CHAPTER SEVEN
Nadia — The Terms I Set
I called Vane back on Monday, and I did it on my own terms, which felt like the only power I had left in a situation where everyone else seemed to know more about my life than I did.
“I’ll meet you,” I said, before he could say anything smug about my having called first. “Not in your car. A restaurant. Public. I choose it, I choose the time, and I bring a friend who sits at the bar the whole night watching the door.”
A pause on his end, and when he spoke again there was something in his voice that might have been amusement or might have been respect — with a man like that, I was starting to suspect the two lived in the same room. “Reasonable terms. Where?”
I picked Solano’s, a small Italian place on Bleecker with too much brass and too many regulars for anyone to try anything, and a bartender named Frank who’d been serving my family for twenty years and would notice, instantly, if something looked wrong.
Priya didn’t love the plan. She loved it more than the version where I didn’t tell her anything, which was the only actual choice she’d given me.
“I’m not letting you do this without backup,” she said, which was how I ended up with her at the bar Thursday night, ostensibly reading a paperback, actually watching every person who walked through Solano’s front door like she was casting a movie about betrayal.
Vane arrived exactly on time, in a different suit, equally expensive, and slid into the booth across from me with the ease of a man who had never once in his life worried about being unwelcome anywhere.
“You look well,” he said. “Considering.”
“Considering what.”
“Considering you’ve spent two weeks being watched by people who aren’t me, and I imagine that’s taken something of a toll.
” He ordered wine without looking at the menu, the kind of small performance of ownership I was beginning to recognize as his whole personality.
“I want to be direct with you, Ms. Kessler, because I think you’ll respect that more than I would a slow reveal.
Your mother worked for a company called Meridian Assurance seventeen years ago. ”
The name meant nothing to me, and I told him so.
“It wouldn’t. She used a different name by the time you were old enough to ask questions.
” He watched my face while he said it, cataloguing something, and I hated how exposed that made me feel before I even understood what he was cataloguing for.
“Meridian Assurance wasn’t an insurance company.
It was a shell for something considerably less legal, run by a man who is, as of four years ago, extremely interested in finding out what your mother took with her when she disappeared. ”
“My mother didn’t disappear. She died. Car accident, when I was nine.”
“That’s the story you were given, yes.” Vane said it gently, which was worse than if he’d said it cruelly — gentleness from a man like that felt like a hand closing slowly instead of quickly.
“I’m not here to argue with your grief, Ms. Kessler.
I’m here because the man who’s spent four years running his own investigation into your mother’s disappearance — the one who’s been watching you far longer and far closer than I have — has never told you any of this either, and I think it’s worth asking yourself why. ”
I felt the floor of the evening drop out from under me. “What man.”
“Ask him,” Vane said, and smiled like he’d just handed me the only gift he had any intention of giving.
“He’s better at answering that than I am.
I only deal in information, Ms. Kessler.
He deals in silence, and in my experience, silence like his is always protecting something.
The question is whether it’s protecting you, or protecting him. ”
He left before the entrées arrived, an untouched glass of wine and a check already settled, and I sat across from an empty seat with Priya’s worried eyes on me from the bar and the entire architecture of my life quietly rearranging itself around a sentence I couldn’t unhear.
He’s been watching you far longer and far closer than I have.
I already knew who that was. I’d known his voice for a week and hadn’t let myself finish the thought.