The Takedown

Chapter 18

18

Throughout dinner, I bide my time, desperate for this all to be over, desperate to speak to my sister in private. Conversation is a little stilted. Grandma Ruby does the heavy lifting, chatting about the Christmas decorations on Main Street, all the lit-up candy canes that she’s positioned on the pavement, and then, out of nowhere, comes the baby talk. Johnny’s mom is all about the baby talk. When is Calla thinking of conceiving? Would she consider IVF if she had fertility issues, to ensure that she’s continuing the Jones family line? And would she pass the green bean casserole? Grandma Ruby deflects this rather tactlessly—but mercifully—with a story about moose trails on the Canadian border; how she even jumped there conversation-wise is never discussed, but Calla seems grateful for it.

I keep waiting for Calla to get up from the table. Use the powder room. Go fetch another bottle of wine. But she stays firmly rooted in her chair, maintaining the charade. As soon as the yeast roll basket empties, Grandma Ruby asks me if I wouldn’t mind refilling it. I give Calla a discreet head bob, hoping she’ll follow me into the kitchen. Instead, Nick does.

Something in my stomach ripples.

“I need to talk to you,” he says seriously, face wrinkled with worry. Real worry? Fake worry? Don’t believe a thing he says. “You think we can go outside for a second? Or upstairs?”

I chuck a few rolls into the basket, their doughy heft crashing against the cloth . Sentimental asshole , Johnny said. That’s not Nick . Maybe you were easy. “I don’t want to leave dinner for too long. We should—”

“Please, Sydney,” he says, dropping his voice to a hushed whisper, hidden under the Christmas music. “I think you’ve been fed the wrong idea. Actually, I take that back. I know you’ve gotten the wrong idea.”

My gaze snaps to him, his face equally tense and desperate. I’m fighting hard to keep up appearances, but the concrete is cracking. Scratch that. The concrete is all over the fucking floor. It’s in chunks. It’s in dust.

The color leaches from Nick’s cheeks. “This is what he does, Sydney, he—” Nick cuts himself off with a biting sigh, neck craning, looking way into the dining room, and suddenly, he’s opening the pantry door and gently shoving me inside. One of his hands presses against the small of my back.

“Hey!” What’s he planning? What’s he going to do next? Rolls abandoned on the countertop, I half trip into the pantry, stumbling over tiny tubs of flour on the floor, heart pounding. “You don’t think this is suspicious?” I hiss.

Nick shuts the pantry door and yanks on the overhead bulb, yellow light tumbling all around us. He’s replaced the christmas sweater with an actual Christmas sweater, tiny blue-hooved reindeer prancing across his chest; he looks so cheery and so sad. Don’t care. The pantry walls close in, frosted glass sugar jars and boxes of starch teetering on shelves. “My handler reviewed the latest recording,” Nick says, whispering so low, he’s barely audible. “That’s why I was looking at my phone at dinner. I know what Johnny said to you, and it’s not true , Sydney. I’m sure you think I’ve double-crossed you, triple -crossed you, but Johnny’s just—he’s doing what Johnny’s does best. He’s making people doubt themselves. He’s telling you the exact thing you need to hear least.”

I cross my arms high over my chest, shoulders bunching. “Well, you don’t really know me, so—”

“Don’t do that,” Nick groans, like I’ve just punched him in the gut. “ Please don’t do that.”

“Do what? We don’t know each other. Obviously we don’t.”

Nick’s throat tightens so painfully, I can see it. “I know this looks bad, but if you’d let me explain... about a year ago, Johnny had his suspicions. There was a mole in my department who told Johnny about my dad and was starting to pick apart my deep cover. I had to pretend to Johnny that I’d join CSIS for him. Follow in my father’s footsteps for him, become a double agent for him, be his guy on the inside.”

The breath continues to leave my chest. “And you didn’t think this was information you should’ve shared with me?”

“You already were struggling to trust me, and I...” His voice breaks. “I didn’t want to worry you. I didn’t want to give you a reason to doubt, when it’s complicated, and it didn’t look good. I swear to god, I have never once said that to a woman at a bar. Johnny was always joking about how I should use it, but I never did. Please, Sydney. I swear to you. You can still trust me.”

