by Tess Sharpe
“Oh dear.” Olivia frowns. “I really am not supposed let anyone down there.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “I totally understand. The scholarship was a long shot, anyway. And there’s always student loans.”
It’s the right knife twist; I know it because I looked into her enough to know she took out a Parent PLUS loan for each of her kids’ college.
“As long as you have the keys,” she says slowly, “I suppose it can’t hurt.”
“Really?” I smile in genuine relief. “You’d totally be saving me. My sister will be upset because I kind of put off the application until the last minute. I had three months. I should’ve gotten my birth certificate earlier.”
She smiles indulgently at me, all motherly and fond. “I had to make a spreadsheet for my girls to keep them on track with applications. It’s a busy time.”
“That’s a good idea,” I say as she begins to lead me through the back. We’re both silent as we pass the carpet that’s cut away. I guess they couldn’t get the blood out.
“Have you talked to Casey?” I ask.
“I spoke to her mom,” Olivia says. “You three looked out for her. I can’t tell you . . .” She trails off. “You are very good kids,” she finally says, her voice tight with emotion.
I place my hand on her shoulder, and it’s not a con when I say, “It’s brave of you to stay here.”
She lets out a shaky laugh. “Oh, honey, I don’t have a choice. I’ve got mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay.” She clears her throat as she unlocks the steel-barred door that leads into the safe-deposit box vault. “Just call for me when you’re done, okay?”
“Will do.”
I step inside and head farther into the vault, waiting for her footsteps to fade. And then I move: not toward the box where Lee keeps Bailout Plan 3 (of 12). No, I go to box 49 and insert the key I found in Frayn’s office. The flap opens, exposing the box, and I try to slide it out.
I don’t know what I expected, but when I can’t even pull it out because it’s so heavy, the weight tells me what it has to be. I knew it was going to be valuable; I thought maybe cash. Some old coins. Stock options or art. A bunch of jewelry you could yank diamonds out of. Something like that.
I did not expect, once I got the box inched out of its slot enough to unlock it, to find gold tucked beneath an old copy of The Wind in the Willows. And not a bottle of tiny nuggets—we’re talking six 400-ounce bars of gold bullion.
Definitely enough reason to rob a bank. Over three million reasons, because that’s about how much this is worth, if the quick search on my phone is right.
Well, shit. I look over my shoulder, knowing that I’m on borrowed time. If I take too long to “get my birth certificate,” Olivia will come looking for me.
I’ve done the research: Howard Miles, the owner of the box, was a widower with no family and no heirs. So there was no one to give this to, no one who knew about it. Did Mr. Frayn steal the keys off the old man? Were they entrusted to him? I’m not about to ask, and I know Casey’s dad isn’t going to be talking anytime soon, if he has even remotely decent lawyers. It doesn’t matter, in the long run. I have the keys now.
A prickle runs down my spine, and the temptation; oh, the temptation . . .
Money enables you to run, if you have to. And it gives you a chance to fight back, if you choose to.
My fingers curl around the box. Who am I kidding? Isn’t this why I brought my messenger bag? Isn’t this the reason I didn’t tell anyone I had the keys? Wes wouldn’t like it. Iris . . . well, I’m not sure where she’d fall. We’re more alike than you know. Would she understand?
This isn’t about satisfying my curiosity. This is about being who I truly am: a girl who finds a way through everything thrown at her.
So I take two of the bars. I don’t take all of them, only because it’d be too heavy, not because I’m struck with some sort of moral fortitude. I slip the gold and the book right into my bag, and shove the box back into its slot in the wall, locking it shut. Safe and away, no one knowing any better, and only me with the key. By the time Olivia’s footsteps come clicking down the stairs again, I’m already on the other side of the steel bars with the birth certificate I brought from home clutched to my chest.
“You’re the best,” I tell her gratefully, and she smiles again. “If I somehow get this scholarship, I owe you dinner.”
“I’m glad I could help. After the last week and a half, I think we could all use a little break from the universe.”
“I’ll say.” And I just got one.
I follow her up the stairs, keeping my shoulders straight beneath the added weight in my bag.
“Thanks again,” I tell her, and she waves at me as she walks back to sit behind her desk . . . and I stroll right out of the bank with the biggest score of my life, just like that.
My hands don’t start shaking until I’m driving out of the parking lot, but I press harder on the gas, speeding down the long, straight stretch of ranchland highway, moving forward.
Already, the plan is solidifying in my mind.
Step one: Book a flight.
Step two: Throw down the gauntlet.
Step three: Survive, somehow.
— 67 —
August 25 (17 days free)
1 long blond wig with bangs, 1 vintage plaid skirt, 1 black cashmere cardigan, a truly impressive array of makeup
Iris’s fingers card through hair that isn’t mine. I can feel the pressure through the wig cap. She bends down so she’s at eye level with me, pursing her lips as she tugs at the back of it, straightening it just a little.
Then she steps back. Comb tapping against her arm, she examines her handiwork.
