Nikki didn’t reply. Because she would have had to say that it meant it looked like her mother had sold out her country.
Her head became light. Heat turned back to see the document again, hoping she had been mistaken, but the image clouded before her eyes. Small trembles made her hands start to shake, and when she crossed her arms on her chest to hide them her whole body began quaking from the inside, radiating out to her joints. As her legs grew weak, she heard Rook’s voice, sounding like it came from the end of a tunnel, asking if she was all right. Nikki turned away to cross to her desk but changed her mind when she got halfway across the room and wove unsteadily out of the bull pen, smacking her thigh into a chair or maybe a desk on the way out.
When she got to the street, fresh air didn’t help. Nikki’s head still cycloned in a whirl of panic. Even in the bright morning light her vision remained fogged by a deep blue haze, the way condensation forms on a shower door. She rubbed her eyes, but when she opened them again the mist had crystallized, making her view a solid sheet of blue ice. Behind it, shadowy figures moved, seeming familiar to her, but unrecognizable. A face looked back at her through the frost. It looked like her own, through a clouded mirror. But it might have been her mother’s.
She didn’t know which.
Somewhere behind her, Heat heard her name being called. She ran.
She didn’t know where.
Rubber squealed and a truck horn blasted. Defensively, Nikki put out her palms and touched the hot grill of a semi as it skidded to a stop. She stayed on her feet, but the jolt fractured the veneer of ice she was looking through enough for her to see how close she had come to getting hit by a truck.
Nikki turned and bolted through traffic on Columbus Avenue, running somewhere, anywhere.
Away.
FIFTEEN
A statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback fronts the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History across from Central Park. Surrounding the famous bronze, a dozen titles listing the achievements of the great president are carved into the stone wall of the parapet: Ranchman, Scholar, Explorer, Scientist, Conservationist, Naturalist, Statesman, Author, Historian, Humanitarian, Soldier, and Patriot. Before these words sits a line of granite benches arranged for contemplation.
When Rook caught up with Heat, she was on the Statesman bench, doubled over, hyperventilating.
Nikki saw his shoes and pant legs before he spoke, and without raising her head, she just whispered, “Go.” He ignored that idea and sat on the bench beside her. Neither said anything for a time. She kept her face to the ground; he rested his palm on her back. It rose and fell with her breathing.
He reflected how, just a few short nights before, the two of them had held each other on the Pont Neuf in Paris while he’d contemplated the thick stone walls channeling the Seine. And Rook recalled wondering what would happen if one of them ever cracked.
Now he knew.
And he set about shoring up the damage.
“It’s not conclusive, you know,” he said as soon as her breathing leveled off. “It’s just a bank deposit. You can project the bad thing if you want, but sounds to me like you’d be breaking one of your own rules if you jumped to a conclusion without hard evidence. That’s my job.”
Not a chuckle from her, not even a scoff. Instead, she folded her arms across her knees and rested her forehead on them. Finally, she spoke. “I wonder if it’s worth it. Seriously, Rook, maybe I should just shut it down. The whole investigation. Leave the past in the past, keep all the bad stuff, I dunno … frozen in time.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“It’s not unthinkable, and that’s a first.” Nikki sighed and her breath hitched. Then in a small, plaintive voice, she said, “But then I keep telling myself I’m doing this for her.”
“Are you?”