CHAPTER SIX
Nadia — The Second Card
Priya stayed three nights, which was two more than either of us said out loud we needed, and by the fourth morning I’d talked myself into believing the worst of it had passed simply because nothing new had happened.
I should have known better by now. Nothing new happening was never the same as nothing happening.
The second card came by courier, not by hand — a plain envelope, no return address, delivered to the gallery instead of my apartment, which told me before I’d even opened it that whoever sent it knew the difference between the two addresses and had chosen deliberately.
Inside was another of Elias Vane’s cream cards, and on the back, in handwriting too elegant to belong to someone who meant it kindly, four words.
You’re asking the wrong questions.
I sat with that card on Marguerite’s desk for a long time before I made myself pick up my phone and call the number printed on the front.
He answered on the second ring, like he’d been waiting for exactly this. “Ms. Kessler. I was starting to think you weren’t the curious type after all.”
“What do you want.”
“That’s the wrong question too, but I admire the directness.
” A pause, unhurried, the sound of a man entirely comfortable making someone else wait.
“Have dinner with me. Not a date, if that’s what’s worrying you — a conversation.
There are things about your life you should know, and I find myself in the unusual position of being the only person willing to tell you. ”
“Why would I trust anything you say?”
“You wouldn’t have to trust me at all,” he said. “You’d only have to listen. I imagine you’re good at that — most artists are. Thursday. I’ll send a car.”
He hung up before I could say no, which I told myself I would have, and spent the rest of the afternoon not quite believing.
I told Priya. I did not tell her everything.
“Absolutely not,” she said, the second the word dinner left my mouth, before I’d even finished the sentence. “You are not getting in a car sent by a man who’s been leaving you cryptic notes for two weeks. That’s the plot of a documentary, Nadia. A true crime documentary.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Then don’t do it.”
“He said there are things I should know. About my life.” I turned the card over in my hands, the elegant threat of it, four words that had already burrowed under my skin and set up residence. “What if he’s right?”
“Then he tells you over the phone, in daylight, in a public place you choose. That’s not negotiable, that’s just — that’s just basic safety, that’s the bare minimum.
” Priya’s voice had the particular tightness it got when she was frightened and covering it with logistics, a coping mechanism I recognized because I shared it.
“I don’t like any of this. I don’t like the coffee shop guy, I don’t like the man in the grocery store, and I really, really don’t like a man who sends handwritten threats disguised as business cards. ”
“It’s not a threat.”
“‘You’re asking the wrong questions’ is absolutely a threat, it’s just a well-dressed one.”
She wasn’t wrong, and some part of me had known that before she said it — had known it the moment I read those four words and felt the same cold drop I’d felt outside the gallery three weeks ago, the sense of being handled by someone who’d already decided how this was going to go.
But there was another feeling underneath the fear, one I liked less because it made less sense: I wanted to know.
I had spent two weeks being watched by forces I couldn’t name, by a stranger in a market and footsteps in the dark and a man whose voice I couldn’t get out of my head, and Elias Vane was the first person to offer me an actual door into understanding why.
I didn’t agree to dinner. I also didn’t say no, not out loud, not in a way that would have stopped me from thinking about it for the rest of the week — which, I was starting to realize, might have been exactly the reaction he’d been counting on.
Kael — The Card I Can’t Intercept
I found out about the second card four hours after it arrived, which is three hours and fifty-five minutes too late by every standard I hold myself to, and I spent most of that gap standing very still in a room by myself, doing the thing I do instead of putting my fist through a wall.
You’re asking the wrong questions. Vane’s handwriting, which I know better than I know my own, because I spent two years of my life reading everything the man ever put on paper, looking for the crack that would let me take him apart before he did what he’s apparently decided to start doing now.
He’s not wrong, is the unbearable part. She is asking the wrong questions — she’s asking who’s watching her, when the question that matters is why, and the why is a story that starts before she was born, with people neither of us can undo, and ends, if I fail badly enough, with her name added to a list I’ve spent four years keeping empty.
I know she’s considering dinner with him.
I know because I know her better than a man who’s watched from cars and doorways has any right to — I know she can’t leave a locked door unopened, that curiosity is the one thing she trusts more than fear, and Vane knows it too, which is exactly why he offered her a door instead of a threat.
I can’t stop her from going. That’s the part that’s going to keep me up tonight and every night until Thursday.
I could tell her everything right now — walk up to her building, knock, hand her four years of evidence and a story that implicates me almost as badly as it implicates him — and maybe that would be enough to keep her away from that car.
Or I could lose her entirely, the moment she understands exactly what I’ve been to her without her permission, exactly how much of her life for the last four years has happened inside a perimeter I built and never asked if she wanted.
I’ve told myself I’m protecting her by staying invisible.
Standing here now, useless, watching a countdown to Thursday I can’t stop, I’m finally honest enough to admit the other reason: I’m protecting myself.
From the version of this where she finds out and looks at me the way I deserve to be looked at.
Vane just made that particular cowardice a great deal more expensive.