Chapter 6
THE FIRST INVESTIGATOR came back empty after nine days.
Julian sat in his office at Gubat with the report open on his desk and the Los Angeles skyline behind him and a cup of coffee he hadn’t touched going cold at his elbow.
The report was thorough. Katy Gates had quit Haven Country Club without notice.
Her last shift had been a Tuesday. Her mother, Amy, still lived at the same address in Silver Lake, still worked her paralegal job, still attended her Wednesday night meetings.
Amy hadn’t filed a missing persons report.
Amy hadn’t seemed distressed when the investigator’s associate, posing as a census worker, had spoken to her at the door.
Which meant Amy knew where her daughter was. Which meant Katy had chosen to leave.
He closed the report and opened his laptop.
The quarterly projections for Gubat’s Southeast Asian expansion were still on his screen, the same numbers he’d been studying for a week without processing a single digit.
The cursor blinked in a cell he’d forgotten the purpose of. He closed the laptop too.
The second investigator, hired a week later, was more expensive and less polite.
She specialized in skip traces and had a success rate she’d quoted at ninety-four percent.
She came back on day six with the same nothing.
Katy Gates had no active credit cards. No social media updates since prom night.
No cell phone pings outside a seventy-two-hour window that ended the night she’d disappeared.
The phone had gone dark somewhere in Pasadena and never come back on.
“Someone’s helping her,” the investigator told him over the phone. “This isn’t a nineteen-year-old covering her tracks. This is infrastructure. Whoever she’s with has resources.”
Reid Jamieson. Senator’s grandson. Old money, political connections, a family that had been making people vanish into the machinery of American power since before the country had a name for it.
Julian paid the investigator. Hired a third.
The third came back empty too.
He stopped eating on the twelfth day. Not a decision.
His body simply stopped requesting food.
He stood in his penthouse kitchen at two in the morning with the refrigerator open and the light falling on his face and a container of leftover pad thai in his hand, and he put it back and closed the door and stood in the dark.
Sleep was worse. He was sleeping in fragments, twenty-minute stretches that ended with him jerking awake to the phantom scent of clean cotton and something floral, the scent that had been fading from his memory for three weeks and was now more vivid than when she’d been standing in front of him.
His brain, deprived of her, was manufacturing her.
Filling his sleep with the copper of her hair and the green of her eyes and the image of her face at three fifteen across the terrace, and then filling his waking hours with the other thing.
The face she’d worn in the gymnasium doorway when she’d turned and seen him with Dionne, the grief so total it hadn’t resembled grief. It had resembled the end of everything.
Gubat’s board noticed. His CFO sent a carefully worded email about the Southeast Asian numbers.
His assistant rescheduled three meetings he’d forgotten and one he’d simply not shown up for.
The empire he’d built at twenty, the concrete and code and capital he’d poured over the wound of his father’s indifference, the proof that he couldn’t be discarded, hummed along without him, efficient and indifferent, and the indifference of his own creation felt like a mirror he didn’t want to face.
He faced it anyway. Every night. The bathroom mirror.
His mother’s eyes in his own face, and the question that had lived in his chest for sixteen years had a new shape now, a shape that fit the contours of a girl in a green dress who’d walked into her prom alone and held her chin up and then recognized him in the doorway and broken.
Was I not worth finding?
The question had followed him for half his life. Now it reversed itself, turned inside out, because he was the one who’d done the discarding and she was the one who’d vanished and the parallel was so exact it felt like a punishment designed specifically for him.
Power. That was the common thread. He’d had the power to keep her.
He’d had her in his hands, literally, her ribs under his palm and her pulse under his mouth and her voice saying his name like a prayer, and he’d chosen to believe a lie instead.
Not because the lie was convincing. Because the lie was safe.
Because Dionne’s version of Katy, the calculating girl who bragged and schemed and used people, was a girl he could walk away from.
And the real Katy, the one who ate lunch alone and said I don’t believe you and touched his face with trembling fingers and asked is this okay, that girl was terrifying, because that girl was honest, and honest people could see you, and being seen was the thing he’d been running from since he was thirteen years old and discovered his name wasn’t real.
The math was inescapable. He became his father. That was the truth he couldn’t outrun. El Diablo had the resources to find his stolen son and chose not to. Julian had the girl who loved him standing three feet away and chose to destroy her. The mechanics were different. The math was the same.
Worse. El Diablo had never pretended to care.
HE WENT TO DIONNE’S office on a Thursday.
Corner office. Twelfth floor. The desk was glass and chrome and the view was Wilshire, and Dionne was sitting behind it in a navy blazer with her dark hair pinned back and a legal brief open in front of her and a coffee cup from the place on the corner that charged nine dollars for a latte.
She glanced up when he walked in and smiled, and the smile was the warm, sisterly one, the one that had been in his life for seven years, and for the first time he saw it for what it was.
“Julian.” She stood. “I didn’t know you were coming by. Sit down. Do you want coffee?”
“No.”
The word was cold enough to make her pause. She sat back down. Folded her hands on the desk. Her eyes moved across his face, and he let her read what was there and calculate.
“What’s wrong?” Careful. Concerned. The good sister.
“Katy never talked to the other servers.”
The calculation behind her eyes went very still.
“She ate lunch alone. Every day. She never bragged about me to anyone, because she never talked to anyone. She was so quiet that a man who barely knew her picked up on it from across the patio.” He kept his voice level. It cost him everything he had. “You made it up. All of it.”
Dionne’s face went through three expressions in two seconds. Surprise, fear, and then iron. He recognized it, because he’d seen the same thing in his own mirror every night for a month: the face of a person deciding which version of themselves to be.
She chose the wrong one.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice was cool, lawyerly, the voice she used in depositions. “Katy is manipulative. She always has been. Her mother was the same way with our father.”
“Her mother was an addict who got clean and raised a daughter alone while your mother took the house and the car and the country club membership.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“You told me she was bragging. You told me she was building a narrative. You called me from your car, from your office, from your apartment, and you fed me lies about a nineteen-year-old girl who was so shy she couldn’t order her own coffee, and I believed you because you were her sister and I couldn’t imagine why a sister would do that. ”
Dionne stood up. Her hands were flat on the glass desk and her composure was cracking, and underneath it was not guilt. He’d expected guilt. He’d expected tears, apologies, the crumbling of a woman caught in her own machinery. What he got was fury.
“I loved you first.” Her voice shook, but not with shame.
With rage. “Seven years, Julian. Seven years I was in your life. I introduced you to people. I came to your launches. I sat at your table at Haven every week for three years, and you never once turned to me the way you turned to her in the first five seconds.” Her chin lifted.
“She is the mistress’s daughter. She is nobody.
And you threw away seven years of friendship for a teenager in a polyester uniform who can’t even make eye contact. ”
He regarded her across the glass desk. The woman who’d been in his life for seven years. The woman who’d fed him poison and called it protection and let him destroy the only person who’d ever seen him without his armor.
“We’re done,” he said.
Two words. Quiet. Final. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t explain or argue or give her the satisfaction of the fight she wanted. He said it like stating the time, or the weather, or any other fact that existed regardless of how anyone felt about it.
Then he turned and walked out of her office and closed the door behind him and stood in the hallway with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and his hands at his sides, and for thirty seconds he didn’t move.
He just stood there. Feeling the weight of seven years of friendship collapse into rubble and not caring, not caring about a single piece of it, because the only thing he cared about was a girl with red hair who was somewhere in the world without him, and he had no idea how to find her.
HE CALLED LUCIANO AT eleven o’clock at night.