Chapter Eight #2
I still don’t know how long we stayed like that.
Her warm little breaths against my skin, both of us listening as someone rummaged through our lives.
I could hear him shuffling through my jewelry box in the bedroom.
He would take my mother’s engagement ring, the ruby earrings that had been in my family for three generations.
He wouldn’t bother trying to crack the safe in the closet—he took the whole thing, containing ten thousand dollars cash, among which, the pickle jar of my old waitressing tips that Waylen and I kept for sentimental value.
My cell phone rang from where I’d left it on my bedside table.
Waylen would be calling to check on me, to ask if the rash on Collette’s cheek was clearing up, and if I wanted him to bring home something for dinner.
The phone rang until it went to voicemail, and then he tried again.
The strange footsteps stopped moving. I squeezed my eyes shut.
I think our intruder realized that someone was home. Nobody leaves their cell phone behind. He would be looking at the photo that came up when Waylen called me: us on New Year’s Eve, his hand under my chin before he pulled me in for a kiss.
If he came into the nursery, I knew how to defend myself. But it was Collette I feared for. She was a vulnerability I wore on my sleeve.
I tiptoed to the closet and I unscrewed the doorknob very slowly.
I clutched the teddy bear handle in my palm so that the long screw stuck out between my fingers like a little knife.
It was blunted, but it could take out an eye.
I pressed myself to the wall, beside the door, and I waited for him.
If he entered that room, I would kill him.
But his footsteps moved farther away. Down the steps and out the door.
I felt it when his presence left. Collette felt it, too, because she started to cry.
A keening scream that turned her all red like I’d never seen her.
And in the bedroom, Waylen was calling me for what felt like the hundredth time.
“That’s it, that’s fucking it. We’re getting out of this hellhole,” Waylen had said. It was one of four break-ins on our street that day, and after a while, police gave up trying to find whoever had done it.
We moved out of our rental house and into a gated apartment we could barely afford, which was enough for Waylen. There was round-the-clock security, he told me. Nothing bad was going to happen.
But I was restless. The police never found the intruder; he was still out there, and he had seen our pictures all over the house.
Some crystal-clear portrait of our family lived in his head, but to us, he was just a shadow.
A nightmare. I didn’t sleep. I stalked neighborhood watch websites.
I read about every break-in that had happened in my town, which led me to break-ins happening in other towns, which led me to murders, rapes, arson, shootings.
Things that had always existed, that I had always known existed. But suddenly I couldn’t bear it.
I don’t have to say any of this now, because Waylen remembers.
The very next day, I called Mr. X and told him I was back in.
Waylen doesn’t say anything more now, because he knows that if he pushes me too hard, I’ll leave.
I’ve done it before. For a few hours, or to spend a night alone at a hotel.
He worries that one of these days, I won’t come back.
—
“Mom?” Collette squeaks as I breeze past her.
She’s standing in her pink nightgown, her golden hair rumpled on one side.
She will never know what it feels like to be unsafe, not if I have any say about it.
She’ll never know what it’s like to watch her whole life burn away to nothing, to be thrown out into the world where everyone is suddenly a stranger.
I kiss her forehead and tell her I’ll meet her in the kitchen in a few minutes. Then I take a hot shower, scouring the peach blossom body wash into my skin.
“Come on,” I tell Collette, who’s scrolling through her iPad at the breakfast table, neglecting the eggs Benedict Waylen has made her. “I’m taking you to school.”
“Now?” she asks. “It’s super early.”
“I’ve got a design consultation with a client,” I tell her. The way her jaw clenches tells me that she knows this isn’t the truth, but she hasn’t figured out the rest of it yet. But she takes a bite of her breakfast to appease Waylen, then she slides out of her chair and grabs her backpack.
I back out of the driveway without giving the car a chance to warm up in the cold November air, and we’re halfway down the street when Collette asks me if her father and I have had a fight, if it’s something she did wrong.
“No,” I tell her, and give her my best smile in the rearview mirror. “Everything is fine. I’m just in a hurry today.”
