CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was nearly 11:00 p.m. when she walked into her bedroom to see if Logan was online. He hadn’t replied to her e-mail earlier in the week, but that didn’t mean anything. His schedule was as uncertain as hers, and she didn’t want to miss him if he did manage to score some computer time. So after watching the evening news with Keith—images of the dramatically interrupted press conference were being mined with a vengeance—she’d kissed his forehead and gone back to her room to get ready.
She stood in the mirror, running her fingers through her hair. For one ridiculous moment she considered changing into something sexier—at least from the waist up, as that was all he’d see on his camera—but decided not to bother. Logan had fallen in love with her in striped T-shirts and jeans. There was no need to mess with a winning formula.
She looked around her bedroom, a sudden strange weight pressing down on her chest. The hazard of living in a place where you had so much history—so much pain and so much rage and so much love—was that every item could turn on you in a flash. Sure, the photo of her at Disneyland that perched on the bookcase? Cute as a button. But then she had to remember that Lianne had taken it. And even if she took the picture down, how many other belongings were just waiting to remind her of everything she’d ever lost? There was the teddy bear she’d kept since Duncan Kane won it for her at the Winter Carnival sophomore year. There was Lilly Kane’s necklace, twinkling from a jewelry tree on her dresser. There was Logan’s T-shirt, left behind after the days they’d spent together, which she kept draped over the back of a chair.
Veronica suddenly missed him worse than she had in weeks. She steeled herself. Dealing with Mom has got you maudlin. Remember the rules, Mars—no pining, no whining. Keep it light.
She was adjusting the angle of the lampshade on her desk when she heard the singsong chime that meant a call was coming in.
And then he was there, at the top of her screen. He wore his sage-green flight suit, unbuttoned partly to show the black T-shirt underneath. This time his eyes seemed to meet hers; the camera must have been adjusted properly. And even though she knew it was an illusion and that their eye contact was being filtered through lenses and wires, it sent a little shiver down her spine.
He smiled. “There you are,” he said.
“Here I am,” she answered.
For a moment they just grinned at each other, each taking in the other’s presence.
“How long do you have?”
It took him a beat too long to answer. They must have a lag.
“Not long enough. Fifteen, twenty minutes? There’s a wait list for the computers.” He smiled ruefully. “Hey, so, sorry I had to miss our last date. I, uh, lost my Internet privileges. Something about insubordination.”
“That doesn’t sound like you,” she said, eyes wide.
“It was a frame job, I tell you.”
“So, business as usual.”
He laughed softly, and the image froze for a moment, streaky digital lines across his face. She held her breath, waiting. After a moment it came unstuck again.
“Can you see me now?” She tried not to cringe at her words. It seemed like half of their scant and precious time together was spent asking that. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Still there? This fucking computer. Mac had helped her optimize her video chat capabilities, but Logan was approximately eight thousand miles away, floating, as he put it, in a giant metal box, surrounded by God knew what kind of equipment interfering with their connection.
He smirked. “Billions of dollars of defense technology at work.”
They were quiet for another moment, awkward. Then his face softened. “You look great.”
“Thanks,” she whispered. “How’re you doing?”
“I’m okay. The flight surgeon cleared me yesterday. I’ll be on deck for a mission this afternoon, so it may be a few days before I can e-mail you again.” He licked his lips. “So how’s Lianne?”
“Well, she’s clean now. She’s got a new family, a new life.”
“Yeah? How’re you doing?”
She hesitated.
“I’m … fine,” she said softly. “I mean, it hasn’t been easy, seeing her again like this. But I made my choice a long time ago. And so did she.” She gave a short, heavy laugh. “It seems like she was really happy, before all this happened. Apparently no one in her new life drives her to drink.”
Logan’s brow furrowed. “Veronica. You know she didn’t leave because of you, right?”
She didn’t answer. She felt impossibly adolescent again. Does Mommy love me? was the kind of thing you scrawled in a diary, not the kind of thing you discussed at twenty-eight years old with your boyfriend.
Logan said something else then, but the screen froze again, his voice so broken up she couldn’t make out the words.
“Logan?”
“You … better … your dad,” he finished. She smacked the side of the desk, more out of frustration than in the hopes it’d provide better reception. But she didn’t have the heart to ask him to repeat himself, to spend another fifteen minutes laboring over the same twenty words, as they’d done several times before. She just nodded.
“Are you there?” he asked. He leaned forward and frowned at the camera.
“Yeah, I can hear you. Logan?”
“Veronica? Are you there?”
Her heart sank. She craned her neck at the monitor, hoping the connection would correct itself, that his voice would come clear through the digital noise. His image shifted jerkily once, twice. She caught the sound of his voice deconstructed into halting and meaningless syllables. And then the window went dark.
She stayed in her chair for a long time. A dark hollow seemed to carve itself out under her chest, frustration and despair curling her fists at her sides. She knew not to worry about the sudden disconnect—he’d often warned her it was just the connection, not some kind of emergency or attack. But now she felt more cut off from him than she had before their awkward, aborted chat.
After a few minutes, she powered down her computer. Logan had said out loud what everyone else had danced around: the fact that, no matter how “professional” and detached Veronica tried to be, Lianne was still the woman who’d left. Still the woman who’d cut and run when things got too hard. And watching her soldier through the search for a missing stepdaughter hurt some deep, childish part of Veronica more than she wanted to admit.
In the hall outside her room, she heard her father’s uneven steps as he made his way to bed. Veronica stood up from her desk, staring at the faint outline of her face reflected in the darkened window. Logan had seen through her; that was one of the reasons she loved him. He could tell her things she couldn’t bear to tell herself sometimes. But what good did it do to dwell on all the ways Lianne had let her down? The bridges between them had burned to ash a long time ago. She couldn’t go back in time. She couldn’t fix what had gone wrong. She couldn’t make Lianne love her.
She touched the surface of Aurora’s diary where it sat on her desk. Not for the first time, she felt a connection to the girl, an ache of recognition.
Both of us are lost, she thought. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to bring one of us home.