“Well, you certainly won’t ask it in eternity, but it does seem to define life here on earth.” He poured himself a cup of coffee (black, no sugar, all yuck) and settled into the stool beside her. “Where is Aggie, by the way?”
“In the backyard, probably digging up my grass. We’re reading the Beatrix Potter books, and now she has her heart set on planting a vegetable garden this spring. Not because she has any particular fondness for vegetables, mind you. This is planned strictly as a lure for bunnies named Flopsy, Mopsy, and Peter, puddle ducks called Jemima, and other talking wildlife of the English countryside.”
“She does know we’re not in England, right?”
“I’ve been trying to break it to her gently.”
He nuzzled her neck. She giggled and kissed his forehead.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“Sorry. I’ll put it away.”
“I don’t care if you read the paper, Lex. I just wondered what you were reading about.”
“Oh, the whole thing about Senator Bennett. I don’t believe all this speculation. Will he or won’t he recommend the bill from the subcommittee? Of course, he won’t.”
Matt chuckled. “I dare say, Alexandra, that none of the political analysts I’ve heard seem half as sure of their opinions as you are of yours.”
“Well, think about it.” She held her palms out side by side, like a scale. “Bennett was elected by a certain constituency to perform a specific function by acting and voting a certain way. This is an extreme departure from all of that, and he is never going to make that leap.”
“He has made several statements to the effect that his feelings about this particular subject may have changed, that some of the activists and lobbyists had presented him with particularly convincing arguments.”
“Regardless of his personal feelings at this point, he cannot write the recommendation. If he did, he would have to redefine his entire political career in order to get reelected, and he simply hasn’t the creativity for that. If he writes it, it’s over for him. Then what would he do with his life?” Alex tsked and shook her head. “No, the man I met was a consummate politician, not a moralist, and he never had the courage of his own convictions, let alone those of activists, who are much more passionate about issues than any politician can be.”
Matt’s coffee stopped abruptly halfway between the buffet and his mouth. “You’ve met him?”
A stab of fear convicted Alex for her “loose lips”—Matt was one thing, but what if she’d made the same comment during her Wednesday morning kaffeeklatsch? She waved her hand to dismiss the subject. “In another life.”
He set his mug down and peered at her a moment. “If you don’t mind, I might like to chat a bit about that other life of yours.” It was interesting how he said it. He didn’t push, but he was serious.
Alex peered down into her cup of sweetened café au lait and thought a moment. She trusted him as much as she could anyone. She also recognized that keeping up so many walls between them would eventually chase him away. In the past couple of months, she’d made a lot of progress toward openness with him. They talked at length about her family and the deaths of her parents. She went to the Seder his parents hosted at their home in Brentwood. She marked their first anniversary with gusto, even being grateful and happy—instead of freaked out—when he gave her a rather expensive necklace to mark the occasion, something she’d never taken off since. She could do this too.
She drew in a deep breath but tried hard not to be obvious about it. “I had to testify before a Senate subcommittee about four years ago. His office set up the particulars, and I met him, briefly, through that process.”
“Huh.”
“That was right before I left the FBI. I had to brief the committee on an operation I’d worked in Shangku with Interpol. It ended badly, and everyone from Washington to the U.N., of course, had to be involved in oversight.”
“You were in the FBI,” he said softly, still taking it in. “That actually makes a lot of sense, looking back on what you have told me.”
“I’m sorry I never told you before. I don’t know why, anymore, that I felt like I couldn’t.”
“Does the FBI usually work with Interpol though? I thought they mostly handle domestic crime.”
“There was a lot of domestic crime involved, trust me. It was—”
“Human trafficking? Specifically, I’m guessing, forced prostitution.”
Alex was surprised. “How did you figure that?”
He shrugged. “Just something you said a year ago. On our first date.”
She laughed. “You should’ve been in the FBI.”
“Yeah, I’ve got enough brain cells to rub together to keep warm. But you met—profiled, I guess—this politician four years ago, and you can predict the outcome of this current debate with more confidence than all the political analysts in the country.”
“Well, I was trained to know what I needed to know about people within a few minutes of meeting them.”
“But your arguments are thought out, elegant, and convincing. In this relationship, sweetheart, you are definitely the smart one.”
Alex cringed.
“What’s wrong?”
“My dad always used to say that.”
Matthew nodded. Alex had told him how she and her late father hadn’t gotten along. “Is it a bad thing to be smart?”
“Whenever I’d disagree with him, he’d say, ‘So you’re the smart one.’ All sarcastic, you know. See, I graduated high school at sixteen and college at nineteen. At twenty-two, when most people are getting their bachelor’s, I was passing the bar. Then I was at the top of my class at Quantico. My dad greeted every accomplishment with the words, ‘Watch out, honey. You’re too smart for your own good.’”
“Oh, sweetie… I’m sorry about that, but please don’t let it get to you now. He was probably insecure about you being so bright and having so many of your own opinions. Some of the most macho men in this world feel threatened by women who have views as strong as yours.”
He was trying to lighten the mood, and Alex giggled a bit even as she brushed away a few tears. “I wouldn’t let it bother me now, except he was right.”
