Chapter 25
Alice
Carter started the car. “Any time you want to parachute out, you know you’re holding the ripcord.”
Alice shuddered. “I tried parachuting once. I’d rather go down with the plane. Can I conclude that Malik leaned on you?”
“Yup.”
“What did you say?”
“I said it was your choice, and that I would protect you as much as I could. And that I couldn’t vouch for the authorities doing the same.
” He turned the car and headed back the way they’d come.
He’d been concerned that the late-model Audi was too ostentatious, but Alice was just happy to have a comfortable seat, though on the way over she’d caught herself leaning into the corners, to his amusement.
“All that stuff in the media,” he said. “They’re trying to scare you into losing your nerve. ”
“It might be working. But I wanna know what’s on that flash drive first.”
“Malik also said that your sister is deteriorating faster.”
“I could tell.”
“You all right?”
“Not really. I’ve never been all right with it. But Kimberly’s determined to set the rules. I wouldn’t want everyone hanging around me like well-intentioned vultures either.”
“I guess you’ve both been here before. That’s gotta color things.”
“Every time has been different, but one thing I know? There’s never enough time at the end.
While someone’s seriously ill, you spend all this time in denial, trying to keep spirits up, trying to keep ‘positive,’ looking for signs of improvement while trying to explain away the signs of deterioration.
No one wants to talk about what happens if the treatments or whatever don’t work.
Even when the end is approaching fast, you’re pinning your hopes on that last-minute rally.
And there usually is one, right before the last decline.
By the time you accept it’s truly the end, it’s usually too late to say all the things you’d been avoiding.
Which is why Kimberly’s making a point of saying all those things now, talking about the inevitability of her death. Normalizing it. Joking about it.”
“That’s an incredible attitude. How old is she?”
“Twenty-eight.”
He blew out a breath.
“I know, right? She’s determined to be the perfect role model for all people dying too soon.
Which annoys me. Death isn’t something a twenty-eight-year-old should calmly accept.
” Alice’s eyes stung. She turned to look out the window, though the suburban streets were a blur.
“And she sure as hell shouldn’t be counseling everyone else over it.
But I guess that gives her something to focus on that’s not…
My other sister—Poppy—was diagnosed with depression before she died.
That was so hard to watch. There is no comfort at all you can give to someone in that situation, and Kimberly felt particularly powerless.
She’s fighting so hard against…” Alice’s throat closed up.
“Alice?”
“It’s just all so goddamn sad,” she said, tears bursting out alongside the words.
Carter turned onto a side street, drew to a stop and cut the engine. She heard a click as he released his seatbelt. “Come here,” he said, drawing her in tight.
“We shouldn’t be stopping.”
“Just take the damn hug.” He tucked her head into the nook under his chin. “I get that you want to keep a brave face around Kimberly, but you don’t have to around me. It’s not just Kimberly going through this.”
She breathed deeply, as if she could suck up some of his strength, his confidence, and allowed herself to melt into him.
In the car’s muffled interior, she could both hear and feel his heart beating—a primal comfort.
Maybe Kimberly was wrong about Alice being the anchoring influence.
Maybe it wasn’t until you found an anchorage that you realized how adrift you were.
“I’m sorry to see you so sad.”
“No, this is good, actually. At this point—with my mom, with Poppy, with Nika… I usually feel empty, and I desperately want to feel something, but I’m just numb or my brain can’t compute.
Kimberly’s giving me permission to start the grieving process early.
I just don’t want to grieve her. I don’t want to lose her. ”
“They’re getting married?”
“She wants a wedding instead of a funeral. A celebration. I just hope she’s going to be well enough to enjoy it.
Poor Malik—they were so stupidly happy, before this.
He’s been her rock these last few years.
It’s hard to watch his heart slowly breaking.
Weddings are supposed to be all about the future, about beginnings. ”
“Yep.”
“But you know what? It puts even all of this craziness into perspective.” She waved her hands toward the windshield, as if their various assailants were gathered in front of them. “And we need to get going.”
“Death has a way of doing that,” he said, releasing her gently but hovering his hands around her for a second as if she might fall.
“I guess you’d know about that.”
“I really don’t know if I do,” he said, starting the car and moving off.
“How so?”
He was silent for a long time, and she thought she’d pushed too hard and lost him.
But then he took a big breath and started speaking.
“It’s like you say about the last-minute rally.
Not being able to accept the obvious. Part of me is still there, waiting for the rally.
I don’t know if my entire brain has truly clicked over to ‘she’s dead.
’ Some of it’s there, some of it’s not.”
“It must be hard when you’re not there at the end—I mean, it’s hard enough when you are there. So Vanessa just disappeared, like in the book? You never got any answers?”
Alice waited for the “it’s a long story” or some other fob-off, but it didn’t come.
Instead, he said, “I don’t even know what country she was in.
Her file is sealed because whatever she was working on was such a secret.
Sometimes I think I should have tried harder, got a lawyer to challenge it, but…
That would have meant facing up to it, and I wasn’t ready to do that.
And now… I dunno if I want to go back and churn it all up again. ”
“So you met in training, married within the year?” She shuffled in her seat to face him, and he glanced at her with an almost undetectable smile—an expression she hadn’t seen before. He looked away again before she could dig to the bottom of it.
“Fast, I know,” he replied, “but getting married made things easier in some ways. Everyone says it’s hard if you marry someone outside the Agency.
When you’re in the clandestine service, half your life becomes a lie.
It’s way easier when you both have security clearances, and you understand what the other one is going through. ”
“You make it sound like a purely practical decision.”
“Nah,” he said with a sad smile. “It was crazy romantic.”
“It was?”
“There was an assignment coming up where we were to pose as husband and wife—I can’t tell you where, or what, but it was just for a few months—and she just said it in an offhand way, ‘Maybe we should get married for real?’ And I thought, ‘Why not?’”
