“I do hope you found your stay to your liking.” The concierge met us in the lobby. “Your departure is a bit abrupt.”
His tone made that sound like a question. It was closer to a complaint. “It’s my leg,” Michael told him in a complete deadpan. “I walk with a
limp. I’m sure you understand.”
As far as explanations went, that one held little to no explanatory power, but the concierge was flustered enough that he didn’t question it. “Yes, yes, of course,” he said hurriedly. “We just have a few things for you to sign, Mr. Townsend.”
While Michael dealt with the paperwork, I turned to look back at the lobby. At the front desk, dozens of people stood in line, waiting to check in. I tried not to think about the fact that in three days, any one of them—the elderly man, the guy wearing the Duke sweatshirt, the mother with three small children—could be dead.
The knife is next. I knew—personally, viscerally—how much damage could be done with a knife. We’re not finished, I thought vehemently. This isn’t done.
Leaving felt like running away. It felt like admitting failure. It felt the way I had at twelve, each time the police had asked me a question I couldn’t answer.
“Excuse me,” a voice said. “Sloane?”
I turned to see Tory Howard, dressed in her standard uniform of dark jeans and a tank. She seemed hesitant—something she’d never struck me as before. “We didn’t get a chance to meet the other night,” she told Sloane. “I’m Tory.”
The hesitation, the softness in her voice, the fact that she knew Sloane’s name, the fact that she’d lied to the FBI to keep her relationship with Aaron a secret—you love him, too, I realized. You can’t un-love him, no matter what you do.
“You’re leaving?” Tory asked Sloane.
“There is a ninety-eight-point-seven percent chance that statement is accurate.”
“I’m sorry you can’t stay.” Tory hesitated again, and she said, softly, “Aaron really did want to get to know you.”
“Aaron told you about me?” Sloane’s voice wavered slightly. “I knew he had a half sister he’d never met,” Tory replied. “He
wondered about you, you know. When you stepped in front of him that night at the show, and I saw your eyes…” She paused. “I did the math.”
“Strictly speaking, that wasn’t a mathematical calculation.”
“You matter to him,” Tory said. I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that it cost her to say the words, because there was a part of her that couldn’t be sure that she mattered to Aaron. “You mattered to him before he even knew who you were.”
Sloane absorbed that statement. She pressed her lips together and then blurted out, “I have gathered that there is an overwhelmingly large chance that your relationship with Aaron is intimate and/or sexual in nature.”
Tory didn’t flinch. She wasn’t the type to let you see her hurting. “When I was three…” Sloane trailed off, averting her eyes so that she
wasn’t looking straight at Tory. “Grayson Shaw came to my mother’s apartment to meet me.” The words were costing Sloane to say—but they were even harder for Tory to hear. “My mother dressed me up in a white dress and left me in the bedroom and told me that if I was a good girl, my daddy would want us.”
The white dress, I thought, my stomach twisting and my heart aching for Sloane. I knew how this story ended.
“He didn’t want me.” Sloane didn’t go into the particulars of what had happened that afternoon. “And he didn’t want my mother so much after that.”
“Trust me, kid,” Tory replied, steel in her voice, “I’ve learned my lesson about getting in bed with Shaws.”
“No,” Sloane said fiercely. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not good at this. I’m not good at talking to people, but…” She sucked in a breath of air. “Aaron brought the FBI evidence that Beau acted in self-defense—evidence they never would have seen otherwise. I’m told there’s a very high probability he did that for you. I thought that Aaron was like his father. I thought…”
She’d thought Tory was like her mother. Like her.
“Aaron fights for you,” Sloane said fiercely. “You say I matter to him, but you matter, too.”
“Beau was cleared of all charges this morning,” Tory said finally, her voice rough. “That was Aaron?”
Sloane nodded.
Before Tory could reply, my phone rang in my bag. I considered ignoring it or declining the call again, but what was the point? Now that we’d been pulled off the case, there was nothing left to distract me.
Nowhere else to run.
“Hello.” I turned away from the group as I answered. “Cassie.”
My father had a way of saying my name, like it was a word in a foreign language, one he could get by in, but would never fluently speak.
“They got the test results back.” I said it so that he wouldn’t have to. “The blood they found. It’s hers, isn’t it?” He didn’t reply. “The body they found,” I pressed on. “It’s her.”
On the other end of the phone line, I heard a sharp intake of breath. I heard him jaggedly let it out.
While I waited for my father to find his voice and tell me what I already knew, I walked toward the exit. I stepped out into the sunshine and a light January chill. There was a fountain out front—massive and the color of onyx. I came to stand at the edge of it and looked down. My reflection flickered over the surface, dark and shadowed.
“It’s her.”
I realized, when my father said the words, that he was crying. For a woman you barely knew? I wondered. Or for the daughter you don’t know any better?
“Nonna wants you to come home,” my father said. “I can get an extended leave. We’ll take care of the funeral, bury her here—”
“No,” I said. I heard the pitter-patter of small feet as a child ran up to the fountain next to me. A little girl—the same one I’d seen that day at the candy shop. Today she was wearing a purple dress and had a white origami flower tucked behind one ear.
“No,” I said again, the word ripping its way out of my throat. “I’ll take care of it. She’s my mother.”
Mine. The necklace and the shroud she’d been wrapped in and the blood-spattered walls, the memories, the good and the bad—this was my tragedy, the great unanswered question of my life.
My mother and I had never had a home, never stayed anywhere very long. But I thought she’d like being laid to rest near me.
My father didn’t argue with me. He never did. I hung up the phone. Beside me, the little girl solemnly considered the penny in her hand. Her bright hair caught in the sun.
“Are you making a wish?” I asked.
She stared at me for a moment. “I don’t believe in wishes.”
“Laurel!” A woman in her mid-twenties appeared at the little girl’s side.
She had strawberry blond hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. She eyed me warily, then pulled her daughter close. “Did you make your wish?” she asked.
I didn’t hear the girl’s reply. I stopped hearing anything, stopped registering any sound other than the running water in the fountain.
My mother was dead. For five years, she’d been dead. I was supposed to feel something. I was supposed to mourn her and grieve and move on.
“Hey.” Dean came up beside me. He wove his hand into mine. Michael took one look at my face and put a hand on my shoulder.
He hadn’t touched me—not once—since I’d chosen Dean. “You’re crying.” Sloane stopped short in front of us. “Don’t cry,
Cassie.”
I’m not. My face was wet, but I didn’t feel like I was crying. I didn’t feel anything.
“You’re an ugly crier,” Lia said. She brushed my hair lightly out of my face. “Hideous.”
I let out a choked laugh.
My mother’s dead. She’s dust, and she’s bones, and the person who took her away from me buried her. He buried her in her best color.
He took that away from me, too.
I let myself be bundled away. I let myself retreat into Dean and Michael, Lia and Sloane. But as the valets pulled our cars around, I couldn’t help glancing back over my shoulder.
At the little red-haired girl and her mother. At the man who joined them and tossed his own coin into the fountain before lifting the girl onto his shoulders once more.