“What are you talking about?”
As hard as she’d been trying to open up, the memories of that horrible night shut her right back up tight. “I can’t tell the story now. I can’t.”
“That’s okay. Can you tell me what’s wrong without telling me the details?”
Tears streamed down Alex’s face while she tiptoed around all the memories and chose each word carefully. “I was arrogant, and my boss warned me too. But I was gonna save the world, you know, and I was gonna do it all by myself if I had to, because I was the only one smart enough and brave enough. I made a huge mistake. Just a few words, but it was over. I should’ve died, but a little girl died instead.”
She saw the light of understanding spread over his face. “You lived through your own execution. Just like Dostoevsky. And just like him, you lost something in the process.”
She nodded.
“But you gained something, too.”
“I took something she had. For a poor little girl, she was so rich, and I wanted—needed—what she had.”
“And you also live with that.”
“It makes it possible to live. But it’s still hard.”
His voice was soft but full of passion and the type of knowledge that came only from experience. “Life is always hard, my love. That’s what it is, and we live for the challenges. If we don’t have them, we invent them out of our prosperous nothingness. We are born to grow and do big things, not sit on our butts our whole lives, to receive Grace and let it birth something new in our hearts. We are born to run with Grace, to take it into every corner of the world. But you can’t receive Grace without guilt, without death. You can’t live again if you don’t die first. There’s no room for you to receive Grace if there’s nothing for it to replace.”
“But she died for my mistake, and I lived.”
He beamed into her face and held it, caressed it with both of his hands. “Am I selfish if I say that I’m glad you did?”
She sobbed then. She couldn’t help it. And he pulled her into his arms and hid her against his chest until the sobs faded and all the tears ran dry.
* * *
At night, curled up in bed, Alexandra lay awake and thought about the conversation she’d had with Matthew. He knew pretty much everything now. Almost. A lot of the details of the story were still missing, of course, but he knew that, and he seemed cool with it. Besides, a lot of those details were still, at least sort of, on a need-to-know, and there was nothing really in their relationship that put him on the list of people who needed to know. Not really.
She should be sleeping like a baby. She was holding nothing back. Except…
“Your name,” whispered that still, small voice.
He knows my name. My name is Alexandra Adelaide, legally, rightfully, and no one can say any different.
But some know different.
That’s not my name anymore.
Uh-huh.
I can’t tell him. That person is dead.
Not to Me. And not to him.
I can’t tell him.
Why not?
That was the question. If she was going to be honest with herself (which she wasn’t, really), she didn’t have a good answer. She knew the answer, but it wasn’t a good one.
She threw herself onto her back, sighed loudly, and stared at the ceiling.
No one ever had advised against telling her boyfriend her name. She wasn’t in witness protection, and the people who hunted for Aglaya had never known Alex’s birth name. She wouldn’t broadcast it, but telling someone with whom she was in a long-term serious relationship depended on her professional discretion.
Telling Matt didn’t violate her discretion. He was trustworthy. If she told him in confidence, no one else would even know that he knew. She trusted him with her life and her daughter. Her name seemed a small thing.
And it was a small thing.
Except it wasn’t.
She knew Matthew Gold well enough to know that her name (and more importantly, her ability to trust him with it) wasn’t a small thing to him.
They’d been together in an exclusive relationship for over a year, and they’d said “I love you” so long ago. She babysat his nieces and nephews, knew his whole family, and took groceries and prescriptions to his grandmother every few weeks. He was the one who replaced her garbage disposal, reset her alarm system and fixed all the little things that went wrong around her house. She’d lost track of the number of times they kissed and the number of times he held her while she cried and the number of times they tore their bodies away from each other so they didn’t go farther than they wanted.
And somewhere in all those seconds that made up all those moments that turned into all those days that added up to over a year of her life—the most magnificent, crazy, passionate, scary, incredible year of her life… there must have been a moment when it had been time to say, “By the way, I haven’t always been Alexandra Adelaide,” and she had missed it.
She twisted wads of her sheets around her fists and gritted her teeth. If she told him now, he’d never forgive her.
Too late. That was the reason. A bad reason, because it all boiled down to this: she was afraid.
But that part she knew.
Matthew Gold had been a surprise to her in many ways. He had turned out to be so very different—or so much more—than she profiled when she saw him in the children’s department of the Sunset Coast Department Store. And he loved her so much.
Fear, on the other hand, came as no surprise to her at all. She’d always been afraid, and she always would be. She was afraid of losing Matt, Aggie, and the wonderful dreamlike life she had on Orange Grove Avenue. Of having another terrible night like the one when she had watched Free Bird fall from the proverbial sky. Of the man known as Ivanovich and the man formerly known as Secretary Tokan. Of the dark and the light. She was afraid of never being able to trust, never having peace.
In short, of everything.
“What’s your boss’s name?” Beck quizzed from the other side of the screen as the hairdresser styled her expertly dyed and curled auburn hair in a professional-looking “updo” that Aili couldn’t have named if her life depended on it.
“Mr. William Rosman,” Aili answered.
