Chapter 2
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
No. No. No.
No. That wasn’t possible. There was no way. We had been careful. We used protection, and I was on the birth control shot. Jack had said he couldn’t have kids. With the scars across my stomach from my stabbing ten years ago, I didn’t think I could either.
It was my first time for god’s sake! There was no way. Even though I took the test, I didn’t expect it to amount to anything.
But the little blue plus sign peered up at me. Clear as day. Fuck.
I knew something was off. Wrong. I was two weeks late.
But I had held out hope that it was due to my work with the Almeidas.
That they had given me so little to eat that my cycle had gotten off track.
Then there was the chamomile. Tea that tasted like death and dying until a few weeks ago.
And there was the tell-tale nausea. I had a decently strong stomach, except when hormones were involved, and I’d been sick enough to know that something wasn’t right.
I sat curled up on the bathroom floor, trembling.
I didn’t know what to do. How to feel. Other than completely and utterly shaken.
I hadn’t really given much thought about whether or not I wanted children.
They seemed so far out of reach. I knew I wanted the choice on whether or not to have them.
But given what all of the doctors had said post-stabbing…
I never held much hope. And the life I led because of the stabbing wasn’t really conducive to bringing a child into the world
So much violence.
So much wrong.
I didn’t even know if I was good with kids. Sure, I’d gotten a bunch of them out of cults. I’d been around them in group settings, like with the Almeidas. But one-on-one? And for prolonged periods of time? Fuck.
What did this mean if the FBI found out?
The terms of my release into FBI custody had required me to be on birth control, precisely so I wouldn’t be in this situation.
So, I wouldn’t be… I couldn’t even think the word.
Not when it was about me. That would make it real. Even more so than the positive test.
What would it mean for the contract, for my deal with the FBI, with Jack?
Fuck. What was I going to tell Jack? Oh god. Jack. Jack, who wanted nothing more in the world than to have a child. Jack who thought he couldn’t have children. And now, I carried a little passenger. Part me. Part Jack.
Get a hold of yourself.
I took a deep shuddering breath. I needed something to hold onto. Something to keep my thoughts from spinning further out of control.
What was the term I used? Passenger. Passenger seemed like the right word. It was less scary. Less overwhelming. Less potentially life changing.
I took another breath, more stable this time.
I didn’t need to make any decisions right now. I needed to allow myself to clear my head. Think everything through. All the way through and come up with a plan. Figure out what I needed to do. What was right for me, and my situation. Because there were options.
The first thing I needed to do was get rid of the evidence.
Because Todd had warned me about the FBI’s tendency to dig into the affairs of people in its employ.
“It’s the FBI,” he’d signed when he noticed my unease with the FBI-gifted roses after our return from the Almeidas. He’d held onto the flowers until we got to our apartment building. “If you don’t want them to know, you handle the evidence at home.”
I didn’t think Jack or Todd would be rooting around in my garbage, but given that my world had just been turned upside down, I didn’t want to take any chances.
But having a task, something to do, was enough motivation for me to get off the floor, wrap up the test along with its packaging, and dispose of it in the central garbage chute. There, at least, the test couldn’t be tied back to me.
One task done.
And that felt good. Like I had a semblance of control.
So, I assigned myself another task—rest. I wasn’t going to be useful to anyone, never mind myself, if I didn’t get some sleep. Give myself a chance to recover, passenger or no.
I drew my blinds, stripped down to my underwear, and crawled into bed. Holding onto Lawrence’s letter, unopened, in my hands, I watched my name in Lawrence’s consistently legible scrawl fall in and out of focus as my vision blurred. My eyelids grew heavy.
I let myself be tired. I was tired. So tired. I had been tired before the unexpected visit to FBI headquarters. Before the Muffin Man interrupted my plans.
Now, I was home. My home. In my bed. Lawrence’s letter smooth and cool beneath my fingertips. Like I had a piece of him with me.
I fell asleep knowing I wasn’t alone. And what a comforting thought that was.
?
The next few days were a blur.
I rarely ventured from my bed. I slept like it was my job. I ate from the packaged and instant foods Jack and Todd had stocked in my pantry. I didn’t leave the apartment. I didn’t get dressed. I was the physical embodiment of the seventh deadly sin—sloth.
