2. Mia
MIA
The last thing Hadley Winslow did was smile.
Not a real one. A camera smile. The kind I'd practiced in a bathroom mirror at twenty-two until my cheeks ached and the girl staring back was worth watching.
Ten million viewers saw that smile. None of them knew it was a goodbye.
I read the teleprompter. I hit every beat. The floor crew moved around me the way they always did, quiet and precise.
Eddie on Camera Two gave me his usual thumbs-up. Priya in the booth counted me down. The lights were hot on my face and I let them be. I wanted to remember that heat.
"That's all for tonight. Stay safe out there."
The red light blinked off.
I unclipped my mic, set it on the desk, and walked off set. My heels clicked on the floor. A countdown. Three, two, one.
Done.
I didn't look back. If I looked back, I wouldn't leave.
Evie was waiting by my dressing room. She had her coat on and her purse over her shoulder and something in her face that told me she already knew.
Not the details. Just the weight.
"Hey." I pulled her into a hug. She smelled of cocoa butter and the vanilla perfume she'd worn every day for the three years I'd known her.
"I'm going away for a while."
Her arms tightened around me. "How long is a while?"
"I don't know."
She pulled back. Her gaze searched mine and I watched her decide not to push. That was Evie. The cream-of-the-cream of personal assistants.
She could read a room faster than anyone I'd ever met. Right now she was reading me and choosing kindness over curiosity.
"You call me when you can," she said. Not a question.
"I will."
I wouldn't. That was the rule. No contact with anyone from before.
Evie didn't know that. She would figure it out when weeks turned into months and my number stopped working.
She would hate me for a while. Then she would worry. Then she would grieve a woman who wasn't dead but might as well be.
I kissed her cheek, grabbed my bag, and walked out of the building into a black town car idling at the curb. I didn't cry. Not yet.
The driver was FBI. He didn't speak. Neither did I.
The safehouse was a brownstone in a part of the city I didn't recognize. No name on the buzzer.
A nurse led me down a hallway that smelled of bleach and sat me in a chair in front of a mirror.
"Time to say goodbye to the blonde," Lucas said.
He was leaning against the doorframe. Forties, dark eyes, calm in the way people are when they've seen the worst and learned to breathe through it.
He'd been my handler for weeks. He called me "sweetheart." He meant it.
I watched as the nurse mixed the dye. The blonde was the first thing I'd changed when I got the anchor job. My agent said dark-haired girls don't test as well. So I became someone else.
Six years of touch-ups and toner. Now it was all going back to brown in a safehouse kitchen at eleven o'clock at night.
The dye went on cold. I closed my eyes and let it happen.
When I opened them, Hadley was gone. The reflection had dark brown hair, wet and heavy against her neck. Younger. She was the girl I'd been in college, before the cameras and the blazers and the boyfriend and the bullet.
"Contacts," Lucas said. He held out a plastic case. "Violet."
I put them in. They itched. I blinked and blinked and blinked and my vision swam. The reflection was a stranger trying to cosplay a different stranger.
"These are terrible."
Lucas almost smiled. "You'll get used to them."
I would not get used to them. I would ditch them within a week. Which meant my real brown gaze would still match Hadley Winslow's. A ticking bomb for another day.
A nose ring went in next. Small, silver, barely there.
Then a tattoo artist showed up, a quiet man with steady hands, and inked a small design on my left wrist. I didn't pick it. The FBI picked it.
I didn't care. Just one more piece of someone I wasn't.
"Name?" Lucas asked.
"Mia Hayes."
He wrote it down. I'd chosen it weeks ago.
Hayes. Common. Forgettable. The kind of name that disappears into a crowd.
No tribute. No connection to anyone. Just a door I could close behind me and never open again.
Lucas handed me a stack of documents. Driver's license. Social security card. Library card from a town in California I'd never visited.
A cover story: copywriter, freelance transcription, relocated from the West Coast.
"If anyone asks about your accent..."
"California," I said. "I already practiced."
He nodded. Then he leaned forward and his voice got quiet. Gentle, the way a father talks to a daughter before he sends her somewhere he can't follow.
"You're safer visible in the right place than hidden in the wrong one. We chose a town where nobody looks twice."
I didn't ask where. He'd already told me. Rockford, Colorado.
Population: so small that everyone knew everyone. So small that a stranger would stick out. So small that the FBI could monitor from a distance without drawing attention.
It didn't make sense to me. Hide in the open? Be visible in a town that size?
But Lucas had kept me alive this long. I trusted him more than I trusted my own lungs.
The private jet was cramped and freezing. Lucas sat across from me. I stared out the window at the lights of New York getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared, and then there was nothing but dark.
Somewhere down there was my apartment. Or what used to be my apartment, before they'd swept it for cameras and found nine.
Nine lenses hidden in the ceiling fan, behind the bathroom cabinet, inside the smoke detector above my bed.