We’re almost to the school when I notice the car that’s following us. It isn’t exactly subtle—a black BMW with tinted windows. It maintains a distance but trails along with every turn through the suburban back roads that lead to the school, even when I don’t signal.
I glance at Collette, who is staring at her iPad.
She knows she can’t bring it to school, and it isn’t allowed until her homework is completed in the evening, so she absorbs all the screen time she can get without a lecture in the mornings.
For once, I’m glad she’s distracted, because she doesn’t pick up on my nervousness.
Not with my kid in the car, is all I’m thinking. Any other time.
It could be anyone. In my line of work, I don’t always make friends wherever I go. The relative of someone I put away years ago, or a supposedly reformed criminal who has changed his mind and decided to pay me back for the ordeal I put him through.
When we come up to the school, I hit the gas and speed past it. Collette raises her head. “Mom?” she says. “You missed the turn.”
“Did I?” I laugh, and it sounds a little too manic. “I must have been distracted. I’ll go around. Don’t worry, we’re still early.”
“But you said you had to be at work.” She sets her tablet down now, her brow knitted in concern.
God, she’s so much like me that it frightens me sometimes.
A budding little investigator. Why can’t she be like the other kids in her class who turn into zombies when you put a glowing screen a few inches from their faces?
“Collette,” I say, more sternly. “It’s fine.”
I zip around a corner that leads to a narrow one-way street and turn down the first alleyway I see. But it’s a dead end, and I slam the brakes so I don’t crash into the dumpster ahead of us.
I glance again in the mirror and watch as the car with the tinted windows speeds past the alley, the driver thinking I’m still on the loose. I wait a few more seconds, but they don’t return, and I let out a breath.
“Mom?” Collette’s voice is trembling. “What’s going on?” I open my mouth to speak, but she says, “Don’t lie to me!” Tears fill her eyes. “Whose car was that? Are we going to get murdered?”
“Nobody is going to murder us,” I say. “Why would you think that?”
“Because when someone wants to murder you, they follow you home. There was this case on a podcast Finnegan told the class about.”
Great. Thanks for that, Finnegan. I can hardly judge Elodie for letting her daughter have access to true-crime podcasts when I’m taking Collette to courtrooms.
I back out of the alley at full speed and turn the wrong way down the one-way street, running the stop and ignoring the horn that blares at me in protest. Within seconds, I’m on the highway, and I realize that I must have run several lights to have accomplished this, but my adrenaline won’t let me stop.
Collette is whimpering, but she says nothing now.
“There’s no school today,” I tell her. “It’s fine. Everything is fine. But I’m taking you to Auntie Ellen’s house.”
Waylen’s sister lives forty-five minutes from us, in the middle of farm country where it’s impossible to get a cell signal, never mind getting your GPS tracking to work. Collette will be safe there. “You’re sick,” I tell her. “You’ve had a stomach bug since last night, okay?”
Collette doesn’t answer me. She arches upward and tries to turn around in her seat to make sure nobody is following us.
Ellen won’t mind. She’s always saying we should visit more anyway.
She homeschools her two boys and spends most of her afternoons tending to the horses on her sprawling property.
Whenever Collette does visit, Ellen relishes the opportunity to teach her about how to apply makeup and French braid her hair.
“And, Collette,” I begin, but she already knows what I’m about to say.
“Don’t tell Dad.” She takes the tissue I hand her and begins cleaning up the tears. All at once she has composed herself. She’s good at burying whatever she’s feeling. She’s learned how to do that from the best.
“Mom,” she says, with an authoritative tone that no eleven-year-old should have. She’s always been mature for her age, my Collette, and so serious when the situation takes a sudden turn for it. “I was listening to this podcast about this mom whose husband just got out of prison—”
“Collette, really.”
“Just listen,” she says, still dabbing at her tears, even as she sobers up from her initial fear. “The mom took her kids and moved far away, but she had a code word, so anyone who tried to pick her kids up from school needed to know what it was, and then the kids would know that person was safe.”
