“It is,” I say, adjusting my napkin in my lap. “The phone calls—that’s not something I do every day. Or ever. And I want you to know, I’m not expecting anything. We’re just out for dinner.”
Hurt flashes across her face; she quickly covers it with a bright smile. “It had to happen,” she says. “I mean…”
“Well, you were pretty against it.”
“Can you blame me?” She picks up her fork and spins a bunch of pasta.
“I suppose not.”
I dig into my steak, unable to shake the feeling that something isn’t right. That she isn’t right. She used a voice-disguising app, yes, but it’s more than her tone. She’s so much more formal and tentative in person.
I ask her about her family, and she brightens up, talking about her niece. I like her most when she talks about her niece.
We chat all through dinner. It’s nice enough. Even so, I can’t imagine kissing her.
Our waiter is showing the dessert tray to the next table over. There’s cake and pie, some sort of custard, and a small group of unfrosted cookies. I tip my head at it. “What do you think about that situation over there?”
“The dessert tray?”
“Those cookies?”
“Probably shortbread.” She shrugs. “Meh. I’m not a dessert person.”
I sit back. What? Not a dessert person?
She looks back at me and smiles.
“So tell me,” I say, “what’s your favorite movie?”
“Gone with the Wind. What’s yours?”
My pulse races. “How about your favorite musical?”
“Why?”
“Just…need to know.”
“I don’t know. I suppose I like Grease.”
My blood races. “Grease is your favorite musical?”
She searches my face. “You have something against Grease?”
“You’re not her.”
She looks like a deer in the headlights. “I like all kinds of movies. What I like at any one time is dependent on my mood.”
I put my napkin on my food. “Why are you pretending to be her?”
“What on earth are you talking about? You think I’m pretending?”
I give her a look. “You’re not her.”
She’s white as a sheet.
“Why would you pretend? Who is she? I need to know.”
She puts her napkin on her food. “Okay, fine. Cards on the table. I’m worried about you. You invited a wake-up-call girl you never met to dinner.”
“And you impersonated her. Look, just give me her contact information—the real contact information—and we’ll go back to how things were. No harm, no foul.”
She gazes across the restaurant—hurt. Maybe even angry. She did go to an extreme length to get a date with me, and now I’m rejecting her.
“You’re a beautiful, charming woman.”
“Save it,” she snaps.
“Why create the fake front in the first place? Please tell me, is Operator Seven somebody you know?”
Still she doesn’t look at me, but her expression is harder. Her eyes are shinier.
“The information,” I say. “I want it.”
I can see the gears turning in her head.
And now they’re definitely turning in mine.
There’s this long moment when we’re both thinking through scenarios of how this plays out. What happens if she refuses. What happens if I then push it. I’ve asked her out to dinner. Dirty-talked the wake-up-call girl. If I threaten her job over this, the potential legal and PR disasters boggle the mind.
“Just a name.”
She stands and grabs her purse. “Forget it.” She leaves. Without giving me a name.
I drain my scotch.
Twenty-One
Lizzie
* * *
I spend the night baking cookies, plain vanilla round ones. Most of them I frost as frown emojis, but a few are sob ones.
I watch Funny Face twice and sing along with my favorite songs. Cookies don’t typically go with beers, but they go with them tonight.
Mia gets home around ten. Wordlessly I hand her the plate.
“Nooo,” she says. “Fired?”
“It’s not technically a firing when you’re still on your probationary period. I learned that today.”
“Honey.” She grabs a sob cookie, takes a bite out of the cheek. “What happened?”
I tell her about the duplicity of Sasha and the betrayal of Mr. Drummond as she eats three entire emoji faces.
“I liked him. I trusted him. It felt so…real. But it wasn’t. How did I not learn my lesson about trusting guys like that?”
She curls her legs under herself, smooshing into my arm. “Screw it. Trust is an act of bravery. So he can just fuck himself.”
“I felt brave around Mr. Drummond. I went places with him I never even went with Mason. But it wasn’t really about that—it was like I had this feeling of discovery with him. Like Amelia Earhart, traveling through new territory. Except not alone. We were a team in a way I can’t explain. That’s how it felt, anyway.”
“Amelia Earhart perished over the Pacific.”
I groan and grab a frown cookie. “And I perished over Lexington Avenue. Because he takes what he wants. He warned me, even. He took and took and took, and then he didn’t even bother to fire me personally. What kind of an idiot am I?”
“It’s beautiful to trust. It’s beautiful to open your heart. Don’t let that asshole take that away. He’s small and mean, and you’re huge with your beautiful, amazing heart.”
“And in the end it’s the least of my problems.”
“Blow jobs for a buck?” she says with a wistful, hopeful smile.
“It’s not even funny. I’m so sorry,” I say.
“What do you have to apologize to me about?”
“Um, being the cause of angry loan sharks about to invade our home when I don’t have their money? I have two days until thugs with pinky rings and guns come to collect money I don’t have. I don’t want you in the crossfire.”
