“My mother just died.”
“Yeah. Otherwise I wouldn’t have put it together. I don’t tell anybody, and you give me the whole story—first person. We’ll go out a few times, somewhere quiet, and I’ll record your story. It’s a big deal, and if I do it right, it could land me an internship at the Times. You’ve never talked to anybody, not Simon Vance, not the scriptwriter, the director, the actors. Your father did. Your mom, too, but not you. I did my research.”
They were friends—she thought they were friends. He’d been with her when she’d found her mother. He’d called the ambulance. And now . . .
“Simon Vance and the screenwriter beat you to it, Chaffins. Nobody’s going to care.”
“Shit, are you kidding me? Everybody’s going to care. Look, we’ll meet up. You can come to my place during the day, after school. My parents will be at work, and nobody has to know. I gotta split. I’ll text you when and where.”
When he rushed off, she sat a moment, a little stunned, a little sick. Why was she surprised? she wondered. Because she’d thought he was, at least a little bit, a friend? Should she be grateful he hadn’t already published what he knew in the school paper?
The hell with it, she thought. Just the hell with all of it.
She got up—before someone could sit down and try to comfort her—and made her way back to the kitchen. She could slip into the storeroom from there for the belated alone.
But Harry was right behind her.
He pointed to a stool. “Sit.” And sat himself on a stack of boxes. “Now tell me what that boy said to upset you.”
“It wasn’t anything.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
She jerked back. He never used that sharp, angry tone. “Harry.”
“We’re going to stop lying to each other. I knew your mother was lying about going to the prison, about keeping in contact. I knew, and I kept it from Seth. I didn’t tell him because it would upset him. And that’s a lie. Omission is a lie.”
“You knew?”
“And maybe if I’d said something . . .” He rubbed his tired eyes. “We’ll never know.”
“We knew. Mason found out and told me. We didn’t say either.”
“Well, where did all that get us, baby? Look where we are now. No more lies, no more omissions.” He leaned forward, took her hands. His eyes, so blue against the caramel, held that innate kindness he showed her every day. “When Seth asked me about taking you, your brother, your mother into the home in D.C., I said of course. But I thought, It won’t be for long. Of course we have to help—Seth needs to help his family—but they’ll get on their feet and get their own in, oh, six months or a year. I could open our home for a year. I did it because I love Seth.”
“I know you do.”
“What I didn’t count on was falling in love with you. With Mason. With your mother. That’s what happened. When we talked about selling the house, moving to New York, I didn’t do it just for Seth. I did it for all of us. Because we’d become a family. You’re my girl, Naomi. Same as if we were blood. I mean that.”
“I love you, Harry. I do, so much.” The tears came then, hot but clean. “I know how much you’ve done for us, all you’ve given us.”
“I don’t want to hear about that. I could tell you what you’ve done for me, what you’ve given me. I bet it balances out pretty square. What I want, and need, I think what we all want and need from today on, my baby, is truth. Let’s start right here. What did Anson say to put that look on your face?”
“He knows who we are. He heard some of the police talking, and he figured it out. He wants to be a journalist, and he wants the story. From me.”
“I’ll have a talk with him.”
“No, sir. No, Harry. What’s the point? He knows, and you can’t make it so he doesn’t. He said he wouldn’t say where I—we are, would leave out some details, but—”
“You don’t trust him. Why should you?”
She thought of Mark’s hand sliding down to her butt, of Chaffins’s blind ambition. “I don’t trust anybody but you, Seth, and Mason.”
“We can put you and Mason in private school.”
“It’ll just happen again. We can move again, and it’ll happen again. Mama’s gone, and it was hardest on her. We couldn’t protect her from him or herself.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt my baby girl.”
“I thought he was a friend. But nobody stays your friend when they find out who you are.”
“If they don’t, they weren’t worth your friendship.”
“But how do you know, ever, who is?” She remembered the card the policewoman who looked like she could play one on TV had given her, and took it out of her bag. “Detective Rossini.”
“What about her?”
“I think, maybe, she’s a friend. He smokes pot—Chaffins—sells it a little, too.”
Harry sighed. “Naomi, I understand peer pressure and the need for experimentation, and this isn’t the time to—”
“I don’t do drugs. Neither does Mason.” She frowned at the card as she spoke. “He wants Harvard and the FBI—Mason won’t take any chances with that. Chaffins wants Columbia, and the New York Times. It wouldn’t look good for him to get arrested for possession, maybe suspended from school.”
Harry’s eyebrows lifted. “Blackmail?”
“That’s what he’s doing. I’d be ratting him out to the cops—and I’m not proud of it. But I think Detective Rossini would go have that talk with him, and it might work, long enough for me to write the story.”
“What? What story?”
“I’m not as good a writer as Chaffins, but I can do this.” It came to her, like a lightning flash on a hot summer night. “If I write the story—as Naomi Bowes—and sell it, maybe even to the Times, he’s got nothing. I just need some time, and Detective Rossini could get me that. I write the story, like Chaffins said—from my point of view. And then he can’t. No one would care after that what some jerk writes about me. Mason? He won’t care.”
“Honey, are you sure?”
“No one’s going to do this to me, to us. I’m sure.”
“Talk to the detective. If you decide this is really what you want to do, well, we’re going to be behind you.”
—
She went back to school, forced herself to continue with the yearbook committee, the school paper. She ignored the furious stares from Chaffins—and completed the crap assignments he handed her. Because whatever Rossini had said to him kept him quiet, and she could comfort herself that in four months, he’d graduate and be out of her life.
After the Oscars, where the screenwriter for Daughter of Evil took home the gold, and the now-fifteen-year-old actress who’d played Naomi Bowes walked the red carpet in Alexander McQueen, after the movie-tie-in release of the book hung for sixteen weeks on the bestseller list, the New York Times ran a three-part article on consecutive Sundays.
She wasn’t at all surprised to receive an angry email from Anson Chaffins.
First you sic that cop on me, now this! You’re a lying bitch, and I’ll tell everybody who you are, where you are, what you are. I gave you the idea. You stole my article.
She wrote back only once.
My life, my story, and I never agreed to your deal. Tell anyone you want.
But he didn’t tell anyone. On her own she sent Detective Rossini flowers as a thank-you. She changed her email address, her phone number, and buckled down to focus on her schoolwork, her photography, and her family.
She told herself she’d put the past in the past now, where it needed to stay. And she’d really begun her life as Naomi Carson.
DEPTH OF FIELD
Ends and beginnings—there are no such things.
There are only middles.
ROBERT FROST
Six
Sunrise Cove, Washington State, 2016
It hadn’t been impulse. Naomi assured herself of that as she roamed the rambling old house on the bluff. A little rash, maybe. A gamble, absolutely. She’d taken plenty of gambles, so what was one more?
But holy shit, she’d bought a house. A house older than she was—about four times older. A house on the opposite side of the country from her family. A house, she admitted, that needed work. And furniture.