Chapter Thirty-Eight
Thirty-eight
Sometime much later, we get up, get dressed, and join the others for a family meal.
Araceli suggests that Dane return to the hospital, which he vehemently refuses.
It turns out she already bought medical supplies for his wound in anticipation of his answer, and I find myself admiring how well she knows him.
“Did you know, Zoe,” Araceli says over dinner, “that I knew I screwed up with your room reservation in Paris? It should have been two rooms and I was going to correct it, but Dane called and he started complaining, but then it turned into ten minutes of describing you to me. So I left the room as one. You should have heard him go on.” She gives a wicked grin.
“No one needs to hear this,” Dane says in mock warning, but everyone laughs. Teasing him is a favorite pastime for all of them.
We make plans. Dane and I decide to stay here in Inverness for two more weeks—enough time for his surgical wound to heal before we fly back to the US. We’ve decided to go to the Bay Area and tell Christine about the house.
But I have to talk to her first, to see if that email from Eric went through. I call her at nearly ten p.m. our time, making sure it’s her afternoon.
“What?” she asks. “I’m at work.”
“Is your job okay?” I ask. “They haven’t fired you?”
“What are you talking about? Why would they fire me?”
“Eric said something—” I try to word it so it doesn’t sound like there’s been further drama.
“Eric is a clown. Anything else? I have to push this code out.”
“I’ll be home from Scotland in another two weeks,” I say. “I’ll see you then.”
“See me? Why? Call first. I might be busy. I have to strip the paint off a pair of dressers I found on the corner down the street.” She hangs up.
Typical Christine. Dane, who sat next to me while I made the call, shakes his head. “At least she picked up.”
After we visit Christine, our plan is to go to Dane’s home in Seattle.
We’ll find out whether my arm requires surgery, and Dane will get his stitches out.
Maybe we’ll simply hang out for a while and see what not being chased feels like.
I will start putting out feelers for where I could go from Chessmont.
I might contact Dr. Devlin at Harvard, whom I presented with in Madrid, and see what he advises.
“My vote is for you to get a place in Madrid,” Araceli says during one of our many group discussions about this. “It’s a good European base, yes?”
“Paris is better,” Xhan says without looking up from her laptop.
“Zurich is nice,” Luca says. “The air is nice there. Good for your health.”
“Maybe all three,” I say.
“That’s the spirit,” Luca says, beaming.
Araceli leaves to drive to our Airbnb on the coast and put it to rights.
She must do a phenomenal job, including replacing the window Eric shot out, because Dane gets an email from the host saying it is spotless and we’ll get our deposit back in full.
These days are some of the best I’ve had.
I want to move forward and see what’s next, but I also love this cocoon of coziness.
■ ■ ■
We finally get a sunny day after two weeks of relentless rain. The blue sky is free of clouds, and the sunshine lights up the river. Tomorrow, Dane and I will take the train to Glasgow and fly to San Francisco.
“Walk with me up to Inverness Castle,” Xhan tells me. “I want to spend time with you before you go.”
Dane is busy catching up on work and, I suspect, deleting the losing players.
He doesn’t talk about it, and I don’t want to know, but his stoic, accepting face when Luca bought him a new laptop said enough.
Over the past two nights since he started, I’ve noticed that Dane talks less but seems more reverent with me, as though reminding himself that we are real and good, and this awful work is not who he is.
The River Ness cuts through a palette of lush green trailing into the distance.
We follow it on the ten-minute walk from our rental house to the castle.
As far as I can tell, the castle is mostly a tourist trap, but there’s a nice view of the hazy outline of mountains in the distance from the top.
Scotland is a beautiful country, and I hope someday I’ll be able to think of it without the trauma.
Xhan and I loop around the castle and walk down the grassy hill sloping to the river.
Inverness is compact and walkable, full of cyclists, and still feels small despite being the capital of the Highlands.
I know that, despite everything, I’ll look back on this time here with all five of us fondly.
I already know I want to see them again soon.
“I got a new phone for you this morning.” Xhan hands it to me. “We were able to get your number transferred. Well, Luca did—I’m not sure how he pulled that off, but he did it with Dane’s too. And as a bonus, this doesn’t have creepy ex-boyfriend tracking apps installed.”
I laugh and run a finger over the screen.
“You should check text messages,” she adds. “For your prize.”
I have tried to avoid thinking about the moments surrounding my win, although we did hear four days ago that hikers doing the Fisherfield Six loop, a twenty-five-mile trail that took them past and into the little valley where the Celtic cross is, reported two badly decomposed bodies there.