“Crossfire? What crossfire? Don’t tell me you’ll be packing heat, too.”
“Not funny.” I stare at the ceiling.
“If they think they’re gonna clip you for that fourteen G’s, they’ve got another think coming,” she says.
“What are you even saying?”
“I’m boning up on my mobster talk,” Mia says.
I roll my eyes.
“There’s a smile,” she says.
“That wasn’t a smile. I want you to start thinking about where you’ll sleep while I deal with them.”
“What do you mean, deal with them? What does that mean?” she asks with a horrified expression. “Lizzie…”
“Not that,” I say. “I only whore to strange men on the phone.”
“Mr. Drummond should pay. He’s the one who got you fired. Make him help you.”
Sasha’s words run through my mind. He’s disgusted…. “I’m the last person he’d help. He’s not who I thought he was. And I’m serious. You need to crash somewhere Saturday night.” The money is due on Sunday morning.
“I’m not leaving you. If you stay, I stay. Also, I totally have to see the kind of cookies you frost for it. They’ll be epic.”
“You’re not staying. If something happened to you, I’d die.”
“Goes both ways, sister. We’re in this together.” She gets up and heads to the refrigerator. It means everything that she wants to stay. It really does.
She holds up two beers: Sixpoint Crisp, our house fave. “Want?”
“You are the best friend ever.”
She tosses one over the small island that’s supposed to imply that the kitchen isn’t the same room as the living room. “So does this mean I have to take it down?”
“What?”
She points her bottle at the wall next to the conundrum window. A new cross-stitch in a wooden frame hangs here.
I go over. There, between two beautiful a
nd elaborately embroidered flowers, is a meticulously stitched saying: Sex with me is a dirty, savage affair. Utterly uncivilized.
“Oh my god! You have finally gone insane.”
She takes it off the nail. “It’s stupid.”
“No!” I grab it out of her hand and hang it back up. “It’s funny. At least he gave us a laugh.”
She pops the top off her beer.
Back on the couch, I Google do loan sharks really kill you? I get the same answers I got when I Googled it ten times before. Sometimes they do kill you, but sometimes they just hurt you. Sometimes they make you act as a drug mule. One guy on one of the threads said they carved up his arm.
I’m trying to decide between having my arm carved up and being a drug mule when Mia starts telling me about her most recent date. “He smelled like a body spray factory and made an assholey actress joke,” she says. “Next.”
“Like what?”
She sighs. “How many actresses does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to screw it in and ninety-nine to stand there and say, ‘it should be me up there!’” She swigs her beer. “Soooo funny. Fuck off.”
“Fuck off,” I agree. Mia has been going to lots of auditions and not landing parts. “What an asshole.”
We drink beer in silence, noodling on our phones. Then I just drink beer and watch Mia noodle on her phone, feeling intensely lucky for having a friend like her.
I’ve lived with her for seven years, since the age of twenty. Not living with her for eighteen months is going to be hard.
I miss her already.
I’ve already interviewed and ruled out a few subletter prospects. One woman seemed like a party animal. Another had a Kid Rock tattoo.
My ideal person is a serious, quiet type who has a demanding job or a significant other who has their own apartment. I want to do the best for Mia.
I find myself wondering whether Mr. Drummond has close friends like Mia. He feels alone when people put him in the hero box. Or was that just bullshit?
I go to bed a few hours later, but I don’t get much sleep. I keep thinking about that enforcer. If he was a regular person, I’d explain and try to work out a compromise. But he has a gun, which tends to be the accessory of choice for the man who isn’t up for working out a compromise.
The later it gets—or earlier, technically—the more worried and scared I feel. Loan sharks hurt people. It’s a thing. A thing doesn’t become a thing without there being some basis to it.
I’m wide awake when 4:20 rolls around. I watch the time feeling sad and angry; 4:20 comes and goes, then 4:30.
The phone rings at 4:43.
I nearly jump out of my skin. It’s him. Did I accidentally unblock his number? Did that motherfucker get around my block?
I’m outraged, but some stupid little part of me is happy. Excited.
And I have to crush that part. I answer. “Go fuck yourself,” I say.
I want to hang up, but it’s not dramatic enough. So I throw the phone across the room. It bounces off the wall, clatters across the floor, and comes to a stop. I can still hear his voice, rumbling urgently. I don’t know what he’s saying, and I don’t care. That’s what I’m telling that happy-he-called part of myself.
The phone is a hunk of metal and glass making noise on the hardwood floor, and I want nothing to do with it.
Nothing!
I get out of bed and shove my feet into my cowboy boots as he rumbles on. I go over and bring a wicked cowboy heel down onto the thing. The crunch is incredibly satisfying.
I catch something that sounds like Hello? Are you okay?
Seriously? Do phones only break when you don’t want them to?
I bring my boot down on it again and again, really hard, smashing it into little bits, severing our connection for good. Eventually the voice is gone.
So done with him!
He can never call me again.
I can never call anybody again, either, but never mind.
It felt amazing.
