When I finished, I flopped back onto his easy chair with so much force that the footrest flipped up, and suddenly I was flat on my back and looking at the ceiling.
I was so exhausted, I didn’t even try to fight it. I took a deep breath, hearing Nick say breathe in my ear, and focused on a single gauzy cobweb dangling from the heating vent in the ceiling.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without him,” I said, reaching out for another peanut. “I never ever thought I’d say that.”
Mr. Bozeman chuckled, and I heard what sounded like him smoothing the plastic candy bag on his leg. I lifted my head from the La-Z-Boy and looked at him. I’d eaten the last one, and now he was folding the empty bag into a neat strip, aligning it vertically between his thumbs. He brought it to his lips and tried to blow a note, the way I’d seen people do with bear grass. It didn’t work on the first try. “If there’s one thing I can tell you for sure, my dear,” he said, repositioning his thumbs relative to the plastic, “it’s that you’re going to be OK. One way or another, it’ll all work out fine. You know what Priscilla and I call you?”
I shook my head and swallowed the last of the foamy sweet goodness. Priscilla placed the conversation heart in his lap. “Our girl,” he said and winked. “Our girl can do anything, can’t she?” he said to Priscilla, glancing at me once more. “Our girl is going to be OK,” he said, then he brought the whistle to his lips once more, and an unhappy honking filled the room.
When I got back to my apartment, I found Mr. Bozeman’s faith in me hadn’t been enough to keep me cheerful for very long. I shoved my suitcase through the door and placed Nick’s duffel on top of it. I kicked off my shoes and headed for the kitchen, where I opened the fridge to find a lone carton of sesame noodles.
I took a fork from the drying rack. I shut the door and leaned against the fridge as I jammed a forkful of cold noodles into my mouth. Sinking down, I tucked into a ball on the floor, as all sorts of dirty poetry rained down around me. How strange that only a handful of days ago I’d been here with him and felt so happy. And now I was here without him and felt so utterly adrift. As I plucked the word please from my hair, I heard a key slide into the deadbolt. For one insane, nonsensical, lovesick second I thought, It’s him, he’s come back to me. But before my heart could swell to bursting, the dream fizzled away, and I heard the click-clack of crutches and Roxie saying, “It’s not a race, Ruthie. Slow and steady, OK?”
The click-clacks of Ruth’s crutches got closer. I heard Roxie say, “Why the hell is there a door in the hallway?”
“Stella?” said Ruth, and the click-clacks sped up before coming to an abrupt halt.
Behind her, Roxie’s fresh and perfectly made-up face appeared. “Uh-oh.”
I sniffed hard, and it made a sucking sound in my ears.
“Did you get it?” Ruth asked softly.
I nodded, and a noodle slipped out of my mouth. I sucked it up, and my lips began to tremble again. Using the sleeve of my hoodie, now soaked through with tears and snot, I wiped my nose and looked up at my two best friends. Somehow, I felt like I’d known them as a different woman. In a different time. Before Nick Norton rumbled into my life and into my heart. “But I came back alone.”
Roxie’s mouth fell open. “You mean . . . he took the fall for you?”
Resting my face in my palm, I set my takeout container on the kitchen floor. Everything inside my body ached. Every corner of my heart felt like it had been gnawed on. Another tear tumbled down my cheek, and I lined up the words please don’t go on the linoleum. He’d given up his freedom, his life, his future . . . for me. Just me. Only me. He had gambled on us and lost. And sitting there on the kitchen floor, with 589 carats in my purse, I felt so very, very unworthy. “He told me to go bite the stars for him and never look back.”
For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Until Roxie let out a clear, long, descending whistle, and Ruth said, “Oh my God.”
43
NICK
Halloween came and went, and I didn’t hear from her. I’d told her to run, to forget about us, and she’d listened. But fuck me if I wished she hadn’t. Because I missed her. I missed everything about her. Her smile, her smell, the way her hand had felt in mine. Her laugh, her love. That Stella blend of sinner and sweetheart. I missed just being near her sparkle. I missed being so full of love and hope. I missed being with Stella even more than I missed being free.
The one sign I had that she was still thinking about me was my attorney, who contacted me the day I was booked in, saying my sister had hired her. I’d almost said, “What sister?” But then I put it together and kept my trap shut about that too. The attorney was good at what she did; no bullshit, no small talk. The story was this. If I was willing to give up the diamond or the name of my accomplice, the sheikh would drop the charges. But in the handful of meetings we’d had it was clear to both of us that unless I was willing to throw Stella under the bus, I was class-A-felony fucked.
As the cops built a case against me, they put the screws to me to give up my accomplice. Witnesses had seen her. The sheikh’s bodyguard gave a description to a sketch artist. The sheikh had said he’d seen her, that he remembered her dress. The sketches weren’t of Stella, but of a little blonde bombshell who didn’t exist. No matter how hard they pushed, I didn’t give in. I didn’t say I knew her, or that I didn’t know her. They asked me where the North Star was. I told them the truth—I didn’t know. They were rough on me, but pressure makes diamonds, and every question those fuckers asked me about her just made me love her—and need to protect her—more and more.