“Can I?” I press, voice utterly cold. Because I’ve already made my decision. I will never trust a single thing he says, ever again.

“Yes,” Nick whispers. He breathes out a hard sigh through his nose. “I want you to know everything about me. You’re the first new person that I’ve trusted in about three years, and—”

One of my hands flings up to yank off the light, while the other clasps over Nick’s mouth. His lips press fully into my palm, the slight tickles of his breath washing over my skin. A shiver runs straight through my core. I’ve heard something. Someone has very tactfully tiptoed into the kitchen and is lingering close to the pantry door. Nick and I are entirely motionless, like the sugar jars. We wait. Wait a little longer.

Before Grandma Ruby swings open the door.

To her immense credit, she gives a little jump but does not question the undeniable oddity of this situation. I’m not sure what she thinks we’re doing in here—this close together, my hand dropping from Nick’s mouth; all she asks is, “Could you pass the extra bag of salt, pumpkin?”

It’s right by my head. Silently, I spin, grab, and hand her the seasoning.

“Thank you,” she says, shutting the door.

“I should...” I tell Nick, never finishing the sentence. His fingertips reach out, brushing mine, and he’s still saying words at my back as I flee.

Dinner doesn’t last much longer after that. Nick and I filter separately back to the table, leaving that conversation like an untreated wound. Forks clink. We eat a winter salad. Arugula. Somewhere under the table, Sweetie Pie knee-surfs for morsels of passed food; I slip her a scrap of turkey—and then a whole mouthful from the palm of my hand. Johnny carves more of the turkey, picking up the knife and slicing into the bird, chopping thick, jagged pieces—and every once in a while, he sends another flash of a smile in my direction.

You , I think. You are going down. Down to the ground. Bucko.

And then, it’s done.

Dinner is finally done. Compliments are given to the chef, and to whoever prepared that mountain of macerated cheese (thank you, thank you) before Johnny leaves with his parents. It’s bad luck to see the bride much past the rehearsal dinner. Everyone goes their separate ways: Johnny to one of the seaside hotels down the road, alongside Mr. and Mrs. Jones; Nick, to take out the trash for Grandma Ruby in the kitchen; and Calla and me, upstairs. Farther upstairs. Into the attic.

When the door clicks closed, she lets go of an enormous breath, shaking her hands like they’re wet and water is flicking off them. “I didn’t think I was going to be able to do that,” she gasps. “I mean, I sort of thought that I could, but this isn’t exactly the wedding scenario I dreamed.” She captures my gaze, breath cascading in tendrils from her mouth. “Sydney, it is absolutely freezing up here.”

“Yeah.” I nod, letting the honesty go. “But the rest of the house is bugged.”

Calla blinks, anger resurfacing. “You bugged our house?”

“No, but it might as well have been me. And I am so sorry. Even saying that feels trivial and inconsequential, and I—”

Shaking her head, Calla cuts me off. “No, just... stop. I don’t want an apology. I just want... God, I don’t even know what I want. For someone to tell me this is all a bad dream. A few days ago, I was thinking to myself, maybe I’m getting cold feet. It’s normal to get cold feet. That’s what all the blogs say. Of course, I barely had time to read the blogs, because this whole thing has been happening at a million miles an hour!” Calla shakes her head harder. “And I’ve hated that. Absolutely hated that. You’re right, I do like to plan, it makes me feel safe—but I just wanted to be this spontaneous person that Johnny wanted me to be, this ‘down for anything’ person, and... Is my vibe check off?”

I don’t really know how to answer that. “I don’t really know how to answer that,” I say.

She massages the base of her throat. “Maybe I’m, like, too used to working with little kids and I don’t know how to process adults anymore, but when Johnny and I were driving back, I fell asleep in the passenger seat, and I had the weirdest dream, Sydney. I mean, the weirdest dream. It’s Christmas morning. We’re all sitting around the tree. Suddenly I get this really sick feeling. Like something’s wrong. When I reach up, my pajama shirt is wet. And sticky. And red. I think, Oh my god, I’m bleeding, why am I bleeding? But then I realize it’s cranberry sauce. Not even homemade cranberry sauce. The canned kind, with the ridges? And there are just... these chunks all over me, and then I realize, I’m not in my pajamas at all. I’m in my wedding dress.”

