You’ve got to pay Lena’s killer, too. You put a deposit upfront and the rest is due on execution. On execution, ha ha. It’s a private joke between you and Dana’s guy. Dana’s role, it’s just to get them where they belong. Dana will do it; she thinks you’ve got dirt on her. As long as she keeps thinking that, she’ll follow through. Dana will get them to the final destination on the transatlantic adventure you created for them. Everything they’ve done they think was their idea. But it was all you, lining up the dominoes. Sure, there were wildcards. You weren’t sure Anand could be trusted. There was the chance Lena wouldn’t find the letter. But that’s been part of the fun. Part of the game. Dana was the most reliable player. She’s good. The best con artist you ever met. She told you she could act, and she can. She’s the one who spun the story about your parents, to get Lena’s and Aubrey’s sympathy. It’s been fun watching it work. It was a brilliant touch, how Dana turned them away at first. It was her idea, telling them outright that you plan to kill one of them. And it’s worked. Every step of the way. The way Dana laughed when she told you about all of it from a noisy pay phone at her bar in Nana Plaza . . . it was like the best cacophony. Cacophony. Phony. Like Dana. A lipstick-slathered phony, everything about her.
Now they’re at the final stage, and you get to watch it unfold. The money you’ll deal with later. Sure you’re feeling heat, but they all know you’re good for it. They know you were stocking up to disappear, but they don’t think you’ll run with it. You’ve always paid your debts. You just need a little more time. You need to send out the ransom note to your parents: from Charlie—though they won’t know it—about Charlie. They’ll fork it over, a huge sum, anything to get you back. You’ll take the money and pay off your debts and kill your girlfriend, not necessarily in that order.
And oh, the relief. To be rid of one of them. To be rid of the thing that you are as long as she’s alive. You’re still that thing; she’s not gone yet. You’re impatient for it to happen. Fidgety. Restless. But you know you have to be strong. It’s an exercise in willpower, this waiting for Lena’s death.
Once, you thought you could break up with her. You thought that would be enough. And you tried. But Lena is headstrong. She doesn’t just disappear. She hangs on, asks questions, demands answers and what she calls “respect.” What about you? Why does she always think about herself and her feelings? What about what you’re feeling? She wants you to be reliable, but you want her to disappear from your life. You want that entire life, the one you had with her, to disappear along with her. Finally you realized: you can’t do that unless she’s dead.
But why Lena? Why not Aubrey, the one who cheated?
It’s simple: because for Aubrey, you have something better planned. Aubrey will disappear on her own. She wants to disappear. She’s been waiting for a way out since the beginning. Lena’s like a tumor that grows bigger and more poisonous, threatening to take you over. Lena is the one who can’t be dismissed. She needs to be destroyed. Or she’ll destroy you. Like she was starting to do. And you can’t have that, can you? No. Everything is in place. Everything is set to happen the way it should. The day you’ve chosen—August 18—is tomorrow.
26
Lena
7:23 p.m., August 17
When someone tells you you’re going to die and you don’t know how it’s going to happen, or when—just that it’s going to happen within a day, unless you can somehow dodge the bullet and hop a plane home—everything slows down. It feels like time’s on hold, maybe because everything revolves around the moment when I step on that plane tomorrow and know I’m going to be okay.
If I could call the cops, I would. But I can’t. What would I say? I think my dead boyfriend is alive and is trying to murder me. No, officer, he hasn’t contacted me. No, nothing in particular has happened other than a mugging in Kerala that can’t be traced back to him, exactly, and a tattoo of a lamb that I got while blackout drunk, and a suicide note with tomorrow’s date on it. None of it is substantial; and yet, I’m more and more certain that Dana isn’t making anything up.
The wildcard is Adam. If Charlie led us here, to Bangkok, there was a reason, and Adam was instrumental. But Aubrey swears up and down that Adam couldn’t have been involved. And yet—she hasn’t reached out to him since we left Bombay. Neither of us has been on a computer. We don’t have local cell phones. Adam, to me, seems too good to be real—how else could we have found Anand and Kerala and Dana? How did Charlie manage to orchestrate that? And why Bangkok, why like this? For his plan to move along without a hitch, everyone we’ve spoken to would have had to have been in on it. All the whys no longer matter. All that counts is getting through this day and making our way back home. In the end, we decide to let Dana book us the earliest flight. It takes off at 5:15 a.m. tomorrow and lands in Boston at 8:40 p.m.
We wait until Dana hands us the printed confirmations. Then we split. We’re sitting curbside a few streets away from the bar, our tickets in our bags. I had to give Dana my gold and sapphire ring. It’s the only piece of jewelry Anand left behind—and probably because it fits so tight in this heat that it’s difficult to remove it without a good dollop of soap. Neither of us feels safe staying at Dana’s overnight.
“We should go straight to the airport,” Aubrey says. “Right?”
“If Charlie has big plans for me, he’ll find me there, too,” I tell her.
“They have security. It’s safe. Unless . . .” She hesitates.