38. Cali
CALI
The knife hovers between us, edge glinting in the light.
Todd flinches back. He puts his hands up, palms out. "Whoa! Cal, it's me. It's just me."
"I can see that." But I don't lower the knife.
He looks awful. That's the first thing I really take in, now that my heart isn't trying to punch its way out of my chest. Todd Bradshaw, who irons his socks, who once sent back a shirt because the collar sat a quarter inch wrong, is standing on my steps in a shirt that looks like he slept in it, ran a marathon, then slept in it again.
There's gray stubble on his jaw. His eyes are sunk into his face. He smells like he hasn't showered.
He looks like I felt this morning.
"What are you doing here?" I ask.
"I need to talk to you."
"No."
It surprises me how easy it is to say that. A month ago, I'd have had a whole speech ready, a whole spreadsheet of grievances. Now, there's just the one word, and it's ammunition aplenty.
"Cal—"
"Todd, I have had the single worst night of my entire life.
I woke up an hour ago on my own kitchen counter, and I have a knife in my hand for reasons I am not going to explain to you.
So whatever this is, whatever you think you're going to say to me, the answer is already no. " I start to close the door. "Go home."
"I don't have a home," he cries out. "Cali. Please. I'm not here to— I know it's over. I know that. I'm not here to win you back, I'm not that stupid, I know I burned all of that down myself. That's not— God, that's not what this is."
I stop pushing the door.
Because there's something in his voice I've never heard before. In ten years of marriage, I never once heard Todd Bradshaw sound scared.
He sounds terrified now.
"You have thirty seconds," I say.
I keep the knife. It's hanging low at my side, but I make sure my grip on it is firm. New Cali doesn't hand her weapons back just because the man on her steps has a sad face. I learned that lesson in the most devastating way there is.
Todd swallows. His throat bobs. He glances over his shoulder, down the block in both directions, like he's checking for someone on his trail. That little movement does more to unsettle me than anything he's said so far.
"Can I come in?"
"No."
"Cali, this isn't— I can't say this out here."
"Then say it fast and say it quiet, because you're not coming into my house. Not ever again."
He closes his eyes and nods. When he opens them, he looks like a man about to jump off a bridge. "Men came to see me," he begins. "After the bank. After you— after the meeting."
I frown. "What kind of men?"
"Federal agents," he mumbles. "Or at least, that's what they said they were. They had the badges, the business cards, the whole nine yards. They sat me down in a conference room downtown and they asked me questions for hours."
A cold dread oozes down the back of my neck.
I've got a data engine upstairs that's currently screaming that the Akov Firm is not what it seems. It's a money-laundering front, one of many, all with roots reaching down into something that purposely avoids the light of day.
So who's to say that Ronan isn't capable of sending men who can play the part of feds to hound information out of Todd?
Or, conversely, who's to say that there aren't real feds who are trying to get after Ronan?
I can't say for sure. But it seems clear that somebody is looking.
And they got to Todd before they got to me.
"Questions about what?"
"About Akov." Todd's mouth twists as he says it. "They wanted to know how I found him, who introduced us, what he said, what I signed. Everything. They had copies of my retainer agreement, Cali. They knew things I never told anybody."
I don't say anything. I'm trying to stay rational and dispassionate, so that I don't lose my head here.
But the more the pieces arrange themselves into a few very obvious conclusions, the less I like it.
In fact, I hate it so much I want to slam the door and go back to bed and pretend none of this is happening.
But I don't. Because that's Old Cali, and Old Cali got eaten alive.
"Why are you telling me this?"
This is the part he came for. Because I need your help. You have to help me, I love you, you're the one that got away. Blah blah fucking blah. I'm braced for it, because if there's one thing Todd knows how to do, it's make everything revolve around him.
He doesn't do that, though.
Instead, he says the worst thing possible.
"Because your name came up."
I nearly drop the knife.
"They asked about you," Todd continues. The words start to come faster, tumbling out, like he's been holding them behind his teeth for days, weeks. "They know you built a tool that can find things no one else can find. And they know Akov's been circling you."
"They said that?" I ask. "'Circling'?"
He shrugs helplessly. "They didn't have to say it in those words.
But that's what they meant. Cali, listen to me.
They laid out the important part pretty clearly, and it paints you in one of two ways.
" He holds up a finger. "One, you're a victim.
Some poor, innocent woman whose ex sent her to a mob lawyer, and now, she's tangled up in something she doesn't understand.
If she's smart, she flips and helps them and they go easy on her in the aftermath.
" He holds up a second finger. It's quivering.
"Or number two. You're in it. You're a participant.
You built the machine that moves the money, or hides it, or finds it, and that makes you as guilty as Akov.
And if that's the case, then they'll squeeze you until you break. "
I stare at him.
"Th-that's insane," I stammer. "I work in supply chain fraud, for God's sake. I've never touched Ronan's money! I didn't even know about the— I found out an hour ago. I have never—"
"I know." He reaches out to placate me, but I back away because I do not want to be touched.
"I know that, Cali. But it doesn't matter what's true.
That's what I'm trying to tell you. They're feds, and the truth is irrelevant to them.
They want bad guys in jail and they aren't picky about which ones or how they get them.
So the only thing that matters is what kind of story they can build.
Right now, they can build either one. The one they pick depends on who talks to them first and what they say. "
I look down at the knife in my hand.
Just a few minutes ago, I heard a knock and grabbed a blade and got ready to fight for my life.
I stood in my own hallway certain that someone had come to make me disappear.
