Chapter 62
VI
I find Mara in our room sitting cross-legged on the bed, doing something with her hair, humming and happy, or as happy as someone can be in the Rot. She’s a woman who’s found her footing in a strange place and is starting to feel like she belongs.
I’m about to wreck that.
I close the door and sit on the bed across from her. She looks up, reads my face, and the humming stops.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“I need to tell you something about Tommy.”
She frowns as she runs through the possibilities. Tommy got hurt? He left the Rot? He said something about her?
“What about him?”
I don’t know how to do this gently. I tried to plan it on the walk over. I told myself I’d find the soft way to do it, the version that breaks the news without breaking her, but there really isn’t one.
“We think Tommy is Landis Fischer, a city development officer from my father’s papers. He’s the man who signed the shell company contracts, blocked Dad’s audit, approved the property transfers. The man who facilitated the corruption that destroyed Rothwell.”
Mara stares at me. “What? Why?”
“The guys matched his handwriting to the documents. The signatures are the same. They’ve been watching him. When they planted false information through you, he reacted. He broke his routine. He started trying to cover his tracks.”
“Through me,” she says. Her voice is flat. “Planted information through me.”
“Rogue told you that thing about me looking for former city employees. That was the plant. It wasn’t real. It was a test. To see if Tommy would react when it reached him through you.”
Mara’s face is doing something terrible, shutting down and opening up at the same time. Her confusion is being replaced by understanding, piece by piece. I can see her rewinding every conversation she ever had with Tommy. Every lunch in the neutral zone. Every friendly question. Every warm smile.
“Oh my god. He asked about you,” she says. “Every time. He always asked about you. How you were doing. What you were working on. Whether you’d found anything. I thought he was being kind. I thought he cared.”
“I know.”
“He was using me. You warned me.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“I told him things,” she says, no longer playing with her hair. “I just… handed it to him. I thought we were friends.”
“Oh Mara—”
“I did exactly what you told me not to do. You said stop talking about your business and I said I would, and then I kept having lunch with him and he kept asking and I kept—” She stops and presses her hands against her eyes. “Oh god. Vi, I’m so sorry.”
“Stop.”
“I fed him information about your father’s investigation. I sat across from him and gave him everything he needed to—”
“Mara. Stop.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are wet and she’s broken with guilt, just like I knew she would be.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” I say.
“How can you say that?”
“You didn’t know, Mara. You had a friend. He was nice to you. He asked questions the way friends ask questions. You answered because that’s who you are. You’re open and trusting. Those aren’t flaws, Mara, those are the reasons people like you.”
She’s crying now, silently, the tears running down her face. She doesn’t wipe them away.
“He’s a professional,” I say. “He hid from everyone in plain sight. The guys didn’t catch him for years. This man fooled hundreds of people, not just you. He fooled us all. You’re not stupid for trusting him. He’s just very good at what he does.”
“But I should have seen it. You saw it. You told me something was off about him,” she says.
“I had suspicions. Vague ones. But I didn’t figure it out either.
The guys did with handwriting analysis and two weeks of surveillance.
It took three men watching him around the clock to confirm what you felt in your gut the last time you talked to him, remember?
You told me it was weird, how he was probing so hard. ”
She nods. Barely.
“You caught it, Mara. You felt it. You told me about it.”
She’s shaking her head, not accepting it. The guilt is too big. It’s sitting on her and she can’t breathe around it.
I move across the bed and pull her to me. She resists for a second, stiff, trying to hold herself together. Then she breaks and folds into me, her face against my shoulder, crying hard.
“I’m sorry,” she says into my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Vi.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I do.”
“You don’t. And I need you to hear that. Because what happens next is going to be hard and I need you solid. Okay? I need my best friend solid.”
She pulls back, wipes her face with the back of her hand, and looks at me. “What happens next?”
“We confront him. Tonight. The guys and me. I’m leading the conversation.”
Something changes in Mara’s face. The guilt is still there. But underneath it, something hardens. “I want to be there.”
“Mara—”
“He used me. He sat across from me and pretended to be my friend and used me to spy on you. I want to be in the room when he finds out it didn’t work.”
I look at her. My best friend. Red-eyed, beaten-up, and furious.
“Okay,” I say. “You’re there.”
She nods, wipes her face again, straightens up, and takes a deep breath.
We sit on the bed, side by side. Mara’s hand finds mine and she squeezes. I squeeze back.
Two women in a dead mall, getting ready for a fight.