But even in my sloth-like state, there were things I managed to do.
Like tending to my wounds, including the tulip brand between my thumb and pointer finger.
I showered. I moisturized my split lip into oblivion.
And despite how counterintuitive it was, I figured out that eating, especially candy, somehow kept my escalating waves of nausea at bay.
I also opened the letter from Lawrence. Though I waited an entire day before I worked up the courage.
The idea of what he might have said was almost better than knowing. Unopened, the letter could be anything I wanted it to be. Kind words. A favorite memory. An inside joke. Naming the people responsible for killing him so I could get revenge on his behalf...
But I should have known better than to expect a direct heartfelt letter with his last words. Words of encouragement. Love. Something feel-good mixed in with the coded language Mads warned me about.
Instead, I got a series of numbers written in short lines:
11121314131521
142412121343444215332512
221214332534331543121513
1513343312
14321511121532144344153112
1444431513135434454243
151313325413345112
1315524212332312
24344542445234343312
2542142424143321343212
And that was it. Nothing else. No quick little note in plain language, just for me.
Apparently, nothing in my world was allowed to be easy.
Everything had barriers, hurdles, riddles, locks, or obstacles that I needed to overcome.
And while I did like games, I would have appreciated something simple, just this once.
Fortunately, the code looked familiar. With five being the highest digit, and each line an even grouping of numbers, Lawrence had used a Polybius square to encode the text.
Something we’d used semi-frequently. More so when we were kids, passing letters to each other about our parents when we didn’t want them to find out what we were saying.
The Polybius squares we made were essentially five-by-five grids, where each pair of numbers corresponded with a letter.
11, for example, represented the letter placed in the first square, and if there wasn’t further coding, that letter would typically be A.
55, on the other hand, would represent Z.
Polybius squares were also occasionally helpful with our Leslie’s Pies work.
But we’d agree on a key beforehand. A random word or phrase to change the alphabet to further prevent our messages from being decoded if they were intercepted by anyone other than us.
Perennial favorites were birds with five letter names, like robin, finch, heron, crane, raven, or quail.
But when I translated the first and second line using any of our frequently used keys, I got pure gibberish. Like ROBIBNA / IEOOBSTTCNKFO or CRANAEB / NGRRASTTDELHR.
Decoding was time consuming. And frustrating.
I felt like my mind was working through a fog.
Like there was something obvious I couldn’t see, which only irritated me further.
I went so far as to translate the entirety of the message with an assortment of the usual suspects just so I could read the message backwards.
Then I tried aligning the letters vertically like he had written in his letter.
But nothing.
There was something I was missing. If I could just figure out what it was…
I worked in bits and spurts. Once I exhausted my mind, I’d allow myself to sleep. And when I slept it was unusually deep. Like I was dead to the world.
?
Something told me to get up. That there was a presence in my room. Someone other than me. Other than my passenger. I fought the heavy blanket of sleep that wanted to keep me under. I wrestled with it, kicking and clawing my way to the surface.
Someone was standing in the doorway to my bedroom. I was sure of it. And they sounded out of breath. Possibly angry.
Fucking Mads. It hadn’t even been a week and he was already going back on his word.
And I wasn’t going to be nice about it.
Even with my eyes closed, I knew I didn’t have much by way of weapons within reach. I did however manage to fall asleep with a pen in my hand.
It would have to do.
Without warning, I spun around and whipped the pen into the doorway.
Thwack! It made contact. “Ugh.”
I knew that grumble. And it wasn’t Mads.
My eyes blinked into focus. The familiar figure looming in my doorway belonged to Todd.
“What the hell, Delilah?” He was rubbing his forehead where I hit him with the pen.
“I thought you—what are you doing here?” I got out of bed and made to cross the room, but felt a whisper of cooled air caress my breast. I’d forgotten how much I hadn’t been wearing, and promptly crossed my arms over my chest. My room was dark enough. Todd likely didn’t notice.
Unfazed, he tossed my phone onto the bed. The illuminated lock screen showed dozens of missed messages. “You didn’t answer your phone. Nothing for days. Days! We thought something happened.”