CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"The Achilles Heel Called Love"
We need to talk, the text had read.
Priya stared at her phone. She had been so consumed by trying to figure out Monica, by the garden and the anagram, that she had let other things slip.
She had not checked on Lila. She had not followed up on their last conversation, in which Lila had mentioned casually, that she thought she had found something worth looking at.
Priya had been so preoccupied that she’d mentally put it down for later.
She had been leaving many things for later, and she was beginning to understand that later had a cost.
The news of Lila's death had been a low blow that landed without warning.
"Her face was unrecognisable," the reporter had said flatly, his words landing like an emotional blow.
Lila's body had been found under Tao's statue, which the investigating officers had noted as significant and the press had been having a field day with it.
Just like Tao's case, he police believed it was a result of the victim being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The pattern was not invisible. The pattern was simply not yet provable.
Monica had volunteered to organise the memorial. Of course she had. Priya had accepted the invitation to attend not out of respect for Monica but because proximity to Monica was still the best intelligence-gathering tool she had.
?
The café was full. The memorial had drawn a significant crowd, which Monica had clearly anticipated.
She stood at the centre of it in a perfectly fitted black gown looking immaculate, working the room with smooth professionalism.
She moved through grief the way she moved through life, with control, grace, an act so polished it was almost impossible to fault.
Almost.
Priya had taken a table in the quieter corner of the café where she could see the room without being its centre. She watched Monica circulate, noted the precision of her empathy, the way she deployed touch and eye contact and the right words at the right moments. She was very good.
Then Taron walked in.
The room shifted. Cameras turned. Reporters moved. A Montgomery was present. Taron navigated it with composed, acknowledging no one in particular, looking for no one specifically.
He did not look for Monica.
He looked past her without pausing when she appeared in his eyeline, and for just a moment, two or three seconds at most, her facade slipped. Monica's face showed something that was not grief and not indifference but something underneath both of those, something genuine and unguarded and raw.
Priya watched it happen and did not look away.
She had her angle.
She texted three words to Taron, I found something.
?
Monica had a tiny, involuntary grin on her face as she watched Priya slip out of the gathering.
Priya had been watching her all evening, which she had noted and managed around with ease.
Monica wasn't afraid of Priya's suspicions.
Suspicions without evidence would simply just not hold up, and Priya would find nothing because there was nothing to find.
She had been careful. She was always careful.
What she had not anticipated was the voice behind her, soft and oozing sadness and regret.
"I wish Lila hadn't cancelled on our plans," a voice said.
Monica went very still. She turned slowly toward the source. A girl she vaguely recognised from Lila's wider circle was talking to a friend, her eyes red from crying, her voice cracking on the words.
"She texted me that morning and said she'd found something but she wouldn't say what. She said she'd tell me that evening." The girl's voice broke. "She never called, now I know why."
Monica absorbed this, her internal alarms blaring loudly. If Lila had told someone she had found something, that someone was now a loose thread. Loose threads had a way of finding their way into the hands of people like Priya.
She moved toward the girl, ready to extend her warmth.
"Hi, Stacy, right?" Monica said, her voice soft and her expression open with exactly the right amount of pain in it.
The girl's face shifted into something between surprise and gratitude at being recognised.
Monica smiled and pulled her gently into a hug and let her cry briefly against her shoulder, and asked her quiet questions, listening to every word with her complete attention, making note of everything useful.
"Hang in there," Monica whispered, lovingly rubbing her back as she pulled away. "If you need anything, you come to me."
Taron, watching from across the room, saw the whole thing. How calculated it was turned his stomach. He walked out of the café a few minutes later and drove to the garden at St. Benedict's, not caring about how fast he was driving.
?
Priya was already there when he arrived, sitting on the low stone wall at the garden's edge, focused on her phone in her lap.
"What did you find?" Taron asked, dropping onto the wall beside her.
She turned her phone toward him. She had captured the moment in the café on a shaky but clear enough video: Monica's face when Taron walked past her. Two seconds of reality before the mask went back up.
"So what, we use her feelings against her?" Taron asked.
"We use her feelings to keep her close enough to make a mistake," Priya said. "She's almost never genuinely off guard. But around you she is. You saw it tonight. She couldn't help it."
Taron ran a hand through his hair. "You want me to pretend to want her back."
"I want you to stop pretending you don't care what happens to her," Priya said carefully. "Because you do, somewhere underneath all of this, and she can feel that. That's what makes it work. Not deception. Not lies. Just the parts of the truth that are useful."
Taron sat with this for a long time, looking at the garden in the dark. He’d thought about all of this sine his and Priya’s last conversation and though he hadn’t voiced it, he had silently agreed to go along with her plan.
"What do I actually have to do?" he asked.
"Nothing dramatic. Be present. Let her call you when she needs someone.
Respond. Let her feel like there is still something between you that is real, because there is, even if it's complicated by everything else. She will talk, Taron. It’s human nature, people want to talk to those who make them feel understood.
And when she does—" Priya's voice was quiet and steady. "We will be ready."
Taron nodded. He wasn’t completely at peace with what he was about to do but he understood that this was the best bet he had at actually finding out the truth.
"Okay," he said. "Tell me when you need me."