Chapter Fifty-Three
Las Vegas, One Year Later
Liv scanned the bustling hotel ballroom for a hint of her sister. Nada. It didn’t seem possible that she could have lost Mandy
between their suite and the party—what had she done, run away with the blackjack dealer who’d smiled at them in the elevator?—but
here they were. Here Liv was, in her least favorite city in North America, in a silver-and-white dress Mandy had insisted
she buy for the occasion. Sleek, glossy people milled around the room, sipping cocktails filled with pastel elixirs and flower
petals. While everyone else glittered, Liv felt like a crumpled piece of tinsel ten days after Christmas.
“Nice cult they got here, don’t you think?”
Before Liv could respond, Mandy wrapped her in a hug, as if it had been months and not minutes since they’d last seen each
other. She always did this now. Every week, her little sister bombarded Liv with rhubarb muffins and triple-texts and last-minute
invitations to quiet dinner parties that turned out to be karaoke rodeos. Maybe Mandy had always had it in her to be so persistent,
so giving, so eager to dump the whole jar of sprinkles onto the cake. But these past eight months, living in Austin, it was
the first time as an adult Liv experienced it up close.
It wouldn’t last forever. Someday Lucinda would be convicted, Liv’s interminable administrative review would end, and she could get back to the business of international diplomacy.
Liv nodded at Casey Ito, the gangly special investigator in his ill-fitting suit, who was watching the crowd from the corner with a bottle of water in his hand. He nodded back.
“How is Double-O-Boring?” Mandy asked, following her gaze.
“Busy.”
Casey had generously kept Liv in the loop on the investigation’s progress. The international team was still working through
all the evidence against Lucinda, but Liv was optimistic. It seemed more of a jurisdictional puzzle than anything else at
this point. Marc had flipped on Lucinda in exchange for immunity, and Imogen’s copious videos from the trip had bolstered
many of Liv and Mandy’s suspicions. The teen had even captured her grandmother daubing what was presumed to be scopolamine
resin on the spare hat—Lucinda’s rafting gloves insulating her from the deadly substance—before offering it to Liv.
Perhaps the most surprising witness to Lucinda’s crimes was Babette herself. While Liv had lied about the imaginary letter,
it turned out Babette kept meticulous notes in her office detailing what she’d discovered about the links between Lucinda,
the Regent Group, and ADD Inc. As Devon had mentioned, Babette was obsessed with the purity of her supply chain. She’d traced
a dizzying array of shell companies linking CareFree’s deadly waste material to Lucinda and a major international drug cartel
and written it all up in a little notebook. She’d planned to ask Fiona to rejoin the company and reengineer the CareFree waste
management plan once she confronted Lucinda. But Babette never got that chance.
It had taken months to gather enough information to build a case, and it might be several more before the various international
authorities decided where to charge Lucinda, for what. In the meantime, Liv was on hold with the State Department and making
decent money as a contract polygraph analyst for the Texas attorney general’s office. She had an apartment that was close—but
not too close—to her sister’s. And she was learning to say yes to a life she couldn’t entirely control.
Mandy’s dress was a deep emerald, with silver interlocking snakes she’d appliquéd onto it herself.
Liv had to smile at the way PK shied back when Mandy greeted him and pointed out the one she’d named Pinky after their shared ordeal.
It had turned out in the investigation that despite Lucinda’s careful planning—the embroidered threats, the implantation of Marc, the scopolamine smeared on the hats that killed Babette and poisoned Liv—the rattlesnake had crashed the rafting trip of its own accord.
“I thought you’d disappeared,” Liv said to Mandy.
“Just had to go back to the room for a little something.” Mandy held out her closed fists to Liv. “You pick.”
Liv eyed her sister carefully. “Are they different from each other?”
“One will turn your heart to iron. The other will turn it to jelly.”
“What kind of jelly?”
“Grasshopper.”
Liv nodded seriously, looking intently at her sister’s closed hands. Ever since her recovery from the gunshot wound, Liv had
taken a new interest in anatomy, in the way bodies were stitched together and could fall apart. She saw the strength in Mandy’s
fingers, the tiny flecks of paint on her nails, and a recent scab that Mandy had attributed to a late-night pinata incident.
This was what they were made of: meat and muscle and blood and bone. Hope and pain. Desire and limitation. These past few
months, going through the healing process, spending more time moving outdoors, Liv felt more acutely how her body worked and
where it could take her. It didn’t hurt that the physical therapist she’d been assigned to was a total fox.
Said fox had told her there are more ways our bodies can change than we can imagine.