We’ve waited for my face to heal up, and now my stomach is spiky with nerves, like when I asked her to help me with this. Now I don’t want to turn around and see my reflection in the mirror. I haven’t looked like this since I was twelve. No—I haven’t looked like this ever. The almost-grown-up version of the girls never walked the world, and now I’m looking at Iris, expectant, instead of in the mirror.
“Well?”
“Truth?”
I lick my lips and then make a face, because lip gloss is sticky, and I don’t like it when it’s on my lips and not just rubbed off from hers. “Yeah.”
“I like your short hair. And your T-shirts and boots. You look really weird right now. Well, no, not weird. Just . . . not like you. At all. Actually, you look a lot like Brigitte Bardot.”
I would narrow my eyes at her, but I think the mascara might smear. “Who?”
She points to my right, at her collage of various classic film actresses and vintage fashion ads. Her mom could easily clue in on the whole Iris likes girls thing just by looking at her room, but straight people do really love to gal-pal us up rather than face the truth—even when it’s hung on the walls.
I look at the actress she’s pointing to, and then I turn, staring at myself in her vanity mirror.
All I see is my mother and memories. But before I can lose myself in the thorns that come with all that, Iris’s door jerks open.
“Iris, do you and Nora want—” Ms. Moulton comes into Iris’s room without knocking and comes to a dead stop when she sees us. “Oh.” She frowns at the sight of me. “Nora! You look . . .” She stops, completely thrown by the change. That’s good. I do not want to look like Nora when I go.
“I’m thinking of doing makeup and hair for the senior musical,” Iris says. “Nora said she’d be my guinea pig. Her sister has some wigs because of the PI thing. What do you think?”
“It’s very Brigitte Bardot,” Ms. Moulton says.
“That’s what I said!”
The two of them share a smile, all conspiratorial and warm.
“You always look great.” Ms. Moulton smiles at me. “But this is cute, too. You did a good job,
Iris. The theater department would be lucky to have you.”
“Thanks,” Iris says, like she didn’t just come up with that lie on the spot.
“Did you two want something to eat? I was going to order pizza. Half vegetarian, half pepperoni?”
“Sounds good,” Iris says. “Nora?”
“That’d be great. Thanks.”
“I’ll holler when it’s here,” she says, closing the door behind her.
We’re quiet for a moment, Iris fussing with the collar of the black cashmere cardigan she put me in. Finally, she lifts her gaze to meet mine in the mirror.
“You’re good at coming up with stuff on the spot,” I say, careful not to call it good at lying, even though that’s what it is.
She shrugs. “I spent a lot of time finding ways around my dad’s rules.” Her hands are suddenly still, like she’s as surprised as I am that she’s brought him up.
We haven’t talked about what she told me in the bank bathroom. I don’t want to push her, but I worry if we don’t talk about it sometime when there isn’t a bomb she built between us, she’ll think that what she told me is another kind of bomb, one that’s ticking down. And it’s not. She was strong, then and now. It’s one of the reasons I love her.
I’d like to punch that asshole ex-boyfriend who didn’t like wearing condoms, and I’d love to destroy her father . . . but that’s another matter.
“I had a lot of rules to follow, too.” I hate how tentative it comes out, but that’s how I feel. With Wes, everything came out in a horrible flood of stories that never seemed to end until suddenly, there weren’t any more to tell, and then we just had to endure in the space between them.
This is different. This is giving pieces up and getting some in return. The ground was tilted toward me when I was with Wes because I had the truth and he didn’t. But with Iris, she and I can be on even footing. We can know each other, piece by piece. We can build something with that knowledge.
“I bet,” she says. “Are you scared?” She fiddles with my collar again, and then her hand settles on my good shoulder. There’s a little catch to her breath when my shoulders relax under her touch, and I lean back into her, trusting her to hold my weight. Her fingers stroke my shoulder as the back of my head presses into the soft heat of her stomach.
“I can’t be scared,” I tell her.
She bends, a lock of pin-curled hair swinging over her shoulder. She presses a kiss to my forehead, then the tip of my nose, then an upside-down kiss on my sticky lip-glossed lips.
When she pulls back, she says the thing that burns the doubt and worry away and replaces it with something more. Something stronger.
You can be scared with me.
— 68 —
August 30 (22 days free)
the truth
Lowell Correctional Institution, Florida
I’m not surprised when they take me to a private visitation room. She’ll have made friends in here, dazzled a guard or two, maybe even a whole handful. If there’s one thing my mother knows, it’s how to work a person and a system. It’s why I’ve never worried too much about her in here.
I’m alone for a minute or two, and the nerves flutter. Lee never talks about her visits here, and the nights after she comes back are the only times all year she drinks. Glass after glass of wine until she’s stumbling and I have to help her to bed. One time, as I covered her up with a blanket, I heard her whisper, I don’t want to, Mommy, as she curled into it, and my heart burned in my throat for days after, because I knew.
I knew.
The time alone gives me a chance to assess the room: the table and two chairs bolted to the floor, the metal loops on the table and floor for the chains.
Do they shackle her in here? Of course they do. What a naive thing to even wonder. I can’t think like that. I know better.
