Chapter Fifteen #2
“Like I said, she just isn’t the same.” He steels his voice.
Whatever emotion he’s feeling, he doesn’t want me to see it.
“All those years of trying to please her parents, and realizing it was all for nothing. She thought our engagement would undo all the time she wasted, but it didn’t.
I couldn’t fix it for her. I wasn’t the man she fell in love with back in college. She hates me for that.”
“Sir, I think we’ve lost the other car,” Bertram’s driver interrupts us. We’ve veered into a parking garage affixed to an office building. Nobody else is here, and I let myself breathe a sigh of relief, but Bertram doesn’t seem at all soothed.
He’s staring at me, and I see some lingering trace of that desire he showed me earlier. But it’s crowded now by something else, something resembling anger and fear. “Margaux, if Annie sent you, you must tell me.”
He pulls me once again under his spell, and even as I feel it happening, I struggle to resist. If he was right, if Annie were somehow still alive and she had been the one to put me up to this, in this moment I would tell him.
“She didn’t,” I say softly. “I thought she was dead.”
“Why would you think—”
The car lurches forward with a roar of the engine. The car is behind us again. It makes no attempt to be subtle, honking and flashing its lights as it chases us. But there’s nowhere for us to go.
Something occurs to me.
I go through my purse as Bertram’s driver exhausts the last of the possible turns, narrowly missing the parked cars as he rounds the corners. Bertram seems well and truly terrified, but a resigned calm washes over me, mixed though it is with a new sort of dread.
“Don’t you have bodyguards?” I ask him as I paw through my zippered compartments.
“I’m not Elon Musk,” he snaps back. “People might try to hack into my bank accounts, but why would they assassinate me?”
“You seem to think your ex-girlfriend wants to kill you.”
“Not me,” he says. “She wants me alive so she can hurt me.”
“Sir, we’re at a dead end.” The driver sounds only marginally less panicked.
Frustrated, I dump the entire purse onto the seat, flustering Bertram. I shake the empty bag vigorously, sure I hear something clattering inside.
“What are you doing?” Bertram asks.
I pull at the lining until I find it—a tear so minuscule that even I hadn’t noticed it.
The fact that it’s cleanly slit with no loose threads tells me that it must be new.
I root my finger around inside until I feel the smooth, curved edge of something roughly the size of a quarter.
I already know what it is before I’ve extracted it.
An AirTag.
It can’t be. It truly fucking can’t be.
I open the door, and Bertram lunges to close it, but I’m too fast for him. I ignore his shouts for me to get back inside the car. When he realizes I can’t be stopped, he gets out after me, demanding I stop as I pound on the tinted window of the car behind us.
Suddenly in a less murderous mood, the driver of the vehicle throws it into reverse, and I lunge for the hood, clinging to the windshield wipers. I know who’s in that car, and it’s not Annie Clarke. I won’t let him get away. If he wants to speed away, he’s taking me with him.
But Bertram has other ideas. He pries me from the hood. “Damn it, woman, have you lost your mind?” he says. His muscles lock. He’s too strong for me, and in one fluid motion he’s propelled me behind him. He guards me with arms held out at either side.
Finally, the car door opens. I recognize the suede Aldwin lace shoes, the wedding ring on the hand that grips the frame of the car door as he gets out. Waylen, the sneaky son of a bitch.
Days earlier, when he and I argued—not for the first time—about me quitting my vigilantism, he got out of bed in the middle of the night. I heard him rummaging through the kitchen to make himself some coffee, and I went back to bed.
In the morning, my purse had fallen from its hook by the door. I’d assumed Collette had gone through it looking for gum.
It’s been more than a decade since Waylen and I worked together, but our whole marriage has been a mission unto itself. And tracking people down was a specialty of his. He’s been so soft for so long that I forgot he had it in him.
But Bertram has never met Waylen, except on paper when he was stalking my personal data.
He has no idea that the man standing before us now is the very same one who catches spiders under a glass and uses a bit of cardboard to release them into the yard, who sat patiently as our daughter snapped barrettes into his hair and used my old makeup brushes to pretend that she was his agent and he was America’s Next Top Model.
There’s a loud click. Bertram’s driver has a cocked gun trained on Waylen, who holds his palms up and utters a soft, “Whoa, whoa.” The same tone he uses on the rare occasion that one of our arguments leads to me yelling.