“What business is he in?”
“Import-export.”
“What is he doing in Shangku?”
“Business.” Contacts made Aili’s eyes blue. Makeup made her cheeks look thinner and rosier and her eyes wider. Designer, wire-rimmed spectacles made the alterations to her face less obvious.
“What kind of business?”
“Mr. Rosman is a discreet but adventurous man who likes to spread his considerable wealth to those who understand his values.” In this game, sometimes the best answer was a deflection.
“How long have you worked for him?”
“Since I was twelve.”
“What does your boss like?”
“Young redheads.” And that was what all the changes to Aili’s appearance were about. A disguise, per se, wasn’t really necessary because Ivanovich didn’t know Aili, but they wanted her to resemble the young girl they needed to locate.
“Does he take good care of other people’s property?” Agent Beck asked her.
“The best.” Aili climbed into a tailored oxford shirt, a designer suit, and thousand-dollar high-heeled pumps. Mr. Rosman was very rich.
“Is that why you still work for him?”
“Mr. Rosman is the best boss anyone could have. And he’s great to do business with. He never goes back on a deal.” She stepped from behind the screen and looked Beck in the eye; he gave her disguise a nod.
“When does he need the merchandise and where should it be delivered?”
“He’ll send me back in his car a week from Friday, at seven thirty p.m. It will be available for pickup the next morning at the Kingdom Hotel.”
“What is he offering?”
“Mr. Rosman wants freedom in the use of the merchandise for the time he rents it and is prepared to pay ten times the usual fee, half up front.”
“And, of course, he’ll tell you the usual fee is at least twice what we already know. Be savvy about the bargaining, or he’ll get suspicious that you’re too placating. But don’t act like you know too much. If you’re too exact on his fees, he’ll suspect that you’ve been watching him somehow, and even if he believes you’re doing it to protect your boss’s interests, he won’t trust you with his business, let alone this girl.”
“I could say something like, ‘I’m making you a generous offer, Mr. Ivanovich. You wouldn’t be trying to cheat me, would you?’”
“That’s good, Agent. But take yourself out of it, you know. ‘Mr. Rosman is making you an offer. You wouldn’t cheat Mr. Rosman.’ Little girls who get constantly raped don’t tend to have the healthiest self-image, and Alice Carroll wouldn’t still be working for her abuser if she were a departure from that stereotype. He controls everything about her. All of her confidence is invested in this man, all of her self-worth is in pleasing him. And it wouldn’t hurt to show a modicum of jealousy toward the girls. Not enough to make him worry about the safety of his ‘property,’ but enough to make her back story convincing. Alice is coming to Ivanovich because she can’t please Mr. Rosman in that way now that she’s an adult. And that would sting for someone who is still so dependent on her molester.”
“That’s a good point. I’ll incorporate that into my cover.”
“And, of course, you have to be sure he introduces you to the right girl.”
Aili sighed and rolled her eyes. “Of course, Beck.”
“Don’t take it lightly. If you give a single piece of the message to the wrong girl, you’re dead. And probably the baby too. He can’t afford to keep that kid aroun
d if he realizes anyone knows it exists.”
“It,” Aili repeated.
“Well, I don’t know what it is.”
“Still. He or she.”
He stared at her a moment, then nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re right.”
“Beck,” she said, suddenly, “what if the baby’s a girl? And what if she’s pretty?”
“Then we will get her out before any of that can happen. Now tell me what the mother looks like.”
“Five-foot-tall, 105 pounds. Long, auburn curls. Thin, rosy cheeks. Small, upturned nose. Sharp blue eyes. And she smiles. She always smiles.”
Beck nodded at her response, then shook his head. “The smile should be enough to tell her apart.”
She swallowed hard. “You would think.”
Chapter Seven
It was happening. She was losing him. For fifteen months, things had been great, then all of a sudden, a couple weeks ago, he started to act distracted and agitated. And it got worse as the days passed. When she asked him if he was okay, he’d say, “I’m just busy.”
“With what?” she wanted to know. That kind of vague deflection wasn’t like him at all.
“I’m working on something. We’ll talk about it soon.”
Something told her it wasn’t something exactly happy, and part of her wanted to know so badly, even if it was something terrible, because waiting was no good. Jump right into the cold lake full body. Rip the bandage off all at once. Get it over with, and all that jazz.
But another part of her was too afraid to push too hard about anything. The last time she had pushed too hard on something, she’d scheduled her own execution.
The scared part won like it always did with her, and she waited. And the fear grew and bled over into other things. She looked over her shoulder at the supermarket. She drew a firearm when the mail carrier stepped onto her porch. She woke at night whenever a car backfired on the boulevard off Orange Grove Avenue.
Matt and Alex still had dates, family dates, like always, little Aglaya happily in tow. They still sat together in church. They still even kissed sometimes, and he was still the same loving, supportive, affectionate, hands-on daddy figure to Aglaya. But it wasn’t the same. He and Alex didn’t talk quite like they used to do before he’d started working on the mystery project. And he always seemed to be rushing off to work on whatever-it-was.
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