Nine little windows into my life. Watching me sleep, eat, cry, grieve, shower. For months. Maybe years.
My forehead found the glass. The chill helped.
There was a bank account in New York with two million dollars in it. Money I'd earned. Money I'd worked sixteen-hour days for.
I couldn't touch it. Mia Hayes had no connection to Hadley Winslow's finances. That was another life. Another person's money.
The bullet in my spine ached. It always ached when the temperature dropped, and the cabin was freezing.
Less than an inch. That's what the doctors told me. The bullet had missed my spinal cord by less than an inch.
They called it a miracle. My nerves disagreed.
I could walk. I could run if I had to. But the pain was a tenant that never paid rent, and winter made it bang on the walls.
We landed in Telluride after midnight. A secondhand SUV waited on the tarmac. Silver, dented on the right side, two hundred thousand miles on the odometer.
Lucas handed me the keys and a set of printed MapQuest directions.
"You're driving from here," he said. "I'll follow in my car for the first thirty miles, then I'm heading back."
"Thirty miles?"
"Then you're on your own." He put a hand on my shoulder. "Burner phone. My number is the only one programmed."
"You need anything, day or night, you call."
I nodded. My throat was tight.
The mountain road was black. Blacker than anything I'd driven through before. The headlights cut a narrow path through the trees and the rest was void.
No streetlights. No other cars. Just the sound of the engine and the creak of the SUV on switchbacks I couldn't see coming.
My hands shook on the wheel. My back screamed at every bump.
I missed New York. I missed the noise and the light and the crowds and the way you were never alone, not even at three in the morning.
Out here there was nothing. Just mountains I couldn't see and air so sharp it burned my lungs when I cracked the window.
Lucas's headlights disappeared in my rearview mirror somewhere past the thirty-mile mark. I watched them shrink to pinpoints and then nothing.
Get it together, Mia.
I kept driving.
Rockford appeared without warning. One second, darkness. The next, a cluster of lights in a valley between ridges.
A main street. A church steeple. Storefronts with awnings dusted in snow. A postcard from a life I'd never lived.
The apartment was on Main Street, above a row of shops. I parked. Climbed the stairs.
The key stuck in the lock and I had to jiggle it and swear at it before the door gave.
The chill hit me first. Then the smell of old wood and fresh paint and something chemical, like new carpet.
The place was bare. A kitchen the size of a closet. A bedroom with a bed that someone had thrown together in a hurry. A bay window that faced the street.
I set my bag down. I opened a box of clothes. I hung three jackets and four sweaters in a closet that didn't have a rod, just nails hammered into the wall.
Then I saw the bookshelf.
It was cheap. Pressed wood, the kind you buy at a hardware store and assemble with a coin instead of a screwdriver.
But the books on it weren't cheap. They were mine. My copies. My editions.
The Austen collection with the cracked spine on Persuasion. The dog-eared Rebecca. The Jane Eyre I'd read so many times the front cover was held on with tape.
Lucas had snuck them in. Packed them up, shipped them out, and arranged them on a shelf in a place I'd never heard of.
So that when I walked in at one in the morning with nothing left of my old life, something on that shelf was mine.
My chest cracked open.
I sat down on the floor in front of that bookshelf and pressed my hands against my face and cried. Not gentle tears. Not the kind you wipe away and keep moving.
The kind that come from somewhere deep and primal. The kind that make your ribs ache and your throat close and your whole body shake.
Not because I was scared. I was beyond scared.
Scared was a word for normal people in normal situations. None of this was normal.
Because Cory was dead and I was alive and nothing about that would ever be fair.
The photograph came out of the jacket lining. The only thing I'd taken from my old life. His face, frozen in a laugh. Brown eyes, full of mischief.
He'd been telling me about a building he was designing, something with arches and light. His hands were moving the way they always did when he was excited.
I held the picture against my chest. Didn't look at it. Didn't need to. Every line was memorized.
A year. A full year since the sidewalk. Since the sound. Since I looked down and saw red and couldn't figure out whose it was.
The tears stopped on their own. My breathing evened out. The apartment settled into its quiet.
I got up. Washed my face in the narrow bathroom. Avoided the glass above the sink because the person in it was a stranger and I wasn't ready to know her yet.
The bay window drew me over. Main Street was empty. Snow fell in slow, fat flakes under a single streetlight. Everything was still.
Across the street, a coffeehouse had its light on. Just one, in the back. As if someone forgot to turn it off. Or as if it was waiting.
Tomorrow I would go there. Tomorrow I would order a coffee and smile at strangers and answer to a name I chose two weeks ago. Tomorrow I would be someone new.
I pressed my palm against the icy glass.
"Okay, Mia." My voice was rough. Hollow. But mine.
"Let's see who you are."
I didn't know yet. But I was about to find out.