She was hurting. This wasn’t going to stop hurting any time soon. “What can I do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Rebecca said, and I could hear her breaking. “Because now I have to go and figure out how to tell my mother that she has a grandchild who looks exactly like the daughter she would have chosen to keep, if the universe had given her a choice between Emily and me.”
Rebecca was here. She was alive. She was a good daughter. But her mother could still look right at her and sobbingly say that all her babies died.
“Do you want me to go with you to tell your mom?” I asked.
Rebecca shook her head, the choppy ends of her hair catching in a draft. “I’m better at wanting things now than I used to be, Avery.” She straightened, an invisible line of steel running down her spine. “But I don’t get to want you with me for this.”
CHAPTER 18
I stayed in the tunnels after Rebecca was gone, debating, then wound my way back toward Hawthorne House and exited up a hidden staircase into the Great Room. Once I had cell phone reception again, I pulled the trigger and made the call.
“To what do I owe this rather dubious honor?” Thea Calligaris had perfected the art of the verbal smirk.
“Hello to you, too, Thea.”
“Let me guess,” she said pertly. “You’re in desperate need of fashion assistance? Or maybe one of the Hawthornes is having a meltdown?” I didn’t reply, and she amended her guess. “More than one?”
A year ago, I never would have imagined the two of us as anything even remotely resembling friends, but we’d grown on each other—more or less. “I need to tell you something.”
“Well,” Thea replied coyly, “I don’t have all day. In case you missed the memo, my time is very valuable.” Over the summer, Thea had gone viral. Somewhere between Saint Bart’s and the Maldives, she’d become an Influencer with a capital I. Then she’d come back, to Rebecca.
No matter how long it takes, Thea had told me once. I’m going to keep choosing her.
I told her everything.
“When you say this girl looks exactly like—”
“I mean exactly,” I reiterated.
“And Rebecca—”
Rebecca was going to kill me for this. “They just met. Eve wants to meet Bex’s mom.”
For a full three seconds, Thea was uncharacteristically silent. “This is messed up, even by Hawthorne and Hawthorne-adjacent standards.”
“Are you okay?” I asked. Emily had been Thea’s best friend.
“I don’t do vulnerable,” Thea retorted. “It clashes with my bitch aesthetic.” She paused. “Bex didn’t want you to tell me, did she?”
“Not exactly.”
I could practically hear Thea shrugging that off—or trying to. “Just out of curiosity,” she said lightly, “exactly how many Hawthornes are having meltdowns right now?”
“Thea.”
“It’s called schadenfreude, Avery. Though really, the Germans should come up with a word that more precisely captures the emotion of getting petty satisfaction out of knowing that the world’s most arrogant bastards have itty-bitty feelings, too.” Thea wasn’t as cold as she liked to pretend to be, but I knew better than to call her on it where Hawthornes were concerned.
“Are you going to call Rebecca?” I asked instead.
“And let her avoid my call?” Thea replied tartly. There was a beat. “Of course I am.” She’d let Rebecca go once. She wasn’t going to again. “Now, if that’s everything, I have an empire to build and a girl to chase.”
“Take care of her, Thea,” I said.
“I will.”
CHAPTER 19
Oren waited until I was off the phone with Thea to make his presence known. He stepped into view, and I forced my brain to focus.
“Anything yet?” I asked him.
“No luck tracing the courier service, but the team I sent to the rendezvous point where Toby was supposed to meet Eve reported in again.”
The memory of two words rang in my mind: shots fired. “Did you figure out who placed the nine-one-one call?” I asked, holding on to my calm the way a person dangling over a forty-foot drop holds on to whatever they can reach.
“The call was placed from a neighboring warehouse. My men tracked down the owner. He has no idea who placed the call, but he did have something for us.”
Something. The way Oren said that made my stomach feel like it had been lined with lead. “What?”
“Another envelope.” Oren waited for me to process before he continued. “Sent last night via courier, untraceable. The warehouse owner was paid cash to give it to anyone who came asking about a nine-one-one call. Payment came with the package, so it’s likewise untraceable.” Oren held out the envelope. “Before you open it—”
I wrenched it out of his hands. Inside, there was a picture of Toby, his face bruised and swollen, holding a newspaper with yesterday’s date. Proof of life. I swallowed and turned the picture over. There was nothing on the back, nothing else in the envelope.
As of yesterday, he was alive. “No ransom demand?” I choked out.
“None.”
I looked back at Toby’s bruises, his swollen face. “Were you able to find out anything about the family of David Golding?” I asked, trying to get a grip on myself.
“Currently out of the country,” Oren replied. “And their financials are clear.”
“What now?” I asked. “Do we know where Eli and Mellie are? What about Ricky? Is Constantine Calligaris still in Greece?” I hated how frantic I sounded and the way my mind was jumping from possibility to possibility with no segue: Eve’s half-siblings, my father, Zara’s recently estranged husband, who else?
“I’ve been tracking all four of the individuals you just mentioned for more than six months,” Oren reported. “None were within two hundred miles of the location of interest when Toby was taken, and I have no reason to suspect any kind of involvement from any of them.” Oren paused. “I also did some checking into Eve.”
I thought about Eve slicing herself open for that game of Chutes and Ladders, about what Grayson had said about her in the car. “And?” I asked quietly.
“Her story checks out,” Oren told me. “She moved out the day she hit eighteen, went no contact with her entire family, siblings included. That was two years ago. She had a waitress job that she showed up to regularly until she and Toby went dark last week. From age eighteen until she met Toby a couple of months ago, she was living hand to mouth with what seemed to be some truly awful roommates. Digging deeper and going back a few more years, I found a record of an incident at her high school involving Eve and an apparently beloved male teacher. He said, she said.” Oren’s expression hardened. “She has reason to distrust authority.”
And who, Eve had asked me, is going to believe a girl like me?
“What else?” I asked Oren. “What aren’t you telling me?” I knew him well enough to know that there was something.