“Angela!” Hamidou calls again. “Komm hier!”
Angela’s expression is eerily blank. There’s nothing there. Not rage, not fear. Not even regret. Maybe she’s only capable of one authentic emotion: love for Hamidou. Perhaps nothing else has ever mattered to her.
With one last glance, Angela robotically hands Kersti her phone and evacuates her sentry position at the door. She disappears into the bedroom, where she’s been summoned, the victim of a lifelong brainwashing from which there is no possible return.
Kersti lets out a tremulous breath and checks the message from Jay.
Are you OK? In cab. On my way.
She doesn’t care anymore if they run, if they get away. She just wants to be safe in Jay’s arms. She wants to live. She lunges for the door and escapes the apartment.
The moment she steps outside, she sees the taxi pulling up to the curb. The door opens and Jay is rushing toward her. “What the hell?” he cries, pulling her into his arms and holding her. “What’s going on? What are you doing here? I’ve been worried out of my fucking mind—”
Inside the cab, she tells the driver, “Gendarmerie, Place de La Gare 1.”
As the driver is about to pull onto the road, they hear sirens. Kersti turns around to look out the window, certain the sirens are coming toward them. As they get louder and the ambulance and fire trucks turn the corner onto Béthusy, Kersti knows exactly what they’re going to find—Hamidou and Angela’s bodies on the concrete. Broken necks, twisted backs, pooling blood. Hostages in life and death. There’s a tragic symmetry to it all, she thinks.
The babies move inside her—that wonderful flutter that reassures her more now than ever before—and she rubs her belly, communicating silently to them. We’re safe.
Chapter 38
BOSTON—July 2016
Kersti follows Laylay down the hall, past Sloane’s room to the one that smells like French perfume and vanilla diffuser and moisturizer. Déjà vu.
“She’s grumpy today,” Laylay warns.
Kersti takes a tentative step inside the room. Cressida is staring up at the ceiling with uninhabited eyes.
“Hey, Cress.”
Cressida doesn’t move. Kersti approaches and sits down on the edge of the adjustable bed. Cressida is pale today. Her hair is tied back in a bun and she’s wearing mascara and plum-colored lipstick, but her cheeks don’t have their usual glow. She smells of Lubriderm.
Deirdre hasn’t told Cressida anything about what happened in Switzerland and she made it very clear that Kersti wasn’t to say anything, either. “There’s no point upsetting her now,” Deirdre said, her tone a command.
Kersti isn’t sure she agrees. Deirdre underestimates post-accident Cressida. Kersti suspects she knows and understands a lot more than Deirdre thinks and might possibly get some peace if she knew how things had ended in Lausanne.
“How are you?” Kersti asks Cressida.
Cressida blinks.
Kersti watches her for a long time, resisting the urge to tell her about Angela and Hamidou. Instead, she takes her hand, leans in very close, and whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
Cressida doesn’t react.
“I know,” Kersti adds, her voice full of compassion. “I know what happened to you.”
Cressida squeezes Kersti’s hand, hard. And then she turns her head away and stares out the picture window, leaving Kersti to wonder what’s going through her mind. Do Kersti’s words mean anything to her?
Maybe she’ll die soon, Kersti thinks, feeling guilty for even entertaining it. But what kind of life is this for someone like Cressida? Surely, she must want it to end. And when it matters, Cressida gets her way.
Her life has already been too long. She once told Kersti that life was short. How could she have known that back then? Kersti assumed with typical adolescent hubris that life would go on forever. In her ignorance, she believed time was a given, disposable and abundant. Cressida, on the other hand, had an eerie intuitiveness and seemed to understand on some level that she had to grab everything she could while she was still cresting with promise, beauty, youth, vitality; while she was still desirable and fertile. Kersti was far more lackadaisical and thought everything would endure—her angst, her opportunities.
But the Lycée was a moment in time, as evanescent as their splendid youth and as anointed as the chance meeting of sperm and egg to create life. A precious, perilous moment where events converged and unfolded in perfect, divine alignment, right up until the moment Cressida fell.
The day of your arrival is fast approaching and I’m feeling very contemplative. I find myself looking back over this year and I’m absolutely certain that some divine power, along with my newfound tenacity and single-mindedness, orchestrated every moment of this journey.
Here’s what I want you to know: you can’t live life by default. I suffered so much because I allowed myself to be the passenger in my own life. I didn’t think I deserved, or was allowed, to expect more. (And yet I see now that my decision to marry your father in the face of my family’s disapproval was the first glimpse of grit and doggedness I’d ever shown. I suppose I had it in me all along.)
I told you when I first started writing this letter that everything I did to bring you forth made perfect sense to me at the time. And it still does. I hope it will to you one day. I loved you long before you were ever conceived. I loved the idea of you, the possibility of you, the promise you held for me. And when I realized that this love might never get a chance to express itself—that it could possibly perish inside me—I woke up. I instinctively knew that passivity and self-doubt wouldn’t cut it anymore, and I finally began to act with resolve. I began to act, period.
Maybe I defied the universe, if that’s even possible. Or maybe I answered a call, acting on pure instinct, as Cressida would have done. I miss her more now than before I knew her story. I’ve decided to remember her as someone noble, impossibly strong, a survivor. She’s the reason you exist. Not just because we used her eggs but also because she showed me how to go after what I want. She taught me to stake my claim at all costs.
It took me a long time to muster the nerve, but you summoned me to fight, to do the inconceivable and be utterly dauntless about my ambition. The best part is, the harder I fought—not just for you, but also for the truth—the more I began to like myself.
I don’t care what anyone thinks about my choices. How freeing that is to say and to actually mean it! Yes, what we did was madness, but you were created from an irrational and outlandish love. How can that not be right?
Acknowledgments