I thought it was Ronan's people. It never once occurred to me that there was a whole other set of hunters out there, ones with badges instead of guns, and that they already had me in their sights.
People vanish over this. That's what I thought upstairs. People like me.
I didn't know the half of it.
"Why are you here, Todd?" I ask again, because I truly want to know. "You hate me. You wanted to take everything from me. Why on God's green earth would you drag yourself over here at nine in the morning to warn me?"
He looks down at his shoes. They're the good ones, the Italian ones, but they're scuffed to hell.
"Because they're going to come for the kids, too," he croaks.
"Not to— not like that. But if this thing goes the way it can go, it splashes on everybody standing close.
I've done enough to them already." He looks up.
I'm shocked to see his eyes are wet and red-rimmed.
"I stole from their mother. I lied to them.
I was going to take them just to hurt you.
I know what I am, Cali. I've had a lot of time to sit with it lately.
Nobody wants to have a drink with me. Nobody returns my calls.
Paula won't look at me. It's very lonely, being me right now. Gives a man a lot of time to think."
I don't say anything. There's nothing in me that wants to comfort him, and I'm not going to pretend there is.
"I can't fix any of that," he says. "But I could tell you this.
So at least you'd have a head start. If it all goes bad, at least our kids can say their mother saw it coming.
" He wipes his face with the back of his hand, embarrassed by his display of emotion.
"That's it. There's no angle. Honestly, I don't have anything left to angle for. "
Against all odds, no matter how sick it makes me… I believe him.
I don't like him.
I don't trust him.
But I believe him.
Because he's got the same look on his face that I've got, that I saw in the mirror upstairs before I smashed it: the look of someone who has run out of stories to tell themselves.
I feel very tired and very awake at the same time.
"Okay," I say.
Todd frowns. "Okay?"
"Okay, you told me. You can go now."
"Cali—"
"I'm not being cold, Todd. I mean it. You told me the thing you came to tell me, and it was the first genuinely decent thing you've done in about two years.
Now, I need you to leave, because I have to think, and I can't do that with you standing on my steps looking like a kicked dog.
" I soften it, barely, because he did make the right choice for a change.
"Thank you. For the head start. I mean that. "
He nods and steps back uncertainly. He looks like he wants to say something else. Something about the kids maybe, or perhaps something about being sorry. I can see him decide not to as he comes to understand that there's no version of that sentence I want to hear right now.
"Take care of yourself, Cal," he says instead.
"I always have," I tell him. "That was kind of the whole problem, remember?"
He smiles. Though maybe that's the wrong word, because it's a wrecked, sad little thing.
Then he turns and stumbles down the steps.
I watch him hurry to the corner and check both ways again before he crosses, and then he's gone, swallowed up into the morning the way everything from my old life seems to disappear the moment I stop looking at it.
I close the door. Lock it.
Then I lean my back against the wall and I slide down it until I'm sitting on the floor of my own hallway. I drop the knife to the hardwood and put my head in my hands.
Think.
Think, Cali. Think.
The way I see it, there are three options.
Option one: I run to the feds first. I find whoever these men are and I walk in with my hands up. I'm the victim, here's everything I know, here's proof I never touched a single dirty dime. I bet the whole house on them believing me.
But...
Cooperating means putting myself inside the file.
My name will find a place—formally, on paper—in a federal investigation into a criminal organization.
I'm not even totally sure what RICO means, but I know it's the kind of word that gets thrown around in these situations and that it usually results in a lot of years in jail for a lot of people who are even remotely involved in the situation.
Federal agencies don't care much about who's a good person and who isn't. They care who's close. And nobody is closer to Ronan Akov's little data company acquisition than the woman who built it and slept in his bed.
My children's names would be in that file. Hayden. Isabella. Attached to it forever. One wrong move, one prosecutor who decides the participant story is better television than the victim story, and I've frog-marched my whole family into the blast radius.
So that leads me to option two: I do nothing.
I don't call anyone. I don't move. I keep my head down and I wait and I let it happen around me. For as long as that lasts, I pray that when the two sides finally collide, I'm small and unimportant enough that nobody bothers to come knocking.
It's kind of ironic: That's Old Cali's whole strategy, really. Make yourself little. Take up no room. Be less, do less. Subtract yourself from the equation.
Except doing nothing isn't safe. It just means I'm letting someone else choose. Either the feds pick me up as a participant, or Ronan's people conscript me into their story to save themselves. I swore I would never do that again. I'm in charge of my life now.
Not Todd.
Not Ronan.
Me.
Therefore, option two is out.
I've only got one real choice left.
I have to go to Ronan.
Not to forgive him. God, no. I have no intention of falling back into anything. But I can walk into that glass office on the forty-first floor with my own dashboard on my own laptop, sit down in one of his intentionally uncomfortable chairs, and show him that I am not a victim or a puppet.
I'm the only one who knows what he truly is.
So, if he wants any chance of getting out of this without all of us going down together, he needs me.
That's all I can do. Fight for what's mine. The company. The kids. My own name. All of it. With the only weapon I've ever been any good at.
Truth is, there's no clean answer. I'm running on hope, fumes, and caffeine. And everything I've ever loved is hanging in the balance.
I rise, pick up the knife, and return it to its space in the butcher's block. When I go back to the kitchen table, I see my phone is face-up next to the laptop. The last message on it is from midnight.
You're beautiful, Calista Meadows.
Read 12:01.
I never answered. And I don't intend to answer now.
I don't need Ronan Akov to tell me what I am anymore.
Only I get to decide that.