"Okay... let me think about where to go," Shalma Hughes said with a faint smile.
"Good! Such a good girl..." he replied.
"..." Shalma fell silent again. Internally, she screamed, "Can he please stop talking to me like a child? I'm a twenty-four-year-old woman, for heaven's sake!" In the end, however, her screams remained purely internal. She met his words with silence.
The rest of the drive was incredibly quiet, as serene as a clear, meandering spring. She didn't ask how he had found her, nor how he had dealt with Hannah Hughes. She knew that even if she asked, he wouldn't give her a straight answer. Instead, he would just throw another question back at her—answering a question with a question was his signature tactic. Shalma was a lazy person at heart; since someone else was willing to put in the effort on her behalf, she wasn't about to waste her own energy worrying about it. Life shouldn't be too exhausting; it was better to just go with the flow.
