Given the seriousness of his crimes, Nick didn’t belong here, but he had always been good at inserting himself into places he did not belong. He’d been convicted of manslaughter for killing Alexandra Maplecroft, and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction for the New York piece of the plan. The jury had decided not only to spare Nick’s life, but to give him the possibility of parole. Which was likely how he had wrangled his transfer to Club Fed. The worst thing that inmates had to worry about inside the blue-roofed pods spoking out from the main building was boredom.
Laura knew all about the boredom of incarceration, but not of the rarefied kind that Nick was experiencing. Per her plea deal, her two-year sentence had been spent in solitary confinement. At first, Laura had thought she would go mad. She had wailed and cried and even fashioned a keyboard on the frame of the bed, playing notes that only she could hear. Then, as her pregnancy had progressed, Laura had been overcome with exhaustion. When she wasn’t sleeping, she was reading. When she wasn’t reading, she was waiting for mealtimes or staring up at the ceiling having conversations with Andrew that she would’ve never had with him in person.
I can be strong. I can change this. I can get away.
She was mourning the loss of her brothers; Andrew to death, Jasper to his own greed. She was mourning the loss of Nick, because she had loved him for six years and felt the absence of that love as she would the loss of a limb. Then Andrea was born, and she was mourning the loss of her infant daughter.
Laura had been allowed to hold Andy only once before Edwin and Clara had taken her away. Of all the things that Laura had lost in her life, missing the first eighteen months of Andy’s life was the one wound that would never heal.
Laura found a tissue in her pocket. She wiped her eyes. She turned her head, and there was Andy walking toward the bench. Her beautiful daughter was holding her shoulders straight, head high. Being on the road had changed Andy in ways that Laura could not quite get used to. She had worried for so long that her daughter had inherited all of her weakness, but now Laura saw that she’d passed on her resilience, too.
“You were right.” Andy sat down on the bench beside her. “Those toilets were disgusting.”
Laura wrapped her arm around Andy’s shoulders. She kissed the side of her head even as Andy pulled away.
“Mom.”
Laura relished the normalcy of her annoyed tone. Andy had been bristling about the over-protectiveness since she’d been released from the hospital. She had no idea how much Laura was holding back. Given the choice, she would have gladly pulled her grown daughter into her lap and read her a story.
Now that Andy knew the truth—at least the part of the truth that Laura was willing to share—she was constantly asking Laura for stories.
Andy said, “I talked to Clara’s daughters yesterday. They’ve found a place for her that specializes in people with Alzheimer’s. A nice place, not, like, a nursing home but more like a community. They say she hasn’t been asking about Edwin as much.”
Laura rubbed Andy’s shoulder, swallowing back her jealousy. “That’s good. I’m glad.”
Andy said, “I’m nervous. Are you nervous?”
Laura shook her head, but she wasn’t sure. “It’s nice to be out of the splint.” She flexed her hand. “My daughter is safe and healthy. My ex-husband is speaking to me again. I think, in the scheme of things, I’ve got more to be happy about than not.”
“Wow, that’s some class-A misdirection.”
Laura gave a surprised laugh, startled that the things Andy used to say inside of her head were finally coming out of her mouth. “Maybe I’m a little nervous. He was my first love.”
“He beat the shit out of you. That’s not love.”
The Polaroids.
Andy had been the first person to whom Laura had told the truth about who’d beaten her. “You’re right, sweetheart. It wasn’t love. Not at the end.”
Andy smoothed together her lips. She seemed to vacillate between wanting to know everything about her birth father and not wanting to know anything at all. “What was it like? The last time you saw him?”
Laura didn’t have to think very hard to summon her memories of being on the witness stand. “I was terrified. He acted as his own lawyer, so he had a right to question me in open court.” Nick had always thought he was so much smarter than everyone else. “It went on for six days. The judge kept asking me to speak up because I could hardly do more than whisper. I felt so powerless. And then I looked at the jury, and I realized that they weren’t buying his act. That’s the thing with con men—it takes time. They study you and figure out what’s missing inside of you, then they make you feel like they’re the only one who can fill the hole.”
Andy asked, “What was missing inside of you?”
Laura pursed her lips. She had decided to spare Andy the details of Martin’s sexual abuse. On good days, she was even able to persuade herself that she was holding back for Andy’s sake rather than her own. “I had just turned seventeen when Andrew brought Nick home. I’d spent most of my life alone in front of a piano. I only got a few hours at school and then I was with a tutor and then . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I was so desperate to be noticed.” She shrugged. “It sounds ludicrous, looking back on it now, but that’s all it took for me to get hooked. He noticed me.”
“Is that where you went when you disappeared on weekends?” Andy had moved away from Nick again. “Like when you went to the Tubman Museum and brought me back the snowglobe?”
“I was meeting with my WitSec handler. Witness security.”
“I know what WitSec means.” Andy rolled her eyes. She considered herself an expert on the criminal justice system since she’d been on the lam.
Laura smiled as she stroked back her hair. “I was on parole for fifteen years. My original handler was much more laid-back about the whole thing than Mike, but I still had to check in.”
“I guess you don’t like Mike?”
“He doesn’t trust me because I’m a criminal and I don’t trust him because he’s a cop.”
Andy kicked at the ground with the toe of her shoe. She was clearly still trying to reconcile Laura’s sordid past with the woman she had always known as her mother. Or maybe she was trying to make peace with her own crimes.
“You can’t tell Mike what happened,” Laura reminded her. “We’re damn lucky he hasn’t figured it out.”
Andy nodded, but still said nothing. She no longer seemed to feel guilty about killing the man they had all started calling Hoodie, but like Laura, she struggled to forgive herself for her part in jeopardizing Gordon’s safety.
The night Andy had fled the house, Laura had sat on the floor of her office, Hoodie’s dead body a few feet away, and waited for the police to bust down the door and arrest her.
Instead, she’d heard men screaming on her front lawn.
Laura had opened the door to find Mike lying flat on the ground. Half a dozen cops were pointing their guns at his prone body. He’d been knocked out, likely by Hoodie. Which served him right for lurking around her front yard. If Laura had wanted the US Marshals Service involved in the Jonah Helsinger affair, she would’ve called Mike herself.
Then again, she shouldn’t be too hard on him, considering Mike was the only reason that Laura had not been arrested that night.
Andy’s text had been fairly nondescript:
419 Seaborne Ave armed man imminent danger pls hurry
If Laura was adept at anything, it was subterfuge. She’d told the cops she’d panicked when she saw a man outside her window, that she’d had no idea it was Mike, that she had no idea who’d hit him, and she had no idea why they wanted to come into the house but she knew she had the legal right to refuse them entry.
The only reason they had believed her was because Mike was too dazed to call bullshit. The ambulance had taken him to the hospital. Laura had waited until sun-up to call Gordon. They had waited until sundown to take the body from the house and put it in the river.
This was the transgression Andy could not get past. Killing Hoodie had been self-defense. Gordon’s involvement in covering up her crime was more complicated.
Laura tried to assuage her guilt. “Darling, your father has no regrets. He’s told you that over and over again. What he did was wrong, but it was for the right reason.”