She is going to need a lot of therapy. “That sounds awful,” I say, utterly sympathetic.

“That’s what I thought! I woke up, told Johnny about my dream, and he laughed —he thought it was a joke or something—and it just brought all of these other things to the surface. All of these reservations that I’d been shoving down because this was supposed to be different , he seemed perfect in so many ways, and I loved the idea of him. Of this chemistry we had, and how he just... he just took up the whole room. Suddenly I had this huge social life, and we were going to all these places, and he told me I was ‘the one’ super early. That felt good. That felt like something. He said he’d never leave me, and those were the exact words I needed to hear. But the lie... the lies ...” She gulps. “I think he does love me, for real, but I also think I was good for his image. A kindergarten teacher who probably doesn’t ask a lot of questions. But I want you to know—I need you to know—I was asking questions. Right from the very beginning. Johnny just always had an answer for everything. Why were his cousins knocking at the door in the middle of the night? Marriage trouble . Why does he own so much duct tape? He shops at Costco .”

“He actually does shop at Costco,” I admit, nose scrunching. “It’s in his file. He’s a Gold Star Member.”

In tiny, tight circles, Calla rubs a finger between her eyebrows. “I’m numb right now. And furious. I’m trying to process this. I’m failing. I heard what you said at the ice-skating rink—about your job, about Johnny—and suddenly I’m speeding off like some NASCAR driver, and I just wanted time to think about how this all could’ve gone so, so wrong.”

I swallow, knowing that we’re getting to the extra-hard part. “Where’d you go?”

Calla starts pacing back and forth in the cold. “I just drove around in circles at first. I was mentally skimming over the last few months, remembering all the things Johnny had told me, wondering how much of it was true—like, is it normal to keep handcuffs in your bedroom? I thought it was... you know, the other reason. It could’ve easily been the other reason! I told myself if I broke into his house and didn’t find anything else like that—”

My breath stills. “You broke into his house?”

“Oh, I have a key. But also, no.” She swivels on her heels, changing directions. “I started to get kind of paranoid. If there was even the smallest chance that what you were saying was true—and why the hell would you lie to me about something like that—I didn’t want to be followed. So I ditched the Escalade at my friend Tyler’s house.”

One of my eyebrows quirks. “Your first boyfriend, Tyler?”

“Yeah, he’s still in town. That’s just the first nonpublic place I thought of. There are woods all around his property. I also sort of invited him to the wedding, which is ridiculous , because the wedding’s not even going to happen, but he was just standing there—”

“Calla,” I say, grabbing her lightly by the shoulders, holding her in place. “Focus.”

She nods abruptly. “I took Tyler’s car so Johnny couldn’t track me, drove all the way to Boston, and went to my apartment. I thought it might trigger some memories, anything that he’d said to me over the course of our relationship, and what felt off. And it did.”

“Go on...” I press her gently.

“You said I was near one of the crime scenes? In Buffalo? I was visiting Diana. She was selling some of her specialty bear sweaters in this gallery there, and I’d never been to Buffalo... and Johnny told me explicitly not to go. Right there in my living room. I didn’t understand it. He was really adamant about it, but I’d already booked the tickets, and I wanted to see my friend.”

Calla gnaws at her lip, her eyes watering. “But he didn’t stop me. He knew that if anything went sideways with that heist in Buffalo, it would look really bad that I was in the area. I was literally just buying gas at the gas station! That’s all. But he must’ve realized that would look suspicious, and he let me walk right into it. Which means he cared more about the money than me, right? He put his crime over... over us. Over whatever we have. And I’m swinging back and forth, because half of me is so mad about all the lies, and half of me is totally numb. It’s not just that I believed him; it’s that I wanted to believe him. I wanted all the fairy-tale bullshit and the perfect man who rides in on the white horse out of fucking nowhere.”

My head almost rears back. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Calla swear. “He did actually say that he wanted to give you a horse at the altar.”