November ticked by, and the guys on my cellblock got hand-shaped turkeys made of construction paper from their kids. Thanksgiving dinner was slices of dry turkey breast, potatoes out of a box, and a can-shaped slice of jellied cranberries, still with the ridges on the sides. The days slid by, one merging into the next, and the turkey decorations were replaced with Christmas trees studded with glue-soaked cotton balls.
Every time I made the walk down the cellblock, I felt sick with nostalgia for something I never had and never would have. Every wall reminded me of holidays and traditions I’d never get to experience with Stella, dreams so powerful because they were so new. Then, in January, the goddamned Valentine’s cards started to arrive. Every paper heart made my own bleed and made me ache to be on the road with her in that RV in a way I’d never ached for anything before.
The attorney had worked to make sure that while I was in the endless holding pattern between arrest and trial, I stayed where I was, with all the white-collar guys serving sentences on evasion and laundering. My cellmate was a decent enough guy. Some hacker who’d gotten himself in a shitload of trouble doing something that I didn’t totally understand. We got along fine, because he didn’t say much and neither did I. But sometimes, at night, he’d hum Tom Petty, and my eyes would get fucking blurry all over again.
I had the bottom bunk, and that afternoon—like every afternoon—I was looking up at the steel crossbars above me, at a scratched-in line of graffiti that said LIFE SUCKS AND THEN YOU END UP IN THIS SHITHOLE.
My thoughts drifted back to that magical night with her, on the roof of the RV, looking up at the stars. I relived the way she’d run her fingertips over my tattoos and the way I’d shown her this constellation and that one, not really caring if she saw them in the sky at all, but just enjoying the way it felt to be there with her. To experience her surprise and her happiness. With each day that passed since I’d seen her last, I’d added a few more stars to the underside of the bunk, so now it was dotted all over with the night sky, dots of ballpoint pen on plywood.
“Norton!” boomed the guard, yanking me out of the stars and slamming me back into the grim realities of the Orange County Jail.
I rolled over in my bunk and turned to face the door. He was a skinny guy who looked a lot like Willie Nelson, except for the uniform. “Got a visitor,” he said, and swiped his key card over the wall, making the lock on the cell s
hudder open with a clatter.
On the wall of the cell across from me was taped a doily heart that had MISS YOU! written across it in crayon.
“Who is it?”
“The fuck kinda question is that?” the guard said. “Think I know? I just work here, Norton.”
True enough. I rolled off my bunk and followed him down the hall. On either side, guys read or played cards or did push-ups on the bare concrete floor. We passed through one guarded doorway, then another, until we got to the visiting room. Because it was medium security, the visitors’ room wasn’t some Hollywood-style set of booths with bulletproof glass, but a big, open cafeteria space with picnic tables bolted to the floor, metal ones dipped in blue rubberized plastic. It even had big, triple-thick windows along one wall, one of the few places in the whole building that had a view of the horizon. Seeing the great wide open soothed the ache inside, but not very much.
As he opened the door for me, I let myself imagine for one second what it would feel like to get to see Stella. The joy. The relief. The happiness.
None of which I’d ever feel again.
Of course, it wasn’t Stella sitting there at the far corner table with her back to me. Instead it was a woman in all black, with short dark hair, and with her right foot in a walking boot.
Ruth.
She was intense. Sitting across from her made me feel like I was getting interrogated in the middle of a round of high-stakes poker while I held the world’s shittiest hand.
“How’d you even get here?” I asked as I slid onto the bench across from her.
She placed her phone upside down on the tabletop. It was covered in rhinestones, just like Stella’s. But these were black, with a contrasting red R in the middle. “I took the bus. I always take the bus.”
Christ. Eight hundred miles on a Greyhound with her foot in a boot. Seriously hard-core. I leaned back on the picnic bench and ground my quads into the edge of the table. “How are you healing up?”
She looked at her boot, which was slightly to the side of the table. She wiggled her toes in her athletic sock and said, “I’m here because I went to talk to your lawyer today. As your sister,” she said, adding a little extra weight to that word to make sure I hadn’t missed it, “I thought it was time for me to actually look her in the eye.”
I gripped the edge of the table, digging my thumbnails into the rubber coating. “And?”
She stared at me, a poker face to beat all the poker faces. “She told me that the sheikh is willing to drop all the charges if you give up the location of the diamond.”
There was no universe in which I was going to swap my freedom for Stella’s. Or her dreams. “No fucking way.”
Ruth sniffed, took a tube of yellow lip stuff with a bee on the label from her pocket, and rubbed it over her lips. Her expression was inscrutable, utterly neutral. “We could set up a dead drop. You’d be riding that bike of yours, slinging drinks, and kissing her before sundown tomorrow, I bet. Tempting, right?”
Tempting wasn’t even the start of it. The thought of kissing her again was mind-bending. But there was no way in hell I’d ask her give up her dreams—or the money she’d get for that godforsaken gem—for me. I wasn’t worth it. But she was. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
Ruth ran her fingertip over the diamond-shaped gaps in the table. “She’s a mess.”
