I have poor boundaries, I know that. I can see that, now that it’s been pointed out to me over and over again. Professionally, personally, I don’t see the distinction. There’s always too much overlap, and I can never figure out exactly where one element ends and the other begins.
She let me in her home, and I let her in my bed, in my head, until the point where to see her faults would be to see my own as well.
What’s your last name? I’d asked her.
And she’d smiled before she answered. You really don’t know? Buying a moment, her eyes twinkling, the bottle of vodka sitting between us. It’s Grey, she said, almost like she was letting me in on the joke, testing me.
Spell it for me, Donovan had said, and I knew I’d seen it somewhere, that it seemed right—
Her eyes twinkling as she pulled it from the vodka label between us—wondering if I would notice. And I hadn’t, not then. It was such an obvious lie, so calculated, she must’ve thought I saw it and didn’t care.
I’m not who you think.
I’m not going to tell you.
I’m no one.
I shut my eyes, felt the anger brewing along with the nausea as my world was shifting, and I wasn’t sure if it was toward him or toward her. “I think you should go now,” I told him. “Wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”
He didn’t stand. He locked his eyes with mine, and I could see he was debating something. He looked at the clock over the sink, made this noise in the back of his throat—as if I were endlessly frustrating. And then, finally, he told me: “They’re going to search this house.”
From the conversation so far, I didn’t think this was something he was meant to share. But he’d done it anyway, whether for himself or for me, I wasn’t sure. Maybe he thought he owed it to me, to give us both a fresh shot; maybe this was a bartering chip. It didn’t matter why.
“They’re getting a warrant. It’s in process. It won’t be long.”
“What are they looking for?” I asked, my voice low, so as not to disturb the balance of the moment.
His voice matched mine. “A knife.”
A knife.
“And,” he said, “any personal documents. Anything that might let us know who we’re dealing with.”
I heard her laughter again that night, with the bottle sitting between us—and wondered if it had been directed toward me instead.
“You search the house,” I said. “Go ahead.” I raised my hands, gesturing around the house.
“You’ll give your consent?”
“Yes,” I said. I had nothing to hide. And there was nothing here for them to uncover about Emmy—I’d been through it all myself. I just needed them to rule this out, move on, take me out of the center of the investigation.
“I’d have to search through everything, Leah. For the knife. For any papers.”
I thought of the box under the house, glad I had moved it to my car. For Emmy and for myself, until I understood what it was doing here. Still, there had been no knife, no papers. I wasn’t interfering with the things they hoped to uncover.
“Yes. Go ahead. Do it.”
He stood and placed a call, still standing in the same room. Then he pulled out a paper from his case, a form for me to sign, granting consent. My back stiffened, my shoulders went rigid. He’d had the form on him, had it this whole time. As if this had been his plan all along.
The pen shook in my hand, but I had already committed. I pressed pen to page and watched as the ink bled where I pushed too hard. “Here.” I pushed the paper back toward him, my fingertips blanched white against the table.
He grabbed it and turned around, not making eye contact. “You can go, or you can stay,” he said, staring out the sliding glass doors.
“I’ll stay,” I said, and I hoped he saw my reflection in the glass. I hoped he saw me standing behind him, arms folded, the way I was looking at him.
I’d been a step behind, and it wouldn’t happen again.
He was playing a game, deciding what to share and how to share it. He was exactly the type of person I once was. After something—and I wondered what exactly he was after. Was it me? Drawing him further into the case, to Emmy? A way to find her, to know more? Was I nothing more than his source, to do with as he pleased?
I had been outmatched. Out here, I’d gotten used to moving slower, letting time catch up with me. I had forgotten and grown too complacent.
Wake up, Leah. Wake up.
CHAPTER 24
I had originally thought we were on the same side in our quest to find Emmy. But this was no longer the Kyle who wanted to stand in the bedroom and listen to me bring Emmy to life. They had already decided that Emmy wasn’t the full picture, the real picture. If they wanted her brush, her toothbrush, or her clothes for DNA, they could’ve asked. I would’ve given that.
But instead they wanted to piece through her life, as if she had something to hide. I thought of John Hickelman’s watch with my fingerprints. Everything in this house with my fingerprints. All the stolen pieces she’d surrounded us with, that I’d never questioned. The box under the house with those pictures.
I had already searched her drawers, her room, her closet. I should’ve known that Emmy would hold her own secrets close, as she had held mine. She was a secret herself. Maybe that was why I’d felt safe sharing mine with her, because in the days after we first met, I was not myself, and she wasn’t fully real to me yet. Or because she was a stranger, and had these brown eyes and was joining the Peace Corps in three months, and would be gone with no access to the rest of the world, like a vault I could bury secrets inside. And I did. Fell under her spell and told her everything.
When I’d arrived at her place that first day, she looked at my bags, my belongings, all grouped together in the middle of the living room concrete floor, and she’d seemed to see it all: that I’d left in a rush because I’d had to.
“This one’s yours,” she’d said, leading me to the room to the right of the main living area. “Sorry, I know it’s not much.” There was a full-size mattress on the floor, stripped of all bedding. A low ceiling and no windows. There wasn’t much room for other furniture. “I’ve been selling things instead of buying them—I’m leaving at the end of the summer, and I can’t take anything with me when I go.”
It wasn’t much, but it was mine—it had a door, and a lock, and it was perfect. I’d smiled and said, “Thank you,” dragging my stuff inside. She left me alone, and I hung up some of my clothes on the metal hangers in the closet. The rest, I left inside my suitcase. It worked just as well as anything else would.
I had clothes, a toothbrush, a few boxes of my things from college that I’d never unpacked at Paige’s. I’d have to get sheets, but the rest I could live without.