The back of my neck tickles from the wig, the weight of hair on my shoulders unfamiliar after all these years. I take deep breaths and keep my back to the door I know she’ll be coming in from, even as I hear the footsteps and the scrape of the lock, the clank of what I know are her chains, because I am not naive. I’m not.
I can hear her settle in the chair, the murmur of the guard’s voice, and then his footsteps, leaving us alone. Definitely against regulation. Absolutely not a surprise.
But I still don’t turn. I show her my back and the spill of long hair that looks real, and I wait.
“Natalie.”
It’s strange, to hear it. My name. But it isn’t. Not anymore. Natalie was the touchstone. She was supposed to be my secret forever. The name I kept for myself. For my family and no one else.
I had been Natalie longer than any of the other girls. I’d been Natalie much longer than I’ve been Nora, but someday, that won’t be true anymore.
And that is my new forever secret. Just like all the girls and names I carry.
The girl my mother loves, the girl she thinks I am? She’s no one’s touchstone. I let her go. She became something that needed to be killed so Nora could flourish.
I left some of her behind in the bloody sand, banished pieces of her with a bottle of hair dye in a dingy motel, and he doesn’t know it and I won’t ever tell him, but Wes’s love helped me destroy whatever was left of her, because my mother’s daughter can’t be loved or known by anyone.
Natalie’s gone. Nora’s become real. Stranger, more secret things have happened, I guess. But it’s knowledge that is mine and mine alone, and I know the value of things that belong only to me.
I finally turn. Her breath catches, and I know why. I look so much like her, like this. Looking at me must be like staring at a photo of herself at seventeen, and looking at her is like I’m seeing the path I would’ve ended up on if I hadn’t fought my way out.
“You’re so grown up.”
Walking forward, I slide into the chair across from her. I can see the guard in the hall through the tiny window on the door. I wonder how long we have. I fold my hands in front of me, placing them on the table. I meet her gaze head-on, but I stay silent.
Her eyes track all over my face, and anyone else would think of it as a mother drinking their kid in after so long apart, but I know better. She’s searching for clues. For tells. For anything she can glean and use.
“I’ve been so worried. I thought maybe . . .”
“I was dead?”
“On the bad days,” she says, and oh, it sounds so sincere. Her fingers knit together, but I won’t let it affect me. I’m glass. A reflection. Everything bounces off me instead of getting inside. “I searched for you. The best I could, in here.”
“I’m sure you did.”
The little twitch of an eyebrow—they’re not as elegantly shaped in here, a little wilder, just like mine—lets me know I’m getting to her.
“I wondered if they put you in witness protection. Your sister’s been trying to find you, too. Is that where you’ve been? With the marshals? Did you finally get away?”
Relief bursts in my chest. The trap I laid with Duane worked. Lee’s cover is still safe for now. My mother doesn’t know how I got out. She still thinks it was the FBI and the marshals.
“I could’ve slipped my handlers from day one,” I say. “I didn’t bother until now.”
“What are you doing here, baby? Do you need help? Are you okay?”
Her eyes swim with tears that’ll never be shed, because the only motivation behind them is information, not emotion.
“You know why I’m here.”
I take my hands off the table and lean back in the chair, unblinking, staring her down. She breathes, in and out, so damn steady, but her eyes are roving my face again.
And then she leans back, too, the best she can, chained to the table. Those tears are gone in a blink, and the smile that curves around her lips?
That’s my mother.
“The wig’s good,” she tells me as her smirk deepens. “You cut your hair, I hear.”
She’s trying to unsettle me, so I let the silence drag. It’s the simplest trick in the book: Make the mark fill the silence. But it’s also the easiest when it comes to her, after this long. I know she has questions.
But I’m not willing to provide answers. They’ll just become weapons in her hands. Everything always does.
“You never divorced him.” It’s a statement. No, it’s not. I want it to be; I want to be that strong. But it comes out like the accusation it is.
“I love him,” she says, and truer words, I don’t think they’ve ever been spoken. Because goddamn, she really does, doesn’t she? It’s twisted and it’s broken—a fun-house mirror reflection of what I know love is. But what she feels, it’s real. It’s so real, she barreled forward into the gator’s mouth, knowing he might bite down. And when he did, she dragged me into the water with them. Chum for the taking.
“He was going to kill you.”
“But he didn’t,” she says, her voice softening. “It was a misunderstanding. Then you had to go and put yourself in the middle . . .”
“I put myself in front of the gun.”
Her lips press together, the lines around her mouth deepening. There’s no filler in here.
“You’re alive because of me,” I tell her. I want to say it one time. Have it acknowledged.
“I’m in here because of you,” she says, flipping it, making it cut, because it’s just as true.
I shrug, determined to be equally cruel. “I did what you told me to do, Abby. I was a viper.”
“You bit the wrong man, baby.”
“Because he’s your man?”
“Because you’re being foolish. You came here knowing full well that as soon as you walk out of this room, I’ll be letting him know you paid me a visit. I’ll give you a head start, baby, because I love you. But I have to tell him.”