The words clobbered me. What I wanted to hear was that she was happy, making plans to live her Big Wide Open American Dream, with her puzzle box full of rough diamonds.
“You need to let her go,” Ruth said, looking me right in the eye. “I want to go back to her and tell her you’ve forgotten about her. I want to go back to her and tell her she’s free.”
A wave of anger came up from deep inside me. It was the first thing I’d felt other than heartbreak in months, and it didn’t feel very fucking good either. There was a time when anger was my driving force, but since I’d met Stella, all that had changed. I had changed. She had changed me. The effect she’d had on me wasn’t lessening over time; it was only getting more profound. Ruth was still watching me, but I turned away. On the far wall was a flyer that announced movie night that week. The Pink Panther. Christ almighty, everything would always hurt forever. There was no way around it.
Forgetting about me was exactly what I’d asked her to do, because that would be the best thing for her. But the idea of me forgetting about her was brutal, impossible. To lose her was to lose hope. To lose her was to let go of the only life preserver I had. To let her go was to make the whole night sky go dark forever.
I shook my head. “You can tell her what you want. But she knows I’ll never forget her.”
Ruth scratched the corner of her eye with her fingertip. “You can’t stop me telling her you will.”
“She’ll never believe you.”
“You’ll never hear her voice. Her laugh. Any of it. Ever again.”
There were a lot of things I regretted in my life, but being in jail for her would never be one of them; even if I never heard that laugh again, having heard it at all made it worth it. Because of me, she would be happy—it would be the only good thing I’d ever done. The very best of things. “Tell her to keep laying low.”
“She might forget about you.”
She owed me nothing, but I owed her everything. Because through her, I’d seen a glimpse of a different life, one that I think I knew I’d never deserve to live, but one that for just an instant, I could see myself inside. And that, just that, was enough. “I’ll never forget her. And I’ll never let her go. Not here.” I tapped on my chest. “And not here either.” I pressed two fingers to my temple. “She’ll always be a part of me. And there’s nothing that you, or her, or anybody else can do about it.”
Ruth’s face was expressionless and stern. She picked up her phone and put it into her pocket, then used the table to brace herself as she stood. She watched me, carefully and closely. I held her stare and didn’t move a muscle. If she was expecting me to fold, she was gonna have a long-ass wait.
But then, very slowly, the hardness in her eyes softened, and I could have sworn I saw the smallest hint of a smile. As fast as it had appeared, it was gone. Disappearing ink.
I began to doubt I’d seen anything at all, until she said, very softly, “Good answer,” and hobbled off toward the exit.
I knew as she turned her back on me that I’d never see her again. And I’d never see Stella again either. “Wait,” I said.
She turned back over her shoulder and stared at me.
“Did she split it?”
If the answer was yes, I’d accept my fate. If the answer was no, I could go on living in the hope that maybe, just fucking maybe, I’d get to hear that laugh of Stella’s someday again.
But Ruth was a stone wall. And without another word, she turned around and hobbled out of the room.
44
STELLA
I let myself into Nick’s apartment and maneuvered a stack of flattened moving boxes through the door. It was the first time I had been back to his place. I remembered being here with him so vividly—the smell, the light, his things, his life—that I had to take a second to gather my thoughts. In the months since that awful day, I had taken care of his rent through his attorney and kept an eye on his bike from afar. Though I’d seen in news articles online that the cops had some fuzzy footage from the Ritz lobby of me in disguise, they hadn’t found any prints. Nobody had come asking me any questions. I was in the clear. And now I’d finally gotten the courage to come pack up his things.
The end of the month was coming up quick, and I knew there was no reason for me to pay another month’s rent on the place. I’d done it through the holidays, but I couldn’t afford to do it anymore. I still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to cleave the stone. And so what money we had, we needed. For the lawyer, for Mr. Bozeman’s debt. For medical bills. For so many things that added up and up.
I opened the silverware drawer and placed the forks and knives, only fou
r of each, into a plastic bag. I wondered when he’d bought all this stuff, and I had a little flutter in my heart imagining if I’d met him in a different time and a different place. At Target, maybe, in the housewares aisle. How different our lives would have been if we’d bonded over a shower curtain instead of over a jewel.
But we were what we were, and that was why being with him had been all fireworks from the start. I told myself for the thousandth time that all fireworks shows came to an end; magic like that couldn’t have lasted long. That’s what I was going to have to keep telling myself, even if I knew in my heart it wasn’t true at all.
Reluctantly, I gathered up the teaspoons and the tablespoons and added those to the bag. Opening the next drawer, I found the wine opener he’d used that first night. I turned it over in my palm. It felt like both yesterday and a whole lifetime ago at once. But just as I was about to put it in the bag with the flatware, I was interrupted by a firm, big-fisted knock on the door.
My heart soared and plummeted just as quickly. It was probably just the building manager, reminding me it was time to get out or pay up. Except as I looked out the peephole, I saw it wasn’t the building manager—not unless the building manager had grown eight inches, developed an enormous beer gut, and become addicted to cheese curls.
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