CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nadia — Ruth
The brass key sat on my kitchen counter for three days before I thought of the one person who might actually know what it opened, and I was furious with myself for not thinking of her sooner.
Ruth Okonkwo had been my mother’s closest friend in the nine years I remembered — not blood family, but the kind of friend who shows up at every school play and remembers every allergy and becomes, without anyone formally deciding it, the closest thing to an aunt a motherless kid gets to keep.
She’d moved to Connecticut a decade ago, after the funeral, after grief had made the city too small for both of us to keep living in it.
We still talked, a few times a year, birthday calls and the occasional lunch when she came into the city, but I hadn’t told her anything about the last month. I wasn’t sure yet how to.
I called her anyway, and drove out to see her the same week, and sat in her sunroom with a cup of tea going cold in my hands while I told her everything — Vane, Kael, Meridian Assurance, the storage unit, the key.
Ruth listened without interrupting, her face doing the specific stillness of someone recalculating years of memory in real time.
“She told me once,” Ruth said finally, “that if anything ever happened to her, I should tell you to look for the water.”
“The water?”
“I thought it was about grief. A metaphor, you know — that’s what grieving people say to each other, things that sound profound and mean nothing you can actually use.
” Ruth set down her own cup, hands trembling slightly.
“But she said it strangely. Specific. ‘Tell her to look for the water, Ruth. She’ll understand when she’s ready.
’ I never understood it. I’m not sure I understand it now. ”
I thought about the paintings hanging in my gallery show — a decade of work, all of it water, all of it dark and moving and never quite still, a compulsion I’d never examined too closely because artists aren’t always required to explain themselves to themselves.
I’d told interviewers it was about memory.
I’d never once considered it might be about something more literal than that.
“There’s a lockbox,” I said slowly, the pieces arranging themselves faster than I could vet them.
“First Union Trust, on Cortlandt. My mother opened it under the name on my birth certificate, the one before Kessler — I found the paperwork years ago and never thought about it again because I didn’t know what it meant. ”
“The Water Street branch,” Ruth said, and something in her voice told me she’d made the same connection at the exact same moment I had. “It’s on Water Street, Nadia. She wasn’t being poetic. She was telling you exactly where to look.”
I called Kael from the car, because whatever careful distance I’d been trying to maintain since the storage unit had quietly stopped mattering somewhere around the moment Ruth said the word water and every painting I’d ever made rearranged itself in my memory into something closer to a map than art.
“I know where the key goes,” I said, before he could say hello.
There was a pause on his end, brief, and when he spoke again his voice had the particular focus I was starting to recognize as the part of him that had spent four years thinking like a hunter. “Where.”
“First Union Trust, Water Street branch. Meet me there tomorrow at nine.”
“Nadia.” Something in the way he said my name made me slow down. “If Vane’s people know as much about your mother as he’s claimed, there’s a real chance they’ve had eyes on every bank record connected to her for years. If this box is real, we don’t walk in there without a plan.”
I hated that he was right. I hated more that some part of me had already known it and called him anyway, because somewhere in the last month I’d stopped wanting to face the dangerous parts of this alone.
“Then help me build one,” I said. “But we’re doing this together, Kael. Not you deciding what I need to know and telling me after. Together.”
“Together,” he agreed, and I let myself believe, for the length of that one word, that we actually meant the same thing by it.