Last time on Sever, the book continues to try to push Rapist-chan’s uncle as the greatest ever.

I never have much of an appetite, and the safest things to eat in his kitchen are the apples, anyway, being that they’re the only things I recognize. They’re not the ultrabright green and red fruit I got used to in the mansion. They’re speckled, flawed, and mealy, the way I grew up thinking they should be.
I’m still not sure which way is more natural.

Let me help you here: apples aren’t natural.

Once you’ve done with that, mealy apples aren’t more natural than non-mealy, they’re just older. Considering apples store really well, they’re probably very old. The bright colors likely mean they were waxed, which is not natural in the sense apples do not grow it, but is in the sense that it’s fucking wax. The speckles and flaws probably mean nothing more than that the apples were sorted after harvest and the crappy looking ones went into the cheap bin he buys and the perfect one into the pricey bin for mansion owners.

But this is all secondary to the fact you can’t live on raw apples. Rhine apparently does not have an appetite at all because the apples shouldn’t be doing anything to quell that, and this means she’s slowly starving. Cooked apples would be an unhealthy diet but at least give her calories.

We’re told that after four days of occasional apples, she’s feeling better. This is presumably some sort of starvation-induced madness. She says she’ll leave.

“Did my nephew arrange for transportation?” he asks.
“No,” I say, tracing my finger around the rim of a mason jar filled with screws and grime. “That wasn’t part of the agreement.”
“So there was an agreement,” Reed says. “Doesn’t seem like it. Seems like you’re just making it up as you go.”
Story of my life. There’s no real way to counter that, so I just shrug. “I’ll be all right,” I say. “He knows there’s no reason to worry about me.”

Except we saw the horrorshow that was her last attempt to travel across the country, and also how easy it is if you have enough money for busfare. All Rapist-chan has to do is give her a bus ticket.

Uncle Perfect instead says that no, Rapist-chan is a sweetiepie:

“The fact that you’re here says he’s worried about you,” he says. “Doesn’t want you anywhere near his father, that much is clear.”

No, RHINE doesn’t want to be anywhere near and was prepared to crawl out of the hospital four days ago rather than stay at the mansion, which was his first offer. He has no problem with keeping the two together.

But Rhine is still being the charming housebird.

“Vaughn and I don’t exactly get along,” I say.

Because on some level, she knows this guy doesn’t care about the horrible things his brother’s done. So yes, she sincerely believes Vaughn has murdered people, and yes, he was torturing her for months. But no one cares, and it wouldn’t be cute to get into details like that, and what matters is being a cute conversationalist.

“Let me guess,” Reed says. “He tried to pluck out your eyes for science.” He says that last word, “science,” with such exaggerated passion that I laugh.
“Close,” I say.

Haha, he drove needles into her eyes!

For a brief moment, he actually acts interested in what’s really happened:

“It was no car accident, was it?” he says.

But questions bad, so she just asks what’s in the hidden shed, which turns out to not even be a secret, it’s just some plane he’s building. Rhine obligingly exposits that there are almost no planes and they’re just for the president and richest people like Evil Mad Scientist.

But since he answered her trivial question, she grudgingly explains his brother was torturing her for science.

“Doesn’t sound like something my nephew would allow,” Reed says. “Don’t get me wrong, the poor boy is as oblivious as a rabbit on a lion reserve, but still.

True, he doesn’t like to share his property and this time his dad wasn’t just borrowing her, he was stealing her.

Animal reserves are a thing of the past, but somehow this comparison feels right.

No, they’re not. You have a lot of very rich people who remember how the world used to be and a collapsing environment, there’d be people trying to keep animals alive.

Rhine promptly defends Rapist-chan because the poor baby didn’t know, and then she told him and he refused to believe her, which is a defense of how great he is.

So we’ve decided it’s best to”—I pause, looking for the right words—“part ways.

I guess this is sort of lying but the whole thing seems to be presented entirely too straight. Rhine mentions to herself that also there’s the Gabriel issue as if she isn’t lying, just not giving all her reasons.

Reed asks, “Then, why, doll, are you still wearing his ring?”

See, he’s got no issues with asking questions, it just took him a while to figure out what to bother with.

Later Rhine lies in the yard and imagining the mansion again because it was so great.

Something rustles nearby and I turn my head, watching the grass move. I get the terrible sense that it’s trying to warn me.
I sit up and hold my breath, trying to listen. But a gust of wind is rolling through. I think it’s saying my name. No, that voice didn’t belong to the wind, though it would make more sense than the truth.
“Rhine?”
I lean back on my arms, tilt my head all the way to see the figure standing behind me.
“Hi,” I say.
The moon is full and beaming like a halo behind his head. His curls are his dark crown. He could be a sort of prince.
“Hi,” Linden says. “Can I sit?”

It was warning her! RUN RHINE NOT EVEN YOU DESERVE THIS RUUUUUN!

Linden-chan is here to say his dad showing up earlier wasn’t his fault, but also he wants to explain his dad is a great guy who was just doing it out of concern for him.

“My uncle called me this afternoon,” he says.
“I didn’t know you even had a phone,” I say.

That’s because you’re an idiot, Rhine. Of course they had nice things.

Somehow this feels like a violation, a reminder that while Linden treated me as an equal during our marriage, that was only part of the illusion. I was always a prisoner.

YES! He was your captor! He may have talked to you like an equal, mostly because you kept the conversation away from anything that’d have shattered that delusion, but he kept you locked up!

Linden-chan is here to say he’s so super worried about her walking off with no plan.

“What are you going to do for money? Transportation? Food? Where will you sleep?”

All concerns she only has due to the kidnapping. But no, Rhine doesn’t want to burden Rapist-chan with helping her further.

Rhine can tell he wants to ask her something, so she begs him to tell.

There’s no hostility in his eyes. There’s no kindness, either. There’s nothing but green. “That night, at the New Year’s party, you said you loved me. Did you mean that?”
I stare at him a long time. Until his face disappears, and he’s just a shadow.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “If I did, it wasn’t enough to make me stay.”

She does not say she was kidnapped and had no choice, but then again, she doesn’t need to. The only reason she ever had to lie was that he kidnapped her.

He says she should stay longer to Give me a chance to figure something out. And when she tries to say she doesn’t want more from him, says that Cecily will be all mad so “Then think of it as doing me a favor

So she agrees to stay another few days.

Never mind that there’s an actual solution here if he’s just worried about her, which is buying her a bus ticket.

The last time I saw him, he was brimming with words and thoughts, anger and intensity. I could feel them humming inside him. But now they’re all gone. I wonder where he put them. I wonder if he shouted them into the orange grove with the supposed ashes of his dead wife and child.

When people don’t really care in the first place, their feelings don’t last. No matter how many excuses you try to make for him, he doesn’t care.

He tells her he packed a sweater for her, because he’s so considerate and great.

“It wasn’t all a lie, Linden,” I burst out when he’s a few yards away. My voice is weak, getting smaller with each word. “Not everything. Not all of it.”
He climbs into the backseat, giving no indication that he believes me.

Stop justifying yourself to a kidnapping rapist.