But could anyone really change? Liv had heard from an old colleague that they were trying to close cases against Lucinda for seven unsolved deaths by poisoning in three other countries—and Liv could only imagine how many near-miss poisonings, like her own, might add to Lucinda’s victim count.
She still didn’t know whether she’d gotten lucky because Lucinda hadn’t had sufficient scopolamine to kill her or whether leaping in the river somehow disrupted its deadly course.
Katy swore later that it was the datura goddess herself who had chosen to spare her life.
But Liv disagreed. Any credit for her survival was surely due to the maddening, loving, flesh-and-blood sister standing before her now, waggling her fists impatiently.
Liv looked from Mandy’s trickster smile down to her hands and deliberated over her choice. Before she could decide, a tinkling
sound filled the air. Dozens of people were clinking tiny silver spoons against their martini glasses. An amplified voice,
warm and serious, washed across the room.
“Welcome.”
Devon looked younger than when Liv had last seen her. She still sported a tight salt-and-pepper pixie cut, but her face looked
ironed smooth, her eyes brighter. Devon Sauvage would never be the poster child for Babette that her sister had been. But
by all accounts she’d embraced her new role as CEO, and it appeared she was using the company’s products accordingly.
“We are here today to announce a new product line at Babette Botanique. To share it with all of you, our dedicated friends
and supporters.”
Imogen was standing to the side of a gaggle of other influencers, phone held aloft.
Her follower count had skyrocketed after the Grand Canyon trip, when she pivoted from peddling beauty tips to eight-second exposés on her grandmother’s exploits.
Turned out being the innocent princess of a crime family was a boon to business.
And Imogen was, apparently, innocent. Lucinda was still fighting the conspiracy and murder charges, but she refused to speak ill of her granddaughter, even as Imogen released one explosive video after another.
According to the prosecutor, they were still piecing together the dizzying collection of shell companies, offshore accounts, and unregistered operations Lucinda employed to conceal her illegal drug cartel’s deadly business.
They’d turned up a few criminals like Marc who accepted deals to talk, and more unlucky employees like Stefan who no longer could.
But they hadn’t found a single family connection.
Even Lucinda’s laundromats—a perfect front for turning dirty money clean—traced back to her and her alone.
But now was not the time to wonder how long it would take for investigators to navigate through the maze of Lucinda’s crimes.
Today, the name on everyone’s lips was Babette’s. On the stage, Devon gestured to Charlie, inviting her brother forward.
“As many of you know,” Devon continued, “we had been working for the past several years on a line inspired by our dear sister’s
fervent belief in all people’s right to be free. Free from worry. Free from regret.”
Across the ballroom, Guy nodded tentatively at Liv. They’d seen each other more since Liv had moved stateside, mostly at Mandy’s
prompting. But her dad was spending much of his time these days hopping between Vegas and Seoul, helping Fiona expand her
light therapy face mask business. According to Guy, it was going to be a total game changer.
Charlie cleared his throat and leaned into his sister’s microphone. “In the wake of our sister’s tragic death, CareFree no
longer seemed like the right product for the future of our family’s business. Babette had a gift for unleashing the wild spirit
of our community. But her loss has focused our attention on other gifts. Other possibilities.”
Devon held up a simple bottle, matte-black, with the telltale silver B emblazoned across it. “Welcome to the first offering of Care. A new line from Babette, dedicated to enhancing the bonding
power of love. Care starts as a lotion, and is coming soon as a fragrance and a serum. Care will not set you free from obligation.
Care will bring you home to the connections that matter most.”
Devon raised the bottle as if in a toast or a salute. From the back of the stage, PK gave a subtle nod, and a blanket of silvery
flower petals fell from the ceiling onto the crowd.
“To Care.”
Amidst the oohs and polite applause and phones tipped upward to capture the moment, Liv turned to Mandy.
She tapped her sister’s right fist.
Mandy opened both her hands. Each held the same thing. A ring. A pearly, opalescent stone, with a delicate trumpet-shaped blossom etched across the surface.
“Is that a datura flower?”
“It is. On a moonstone.”
Liv looked closer at the flowers engraved on the shimmering gems. She imagined her sister tracing them with an X-Acto knife,
the pink slip of her tongue sticking out between her lips.
“That scab wasn’t from a pinata incident, was it?”
Mandy grinned. “If I tell you, I might have to kill you.”
“Then I guess I’ll never know.”
There were so many things she never would know. So many choices Mandy would make that were not to her satisfaction. Liv looked
at her sister, who would never stop lying to her. Who would never stop loving her.
“Thank you.”
“Here.” Mandy gave Liv her ring and slid the other one onto the pinky of her left hand. “So we never forget what’s important.”