“In our living room ? Where would it fit?” She kneads at her eyes. “Never mind what Sweetie Pie would think. She is really afraid of horses.” With the sleeve of her sweater, she wipes the bottom of her nose, which has started to run a bit. “I think I just wanted one guy not to disappoint me like Dad did. I know you don’t want to see him again...”

My stomach tightens. Throat tightens. “It’s not that.” In fact, I’m picturing it. Him, walking into the foyer in a rumpled blue suit, hair comb-parted. Maybe his hair’s longer now. It would be, wouldn’t it? And his face would scan the guests, searching for Calla, searching for me. That would be the perfect result. The best ending.

But that’s the movie ending. The tidy strings. Real life is messier than that.

“He actually called the house,” I breathe out.

Calla catches my gaze, her eyes a little bloodshot, her voice emerging in a rasp. “He did?”

“Yeah.” I’m struggling to keep it together. “Yeah, he did. I... I, uh, answered the phone, and he didn’t recognize my voice, he thought it was Grandma Ruby, and he basically said that he’s not coming to the wedding, and I know you don’t have the father you deserve, and you don’t have the sister you deserve—”

In a flash, Calla bursts forward, wrapping her arms around me. It feels like coming home. It feels like forever ago. Her chin settles on my shoulder, and I lean in, breathe in, hold her tight. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “Don’t say that. You’re here, despite everything. Just because I’m not going to get that perfect reunion doesn’t mean I’ve totally lost my faith in you . You came back. This—right here—is coming through on who you used to be. Who you’ve always been.”

That just about breaks my heart. Also, heals me a little. Calla’s right. I have drifted away from myself, but this holiday, it’s like I’m stumbling back ashore.

Even just speaking about our dad, out loud...

Sometimes you can’t heal if you don’t recognize the damage. Sometimes you have to know exactly where it hurts, and why it hurts, before you can start mending yourself.

I speak, throat still raw. “Do you ever just really, really miss how it was?”

She nods against my shoulder, hugging me tighter. “All the time,” she whispers. “I have this... memory of Mom and Dad, this specific one that always replays in my head, and it’s so clear that I’m not even sure if it’s real.”

“Tell me,” I murmur.

Calla takes a little step back, wiping away a tear with the heel of her hand. “I was really little, because we were still in that condo, way before we moved in with Grandma Ruby, and it must’ve been Christmas Eve. I think that I thought I heard Santa. Some sort of noise in the living room. So I round the corner, and there’s Mom, and there’s Dad, and they’re just holding each other. That’s the whole memory. They’re just holding each other by the Christmas tree, these multicolored lights all around them, really bright, and I knew that one day I wanted someone to love me that much.”

“That’s the thing,” I rasp out, instinctively thumbing my tattoo. “You have that, Calla. Grandma Ruby and I, we love you to the moon and back... And I’m sure it’s a real memory. That’s the biggest thing I remember about them, too. How close they were.”

Calla breathes out a sigh, almost like relief. “Good, because... sometimes I don’t know if I’m just remembering stories that Grandma Ruby’s told me, or things that I’ve seen about moms on TV, and with Dad, I have really random images. Like when he signed up for the dunking booth in thirty-degree weather, or him doing my hair with a... vacuum hose? And the baseball games. I loved those baseball games.”

My forehead scrunches up. “You did?”

Every summer before school started, Dad, Calla, and I would take in a home game. We’d buy a Cape Hathaway Huskies foam finger and eat the peanuts from shells and wrap ourselves in fleece sweatshirts as the sun set. Dad would kick his feet up on the back of the seat in front of him, his hands behind his head, and he’d say, This, girls, is the closest thing to happiness. And it was my happiness, too. My glimmer of it. In the years after he left, Calla and I kept going—but I’d see the after-shadow of him in the stands. Hear his happiness quote, which felt so foreign then. And my grief got me. The CIA became an excuse to stop attending those end-of-summer games, to stop remembering, to stop doing something that cracked me wide open.

“I did,” Calla says. “I mean, not the baseball part, but everything else.”