“I can’t imagine making the biggest life decision you’ll ever make spontaneously.”
“That was Vanessa. And it was a no-brainer. She once said that we were basically the same person and that was why it worked so well. We got married the following week, super quietly, and shipped out on assignment the next day. We joked that it was our dream honeymoon—and it was a great cover because of course we were all over each other, for real.”
“Sounds like the perfect partnership.” Alice got that strange rush of buoyancy and envy she’d had at the cabin. To have found a man like this, known he was yours forever, and then…
“Yeah, we were good together. But I don’t think two people have to be exactly the same to work. Yin and yang and all that. I mean, take you and me!”
He said it jokingly, and Alice didn’t know how to respond—she was way too much of a coward to ask what he meant, even though inside she was screaming to know—so it remained hanging there between them.
“How long were you married?” she said eventually.
“I never know how to answer that question.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because I don’t know when she died.”
“Oh shit. Right.”
“I can’t even tell you how long it took before I stopped expecting a call from her.
At some point, not even all that long ago, I realized I wasn’t waiting for the phone to ring anymore.
And I wasn’t getting that double hit of terror and hope every time it did.
You only realize you’ve passed those kinds of milestones in hindsight. ”
“Oh God, yeah, the phone ringing! That’s the absolute worst when you’re waiting for news.
I once got to the point, when my older sister was ill, that my phone was triggering little panic attacks whenever it rang—even after she’d died.
” Alice planted her hand on her chest. “Kimberly made me change the ringtone, which helped, but even now, if I’m out and about and I hear that particular tone on someone else’s phone, it’s like a dagger to the heart. ”
Carter looked over at her for a few seconds longer than she was comfortable with, considering he was driving. He had that look as if he was trying to figure her out.
“Carter? The road?”
“Sorry,” he said, turning back. “You know, I have the same thing, with the ringtone. Like I hear it somewhere, and I feel it, right here.” He lightly punched his sternum with one hand.
“And I get the same rush of feelings I did when I was waiting to hear—like hope, but a dark hope that felt like someone was punching into your gut and twisting your insides. I remember at one point wishing that I’d just get the call—the call—and it would be all over. I mean, shit, that sounds…”
“No, I get it,” Alice whispered. “I mean, different circumstances, of course, but…”
“I really think you do,” he said, almost to himself, a note of wonder in his voice. “So many people claim to know what you’re going through…”
“What kind of closure have you had?”
“Her brother and sister held a memorial service but I didn’t go.
I wasn’t ready. With a regular death, I guess you all accept it at the same time, more or less.
Not with this. You just can’t silence the ‘what ifs.’ It’s like there’s a line in your book: The question of where she lay was always present.
In the absence of certainty, his mind threw up gruesome images, all with one thing in common—she lay alone, unmarked, forgotten.
Except that sometimes even now I picture her alive, getting on with a regular existence somewhere else.
There’s an infinite number of parallel lives she could be living.
Man, your sister would have a field day with me. ”
Alice didn’t want to break it to him that Kimberly already had.
“I mean, I’ve accepted she’s gone. I just… Sometimes I also expect her to walk through the door. It’s messed up, but that’s what it is. Like the book said, I’ve gotta learn to live with a question that doesn’t have an answer. That’s been going around in my head since I read it.”
Alice murmured in sympathy.
“I remember Nika saying once that she never moved on from her fiancé’s death,” he continued, “though she did finally grow out of her death wish and become attached to life again. In her case, there was a funeral, of course, a body in a casket—she watched it go into the ground, from a distance—but she never found out for sure who killed him.”
“So you were both living in limbo?”
“Isn’t life a state of limbo?”
“Ooh, deep.”
Carter laughed. “This is all a bit deep, right? I don’t know why we keep ending up here.”
Alice pointed to her head. “Morbid-story magnet, remember?”
He laid a hand on her thigh and gave her a grim smile. And though it began as a gesture of comfort, he left it there as they drove, long after the moment had passed. She liked it—the warmth, the connection. An anchor.
“You really are exactly as you appear, aren’t you?” he said as they joined the highway.
“What do you mean? Where did that come from?”
“No surprises. No hidden agenda. Straight up.”
“Dull and predictable, that’s me.”
“You’re hardly dull. And I like it when things are predictable—when the things that happen in a day are the things I expect to happen. You may be the most genuine and authentic person I’ve ever met.”
“Seriously?”
“I haven’t experienced much of that in my adult life, where no one is what they pretend to be. Hell, when I’ve spent a lot of the last decade literally pretending to be someone I’m not.”
“Most people are like this. Predictable. Normal. And maybe I do have an agenda. Maybe I’m planning to turn you in.”
“You’ve had plenty of opportunities, but somehow you keep choosing to take the risk. So maybe you’re not as predictable as you think.”
“Live for the moment, that’s me.”
“People who live for the moment are more likely to die in that moment. I prefer your ‘survive-the-day’ mantra.”
He smiled at her, and it occurred to her Kimberly was right—he was looking at her differently from yesterday.
Less of an inconvenience and more of an ally.
A literal partner in crime. As if there could be any future between them.
They’d be apples and oranges, especially compared with his apples and apples relationship with his wife.
Alice would be Jane Eyre to Mrs. Rochester, the second Mrs. de Winter to Rebecca, but forever stuck in the middle of the narrative, with all the murky complications and questions and no happy ending.
But then, that thing he’d said about yin and yang. What if someone like her could have someone like him? Because, damn, she really was starting to feel something for him that she could swear she’d never felt before. Which was surely down to the drama of the situation, but…
It was true that she was sticking with him because she wanted to know what happened next. But not just with the FBI and the Russians.
With him.