The Scottish authorities are mystified as to the identities.
There’s simply nothing in any database or any identification on them to tell them who they might be.
I press the phone. It’s powered on, and the screen lights up. “This is the longest I’ve gone without using a phone in years. I guess I’ve been distracted.”
“Oh, I know. The sounds coming from your room are enough to wake the neighbors.”
My cheeks explode in flames, but Xhan just laughs. “I’m kidding. Sort of.”
My texts take a moment to download from the cloud. All the ones from Christine and Eric, before Scotland. There is the message from that unknown number that texted me in Madrid saying The Enigma Challenge has begun. Below that are two new texts, sent last week.
Unknown: The Enigma Challenge has ended. The winner has keyed in.
Then another one: Zoe Alicia Wilder, $12m has been deposited in your bank account.
I get a chill looking at the words. I consider calling Christine right now and telling her the news.
That the house is saved, that I’ll be paying it off in full and taking care of the property taxes forever, but she’ll want to know how and why, and I will need time to have that conversation with her.
Knowing I have the money is the important thing.
I’ll download my banking app when we’re back at the house and look at the number with my own eyes.
We walk in silence for a bit, and Xhan speaks again.
“Zoe, I wanted to tell you…Dane is the best of men. But he can be closed off and lonely. He gets into this pattern of thinking when he’s left alone that he’s somehow bad or unworthy.
He’s been looking for his person for a long time, and I told him that when he found her, she would have to be clever and fast and resourceful.
No one else would work. And I told him that if he found that, she would be his stars, and he would be her moon. ”
My eyes are suddenly a little wet.
“If nothing else, you make him so much less grumpy.” She smiles. “You do us all a favor, Zoe.”
I laugh with her and think of last night, when Araceli held up a cashmere pullover she’d purchased for me and Dane growled that he wasn’t made of money and Araceli could stop spending it anytime.
Araceli stood tall and put her hands on her hips and snapped, “You are made of money, Dane Seaver, and how dare you tell me to stop buying things for Zoe! Are you really telling me you don’t want her to have this beautiful sweater?
” She looked pointedly at me, and I saw it—I saw his face soften and his mouth part slightly when his focus went to me, and I knew everyone else saw it too.
As though that hadn’t been clear enough, he got up and crossed the small sitting room to where I was settled in a large armchair with a blanket and tea, courtesy of Luca’s mothering, and picked me up out of the chair.
“Your leg!” I protested. “You’re not supposed to put weight on it!”
“Buy her anything,” Dane told Araceli. He kissed me, one of those long, slow ones full of tongue and heat that turned everything inside me to jelly.
I wrapped my legs around his waist as he carried me back to our bedroom.
The last thing I heard before he closed the door behind us was Araceli saying, “Holy mother of God, that man is in love.”
Ahead of us, the sun glints off the water and the leafy trees lining the river walkway cast dappled shadows on the grassy area beyond.
I feel the urge to get back to the house, to Dane, to feel his fingers on my skin, in my hair.
When Xhan and I left, Luca was stewing some gigantic hunk of meat in a stockpot and Araceli had gone out for wine and whatever else she could find, usually giant bunches of flowers and fancy dessert.
We will have a good dinner tonight, our last together for a while.
But I force myself not to rush, to go slow and enjoy the walk. I tilt my face into the sunshine and feel that sense of life, of anything being possible, that I felt that first day in Madrid. My phone pings with a text. Hoping it’s Dane, I angle the screen toward me to read it.
But it’s them again. ProtoDark.
Unknown: Congratulations, Zoe. We look forward to meeting you in person.
The words fill me with a horrible dread. I don’t know what to say, and I can’t tell them no outright. Another text arrives.
Unknown: We will send details soon.
A surge of irritation overrides my good sense, and my thumbs fly over the screen. I may regret this, but I send it anyway.
Zoe: And if I refuse?
“Oh, be careful,” Xhan murmurs, but it’s too late for that.
The dots appear, indicating a response is coming. I consider throwing the phone in the River Ness. Xhan watches with me as the response appears.
Unknown: You don’t have a choice.
I shake my head in disgust. I’m trapped and I know it.
Unknown: Your father also said he didn’t want to work with us.
“Oh, shit,” Xhan whispers.
I look at her, my face slack with shock. That missing police report of my parents’ car crash, the doubts Christine and I had: It all rushes back.
My phone pings again.
Unknown: That’s what got him killed.
Unknown: We would hate to see that happen to you.