Twenty-Two
Theo
* * *
Willow flings open her door. She’s wearing her bathrobe and an angry look. “It’s six in the morning.”
“It’s 6:10,” I say, handing her a mocha cappuccino. I walk into her place.
“What’s going on? Did you confront the woman in marketing?”
“It wasn’t her. We need a plan B.”
“You were so sure.”
“What can I say? It wasn’t her.”
She narrows her eyes. “You seem happy about it.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now.”
It’s a strange thing for me to say, but she doesn’t make a big deal out of it. She’s my sister. She’s on board. “Aaaaaand you need your brilliant sister to find your wake-up-call girl some other way.”
She puts out a plate of scones.
I take a seat at her table and tell her how I called this morning, and Seven said “go fuck yourself,” and then it sounded a lot like she smashed the phone. Did Sasha instruct her to do that? At any rate, the number is out of order. The email bounces now, as if the account was closed, but it was probably Sasha anyway.
Either there’s an actual service, or it’s somebody Sasha knows.
“Theo,” she says. “The woman said ‘fuck yourself’ and destroyed her phone when you called. Magic 8-Ball says…she doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Something else is going on. She wouldn’t just cut things off like that.”
Willow winces.
“Yes, I know how that sounds, but you don’t know her, and I do. If nothing else, I want to make sure things are okay. Did Sasha come down on her somehow?”
“And there’s the thing where you still want to go out to dinner with her.”
I shrug.
Willow sips her coffee. “Let me ask you this. How were you paying for this service?”
“I already hit up accounting. They don’t have the contact information.”
“Right, but how were you paying?”
“PayPal.”
She smiles. “I say we pay them, then.”
“Why?”
“So we can follow the money. Assuming the PayPal account is still there.” She grabs her laptop and we access the accounting department records. It’s there. Willow has me make a thirty-dollar test payment to the specified PayPal account.
“We probably just paid Sasha thirty bucks.”
“I know, but you have to look at everything. Sometimes when you do that and you look at your statement, you get a business name.”
We sit back.
Sure enough, she gets a receipt. From O. Waves. And a string of numbers.
“Is Sasha’s last name Waves?”
“No, it’s Bale.”
“Interesting,” Willow says. “Sea turtle avatar. Huh.”
“Let’s Google O.Waves.”
She gives me a look. “We have something better, Mr. Bond.” She opens up a search engine I don’t know. “Deep Web.” A few clicks later, it turns out the payee is Ocean Waves, a 301C that supports sea turtles.
“Wow,” she says. “She covered her tracks.”
“Damn,” I say. Total dead end.
“Sasha won’t take a bribe to tell who the caller is?”
“She tried to impersonate her, then refused to tell me. I’ve been in business long enough to know when somebody can be bought. All Sasha’s getting is a pink slip as soon as I figure out how to do it without HR up my ass.” I push my palms to my forehead, despondent.
“She could sue you so hard.”
“Forget Sasha, I need the caller. We know the caller might work at Vossameer, but not necessarily.”
“You have hundreds of employees.”
“We know she’s a she.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s an assumption. Will you accept that?”
It’s when I’m walking home that inspiration strikes.
There was a charitable givi
ng event at the beginning of the month where employees were asked to nominate charities for Vossameer to give to. Everybody got a nomination form. I head back to the office. It doesn’t take long to get the list. I want to see whether Sasha suggested the Ocean Waves sea turtle charity.
I look it up. No go. Sasha suggested the United Way.
Just for the hell of it, I go down the rest of the list, one hundred and eighty employees. One person did suggest Ocean Waves.
Lizzie Cooper.
I know I’ve heard the name. It takes me all of three minutes to put it together.
Turnip Truck.
My head spins. Could it be?
I think back to the burn of her gaze that first day. Maybe Mr. Amazing is being amazing elsewhere.
It’s her.
Something in me recognized her that first day. And then the next day, she’d seemed different. Clothes all wrong. Doltish attitude all wrong.
She was hiding. Hiding in plain sight.
You’re so oblivious.
God, I even stood there imagining that flip book I’d had as a child. The wrong outfits and shoes on the wrong people. Because she was all wrong.
Operator Seven.
She hid herself. Why?
I put in a call to her extension. A woman answers. “This is Amy.”
“I’m looking for Lizzie Cooper.”
“She’s not here,” she tells me. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“When will she be back?”
“She’s gone.”
“Gone? What happened?”
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
“It’s Mr. Drummond,” I say. “And I’m asking you to tell me what happened down there.”
“W-well, all I know is that she walked out of here saying this place sucks and…”
“And what?”
“That we all need to pull our heads out of our asses?”
Sounds about right. “Thank you,” I say.
I grab Lizzie’s address from accounting and call Derek.
An hour later, he’s parking a half a block down from her home. It’s a prewar building in a gloomy section of Hell’s Kitchen. No doorman. Not a good neighborhood.
I figure out her windows are on the fifth floor, probably the last two windows on the side, overlooking the courtyard.
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