“Don’t shoot him!” I say, and rub the bridge of my nose. “He’s not dangerous. He’s just an idiot.”
Bertram has shoved me behind him again, as though pulling me out of a valley of flames. There’s a concerned crease on his brow, much like the one he had when he coaxed me out of my broken-down car.
Was my engine dying also Waylen’s doing?
I stare at him, not fighting Bertram’s protective force field.
I see a glimpse of the man he was before we were married.
Soft-spoken and mild, until suddenly he wasn’t.
It was that unexpected edge that lured me in, made me give myself to him.
It’s the reason we ended up conceiving Collette one winter night beside a roaring fireplace in his apartment.
But he’d put that side of him away when we said our vows and he gave up this life. I had forgotten it existed—almost.
“You know this man?” Bertram asks. “He works for—”
“He doesn’t work for Annie,” I assure him.
“Who?” Waylen asks, when the driver finally lowers his gun. But he at least has the sense not to take another step, and to keep his palms visible.
“He’s my husband.” I sigh, and turn on Waylen. “What are you doing here?”
He hesitates, but the anger in my eyes—despite my cool tone—scares him more than any gun ever could.
His shoulders drop, and then his hands. He sits on the concrete. The sight of him in his pressed khakis and white blazer—which he so lovingly ironed with the Sunday laundry—is distressing and yet somehow so romantic in a way that only I would see. He’s broken.
“Please, Margaux,” he says, staring down at the ground. It’s stained with puddles of old oil. “Please, I just want you to come home.”
Bertram doesn’t stop me when I approach Waylen, perhaps because he’s too perplexed by the sight before him.
I crouch in front of Waylen, my thighs burning because I refuse to sit on the dirty concrete in my clean dress.
He won’t raise his head to look at me, but I see the bleariness of his eyes. Are those—tears?
I want to hug him. To pity him. To revert back to the young twentysomething I was when we met and his eyes could melt me like a puddle.
But I have been married to this man for more than a decade now, and I know what will happen if I turn soft.
We’ll go home, make reckless, passionate love in the middle of the day, and he’ll hope that my hazy post-sex brain will forget all about it.
That’s what he wants. That’s who he thought he was marrying, and if I give up my vigilantism, my edge will go along with it.
At least, that’s what he thinks.
“Waylen, really,” I say. “What are you trying to do?”
“I just want you to come home,” he says.
I grab his chin, forcing him to look at me.
He swallows hard. “Collette is a mess, can’t you see that?
” he says. “You’re forcing her to socialize with Elodie’s horrible daughter, and don’t get me started on Elodie.
The choices you’re making, the things you’re getting up to. I don’t even recognize you anymore.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I say, staying firm. “That was you at the hospital, too, wasn’t it?”
I feel a sick dread at the thought of him following me with that AirTag, knowing everywhere I’ve been.
Has he figured out that Mr. X is in the hospital?
If so, he’ll wonder why I’m going to visit him when I’ve never met with him in person for our missions together.
He’ll want to know why I’m speaking to his doctors, why I care so much about his health.
Worse, if he finds out how sick Mr. X is, he’ll be glad.
He’ll hope this means that my spy work will die with him.
I can’t let him find out about my past. I can’t let him know that Mr. X is my brother. He’ll piece too many things together and ruin everything.
Isn’t it enough that I’ve given you my stupid, traitorous heart, Waylen?
I would prefer he accused me of an affair than know the truth about my past. In his mind, Mr. X was never more than a boss to me. I thought about telling him the truth, but I can only stand to share so much.
But if Waylen is wondering what I was doing at the hospital, he doesn’t ask. He only nods. “Yes. Yes, it was me.”
“Every time?” Bertram asks.
Waylen doesn’t look at him, seeming almost to have forgotten he was standing behind me. “Yes,” he says. “All of it.”
“Why are you following us?” Bertram asks the question before I can get the words out.
I stand, and when Waylen doesn’t follow suit, I grab his arms and force him to come up and face me.
There’s a flash of something angry in his eyes—something jealous and dark—and then it’s gone, traded once again for contrition.
Nobody saw it but me. I’m the only one who ever looks closely enough. Blink and you’d miss it.
He looks at me like a man defeated, as though I hold the strings to his heart and the fate of our marriage. “I did it for us,” he tells me, ignoring the fact that it was Bertram’s question. “I hoped you would finally see how dangerous this all is, and it would scare you into quitting.”