“Then we’ll go,” I tell her, meaning it. “We’ll start going again. This summer. Or even before that. In the spring. Whenever the season opens, we’ll be there. Things will be different from now on.”

Calla pauses. She thinks. She says, “I believe you.”

It’s a simple statement. It’s also exactly what I need to hear. And I feel myself mending a little more in all the cracked places. How can she be so loving, so forgiving, when I’m not even ready to forgive myself?

“What do I do, though?” she rasps, leading us back to the present. “About the wedding?”

“What do you want to do?” I ask her gently.

“I can’t marry him, Syd.”

“I know.”

“Everyone’s coming to the wedding.”

I place my hands on her shoulders. “Don’t worry about them. Let me worry about them.”

“I thought if I came back,” Calla says, “I thought if I held Johnny in place, kept all of his family in place for the wedding, that would give you time to... work something out. And it would give me time to remember a few more things. There is... there’s one more thing I remember.”

I step back a touch, look at her. “Yeah?”

She chews her lip. “Johnny has a storage unit for his mountain bikes. I found the key last week and asked him about it.”

“Okay...” I say, pulse rising again.

Calla blinks. “Sydney. He hates biking.”

—

Far down the street, near our neighborhood’s gazebo, I dial Gail’s number in the snow. My boots crunch as I fast-walk back and forth, rock salt under my heels. She doesn’t answer. Someone else does. “You’ve reached the after-hours offices of Clara’s Chicken and Homemade Waffles; how may I direct your call?”

I don’t even hesitate. “Put Gail on the phone.”

The voice on the other end of the line doesn’t waver, either. “Last name? And what department does she work in, please?”

Heart hammering, I massage my forehead with the palm of my hand. “This is Sydney Swift, and it’s an emergency. Just transfer me to Gail.”

“I’m sorry,” the voice says, utterly unaffected, “but we have dozens of departments: marketing, HR, chicken resources—”

I’m fed up with the runaround because we are running out of time . “My sister knows about a storage unit.”

The response is immediate. “Hold, please!”

A sharp beep follows before there’s shuffling, and the crisp sound of Gail’s voice bleeds over the line. “Sydney.”

I dive right in. “Porky’s. He’s hiding stolen goods at Porky’s.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Yes,” I say, sparkling wine still coursing through my system. “Not the point. It’s a storage facility off the Massachusetts Turnpike. There’s a little pig on the keychain. That’s where Johnny’s hiding his cut of the stolen goods. I’ve been racking my brain for days, wondering how the Joneses managed to shift that much high-value contraband without a single trace on the dark web, and that’s the thing, Gail—they probably couldn’t do it all at once. They’d have to store it somewhere, unload it in batches. And my guess is that’s where the rest of the C4 is hidden, too. Because they’re not using all of it for some bridge, are they? If we act tonight , I’m talking right now , we can have all the evidence we need by morning. Before the heist even goes down. Locate the unit, get a warrant, head in with a task force.”

“You want me to put together a spontaneous task force,” Gail deadpans, “on Christmas Eve.”

“On Christmas Eve,” I underline. “Who knows how much longer the storage unit will remain operational. If you want to nail them before the next heist, avoid any bloodshed for those armored vehicle drivers and any traffic near that bridge, the window is already closing.”

The longest pause in human history ensues.

“Are you still there?” I ask.

“I’m thinking, Sydney.” In the background, computer keys clack, and Gail stalls. “Was the Chicken and Homemade Waffles office believable?”

“Thirty percent believable. You would lose most people at ‘chicken resources.’?”

“We’ll reformulate. My assistant, she’s new.” One final clack on the keys follows. Gail releases a deep sigh. “Theoretically, I could gather a team of four federal officers in the South Boston area. And theoretically, we could obtain a warrant this evening and mobilize in the early hours of the morning, placing a second team outside of your neighborhood—ready to swoop in when the evidence is seized... But you’d have to stall until the team arrives. Keep Johnny and the Joneses in place. Maintain the charade.”

I nod in the dark. “I can do that.”

“You’re absolutely positive?”

I nod again. “Just as long as you can get it done before the wedding.” I check the clock on my phone, feeling my stomach drop. “Eleven hours and counting.”