesday for six months after so I could make fun of all the stuff that happened in our family therapy sessions. Yeah, she hates me and has made me miserable for the past nine months and four days. But I can’t do this to her. I just can’t.
    “I’m not turning her in.” There is space in my chest as I say the words, an opening. I made the right choice. And then I realize something else. “But I can’t just sit around waiting for them to execute someone. Or just playing with this stupid phone all night, hoping I get lucky with it.”
    Hudson nods. “We need to do a little brush-busting.”
    “What?”
    “It’s a hunting term for when the animal sees you and ruins your shot before you can take it.”
    I wrinkle my nose. “You hunt? That’s so mean.”
    He gives me a withering stare. “We hunt for meat. And we use a lot more of the animal than you do when you pick up a steak at the grocery store.”
    I think about it for a moment. “Okay, you’ve shamed me with my meat from the supermarket,” I say. “I’m with you. Let’s do a little brush-busting.”
    He laughs. “It sounds