There’s a pause, while I guess the person on the other end is talking, but I can hear her as her fingers fly across the keyboard. “I know it makes no sense,” she says, “I have no clue why she’d call my office—” The typing stops. And then a string of expletives fly from Ivory’s mouth. She laughs, but it’s short and cold. “She didn’t know where I lived,” she says. And she laughs again. “I have to go. You better come. She’s here.”
My arms, my legs, the back of my neck are covered in a rush of goose bumps. She’s talking about me, and she knows. She’s told someone else. I have no cards left, except the present. Except the words I have inside me. I have no time to discuss this with Casey and Cameron, but I know they’ve heard as well. I stand up, in view of the window, even though Cameron grabs my arm, trying to pull me back down.
“Trust me,” I ask him, even though I’m not sure what I’m asking him to trust me to do. To get us through this, I guess. God, I don’t know if I can do that, either. I’m not only fighting for myself right now, not just for my own freedom, but for theirs. Because if people are coming, they’re coming for all of us.
He lets go as I walk up the steps to the front door. They’re watching me from the corner of the house, but I don’t let on that there’s anyone else. Just me.
I ring the bell, and Ivory Street opens the door like she was expecting me. Her eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses are the deepest shade of blue, and her hair is dyed a shade of red just this side of copper—but her roots show a mousy brown. There’s a fine map of lines around her eyes and mouth, and for a second I think she doesn’t recognize me. Then she steps back, gestures inside, and says, “I can’t believe she actually did it.” But then she smiles, and it’s all ice, as the door shuts behind me. The lines around her eyes and mouth deepen, and, at the sound of the latch catching, so does my fear. “You are one driven soul, child.”
Chapter 22
There’s a long table along the entryway wall—lamps and a phone and mail stacked neatly. An old wedding photo, in a silver frame, with the engraving: Ivory & Edmond.
Edmond.
She sees me looking. “I assume it was you who called me in my office?”
I nod, but I don’t speak, just in case it triggers a memory of the phone call and the fact that Casey’s voice is not my own. I also need to figure out what’s happening. I need to weigh her words, her actions, before using my own.
This is what I’m good at. I’m so good at it.
“You must be exhausted,” she says. “Thirsty?”
I nod. I need a moment to take her in, figure her out. So, it seems, does she, because she sways into the kitchen, as if this is a normal house visit and I’m nothing but a long-lost friend. There are no windows here—just cabinets going round and round the room, and a long island in the middle. The light comes down through skylights above us. Behind me is a door, slightly ajar, and I can just make out the top of a wooden staircase leading into the darkness. There’s a deadbolt on the outside, and I’m imagining all the thousands of things that one might keep in there. I strain to listen for the hum of computers, but I can make out nothing behind the walls. I wonder if that could hold the shadow-database. The wonder starts to veer to hope, and I pull myself out of the daydream.
She takes a glass out of a tall, dark cabinet and holds it under the water dispenser, handing it to me after. I watch her as I drink, then place it on the dark granite counter, and the noise breaks the trance.
“Tell me, my dear, how did she do it? The whole world wants to know. How did June get you to me?”
I pick up the glass again and drink the entire thing, letting her questions, and the silence, linger in the air.
“On second thought,” she says, “I think I’ll have a drink as well.” She walks to the refrigerator and speaks as her glass fills with water. “That was quite the escape,” she says. She turns around, assessing me slowly from bottom to top and back again. I feel too small in these clothes that don’t fit, too exposed in this room with no windows. “I think even June would be impressed.”
“I think so, too,” I say.
I put the glass back on the counter, but it shakes as it settles, and she grins, walking closer. “Is she like a ghost for you, too? She is for me. Sometimes, just as I’m waking, I swear I can hear her.”
We were right. She knew June. She saw her. Heard her voice. My heart beats twice as fast, imagining June standing before her, just as I am.
Ivory places her glass beside mine on the counter and gestures to the corner of the room, where nobody stands. “I’ll be cooking here alone, just me and an empty room, and then … poof. Sometimes I see her here, standing in the corner of my kitchen … Can she be both your ghost and mine? Can she be in both places at once?” She shrugs. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.” She takes her glasses off, makes a show of wiping the lenses slowly with the edge of her shirt. Buying time. Buying seconds, minutes, because someone’s coming. But I have to wait. I don’t want her to know that June didn’t leave this for me, she made me work for it. She left herself for me, and the path she was taking, and I followed her footsteps here, learning less about her than I am about myself. I still don’t know what this woman has to do with the database.
“Did you come for the money, sweetheart? I do suppose you’re owed it.”
Money? What money?
“It will take me some time to get it for you, dear. How much do you need? I assume it’s a lot. I assume you want to disappear. I assume you need enough to live on. I can do that for you, sure.”
Something isn’t right. It’s not as we thought—this woman wasn’t broken by June. She wasn’t used by her. She did something. This woman is toying with me as if I haven’t spent years studying people. She doesn’t know who I am at all. I don’t know her either. But I’m learning.
June didn’t break this woman. This woman broke June.
And now I’m walking the same path, with the same strengths—the same strengths she can flip around and use to hurt me.
I look to that corner, to the door with the dark stairwell stretching behind, and Ivory smiles. “It’s a wine cellar, dear. No dead bodies, I promise.”
Still, it makes me nervous.
“The money would be nice,” I say noncommittally.
“Nice,” she says, her hands stilling. “What is it that you want exactly, Alina? What brings you to my doorstep now? I’m not sure what you think I can do for you at this point, other than the money.”
This is what I want to know: Why did June lead me here? “Who did you just call?” I ask.
“Ah. Eavesdropping, were we?”
This is a dance. A tightrope. And I have spent years on it.
Actions here will mean nothing. Words, everything.
I think June was trying to find Ivory Street, too—but after. After she got into the database with Liam, after she realized something didn’t add up. After they released the names, after Liam died and she spent over a year holed up underground with nothing to do but think. I believe she wanted to ask Ivory Street. To see if there was a mistake with the study. Though if there was, if June used this study that was so wrong, then she was so wrong, acting on that information. I wonder what she would’ve done, if she realized that.
“I’ve read your papers,” I say. “Fascinating stuff, really. I couldn’t follow it as well as June. She was much better at that stuff.”
“Is that so,” she says.
“You know what?” I say, switching gears, “I do want the money. How much would you say seventeen years is worth?”
She pauses like she’s mentally calculating the answer. Then she nods. “That’s a lifetime, isn’t it? For me, it’s just a sliver of one. But for you, that’s everything, isn’t it? A lifetime, then. I can get you one more.” As if lifetimes can be bartered and weighed and assigned a value.