“There’s nobody from my past who’s getting out of prison,” I tell her.
“You don’t have to worry about anything like that.
” And my current case…I doubt Bertram has any reason to suspect me yet, but if I play my cards right, he’ll be behind bars for a long time.
That is, if he’s guilty. Even though he appears squeaky clean, he must have slipped up somewhere. Mr. X has never led me down a dead end.
If Bertram is the one following me, it must be because he wants to know as much as he can about me.
Because he suspects I’m sniffing him out?
No, I didn’t give him any indication that I’d be doing that.
Because he wants to learn all he can about me, so he can use me in some way?
He’s a billionaire, which means he has the resources to stalk anyone who comes into his life.
Maybe he’s paranoid. Maybe he has some way of knowing we copied the contents of his laptop.
He is a tech genius—supposedly—after all.
“We can use a code,” she insists. “If we need help, we say—” She looks around the car, contemplating. “Nail polish.” Her eyes have landed on my manicure.
I’m proud of her for coming up with something so clever. I smile at her in the mirror, trying not to let on that I’m checking for cars behind us. Nobody is there, thankfully.
“I’m so proud of you,” I say. She doesn’t seem to mind that she’s just like me at times.
She understands this small conspiracy between us, and that something is happening beyond what I’m going to explain to her—so she doesn’t press. She is adding up all of the little white lies I’ve asked her to tell her father.
But she doesn’t know about the bigger betrayal. Even though I’m taking Collette to his sister, I’m breaking an agreement we’ve had for years.
During our first mission, when we were still trepidatious around each other, we skirted the parameters of our relationship like spies around security lasers in a mansion with a million-dollar crystal vase.
While neither of us would have called it love, there was a lust factor.
We were in our early twenties. I was trying to outrun a past that I never spoke about—not even to him.
Waylen’s petty fraud was no match for the secrets I keep, but even so, we found a way to connect with each other.
The first night we made love, it wasn’t planned.
I could feel Waylen falling in love with me, as though he were succumbing to a poisonous mist that had infiltrated the oxygen in the room.
We dozed on his bed, and while I was still half asleep, it started to rain.
Thunder shook the walls of his tiny apartment, and lightning flashed.
He got up to close the window. I watched him move, the taut muscles of his naked body catching the shadows of the next bolt of lightning. He wrapped his arms around my chest when he returned to bed.
“When I was a kid, I got caught in a rainstorm like this while my parents were driving us home,” he said. “We saw a tree go up in flames when a power line hit it.”
I’d turned to face him, curious that he was starting to be vulnerable with me.
“There was a tornado, a totally freak thing that even the meteorologists hadn’t predicted.
The only thing around us was this huge furniture store.
It was closed, but my dad smashed in the glass door so we could all get inside.
He said the safest place to be in a storm like that was a building with lots of plumbing and electrical wires. That’s why I picked this apartment.”
He lived in a small unit of a massive building, on the fourteenth floor.
I’d assumed his reasons were budgetary. But it fascinated me to know how deliberate he was.
Not just in the way he spoke, the way he dressed to match the mission, the way he kissed me as though we were the only two people in the world—but even something as mundane as choosing an apartment.
In his arms that night, I felt the safest I had ever been. Like I’d found someone who knew how to keep us safe. Someone who saw the details that even I—with my constant catastrophizing—would miss.
A lot of people think that the safest place to weather a threat is in the trenches, behind a tree or under a porch. But really, it’s a place with large crowds where you can hide, and with towering walls and wires to absorb the electric shock.
Bertram Casimir is not a literal tornado, but he does pose a similar threat.
Waylen would hate that I’m taking Collette to his sister out in the country.
We agreed that no matter what, when something was wrong, we would meet at the only shopping mall still left after the pandemic shut down the surrounding businesses.
We agreed that we would meet in the parking garage underground, and if we couldn’t call the other for help, we would wait.
I should be doing that, my logical brain is telling me. But something else—something I can’t seem to place my finger on—tells me that Waylen should never hear about this. And that voice, duplicitous as it might be, is loudest.