She scans the room, locating the alarm against the far wall. She tries a few combinations before it stops. “Jasper’s birthday.” Her harsh laugh echoes through the space.
Inside, the office is clean and spacious, an upscale lobby. Tessa surveys the room, then walks down the hall to the two rooms in the back. One looks like a doctor’s office, with a reclining medical chair. The other has a few large metal tanks with black lids, a table with a bank of microscopes, some other equipment I don’t recognize. On the counter next to amicroscope, Tessa locates a binder. She flips through it, closes it quickly. She peeks in drawers, which are filled with vials and more medical equipment.
“Tessa. What’s going on? Why are we here?”
She ignores me, walks back to the lobby, where she spots a sleek green filing cabinet doubling as a credenza with three cacti spaced across it. No surprise, the cabinet is locked. As she races toward the door, I think we’re finally done with this mad expedition. Then she bends down to retrieve the brick amid the broken glass, whips around, and slams it against the lock on the cabinet until it submits.
A siren blares in the distance. I have no idea if it’s for us or one of the many other emergencies in Los Angeles. I don’t know if a break-in even qualifies as an emergency in LA. Either way, it scares me to my senses.
“Tessa, we need to get out of here. Now.”
It’s like she can’t hear me. She thumbs through the files, then gets frustrated and grabs an armful and races toward the door.
“Are you going to help or what?” She motions to the filing cabinet. “Grab some.”
I don’t have time to ask why. Whatever we’re doing, I’m already in this with her.
It takes three trips before we’ve emptied the cabinet. Then she climbs into the driver’s seat and starts the car. I hesitate. This journey she’s on—I’m not sure whether it has anything to do with my daughter. Tessa peers at me through the passenger window, worried. She needs me. So I open the car door and climb inside.
She’s calmer now, acquiescing to the laws of the road. I still can’t settle the knots in my stomach. I’m confused. It’s more than that, though—something I can’t quite put my finger on.
As Tessa pulls into the garage behind her house, a new fear hits. “What about your husband?”
“He took Jasper to the pier. They’re getting lunch after.” She checks the time on the dashboard. “They won’t be home for at least an hour.”
I follow her inside, carrying an armful of the files we’ve just stolen, then drop them on the kitchen peninsula next to the pile she’s alreadybrought in. She goes back into the garage to get another armful. I stay in her house, realizing that I’ve only seen it from outside. Standing in the living room, it’s immediately obvious that Regina’s living room wasn’t just the same style as Tessa’s. It was exactly the same, right down to the position of the television, the simple beech coffee table, the velvet couch in a different hue. It has a strange logic to it. In high school, Regina was a chameleon. One month she was a serious athlete, wearing her soccer windbreaker everywhere. The next, she was one of the theater kids, donning red lipstick and rehearsing lines for parts that weren’t hers. She was a hippie, a goth, a long-distance runner, a debate team captain, an artist, a mathlete. I assumed she was searching for an identity that fit. When she told me she was going to school for writing, I said something about how it was a big commitment.
You don’t get me at all,she’d said without an ounce of the histrionics her words implied.Why do you think I’m into everything? I need to understand what makes people tick or my characters will be bloodless.
It’s how she interpreted the world, through imitation. If she wanted to understand her lover, how he’d vowed himself to someone so different from her—in personality and style if not in looks—Regina would have copied Tessa’s style. I get that, I do, and I’m trying not to judge. But Regina’s apartment wasn’t copying a style. It was inhabiting a life.
Tessa waddles in with the rest of the files, stopping momentarily when she sees a girl outside snapping a picture of her house with an old camera. Tessa shoos her away but doesn’t follow up with the logical next step of pulling down the drapes. Across the way, I see other people I’ve noticed before, the bearded man with the bike and the orange child’s seat, the woman with the easel and palette, the fit redhead with the stroller. Everyone has accessories here, covers for what they’re really doing—watching.
Tessa skims a file, then tosses it onto the floor. Opens another and does the same. Intake forms fall from the folders as they hit the floor, exposing passport-size photos of pretty young women, handwrittenresponses on questionnaires. Another folder drops, obscuring the image of an Indian woman with golden eyes.
“Tessa, stop. Tell me what’s going on.”
“You know how you said Marley looked like a younger version of Laila Ruiz?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Laila Ruiz was one of Gabe’s patients. I mean, he never told me, but trust me, anyone that high-profile went to Gabe.” Tessa shows me an open file. Sure enough, it has a small photo of Marley with her measurements and background, her genetic history, other testing. Tessa types on her phone, then hands it to me. I skim a gossip article announcing Laila Ruiz’s pregnancy. It says nothing about a donor.
“Do the math.” Tessa points to the date on Marley’s intake sheet, the day her eggs were harvested. “She got pregnant the same month Marley donated her eggs.”
“Okay.” I hand her phone back to her. There’s nothing wrong with using an egg donor, with keeping it private.
“Only Gabe never told me about it. Not Laila Ruiz specifically. He wouldn’t break doctor-patient confidentiality. He never told me about Rosebud, that he’d started an entire wing of his business for donations. Why wouldn’t he tell me that? Don’t you see?”
All I see is a woman with dark circles under her eyes, tearing through files she’s stolen, tossing them on the floor when they don’t deliver the news she’s expecting. Other people might see something different, someone hormonal and unhinged. I see a mother, searching for answers in the wrong place. I don’t know what Regina’s death has to do with the files scattered across Tessa’s kitchen floor, the donors Regina evidently recruited for Gabe. I know he was the man along the canals that Regina was having an affair with. I know he killed my daughter. I know Tessa still refuses to accept that.
Before I decide what to say, Tessa diverts her attention to the French doors, sighing heavily as she offers a reluctant wave. I follow her gaze to the woman from next door, still as a statue on the walkway outside Tessa’s patio. The woman doesn’t wave back as she steps into the garden, toward the house. Her attention is fixed entirely on me. That’s when I know everything’s about to change.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Tessa
“Let me get rid of her,” I say to Barb. I use my toe to edge an intake sheet of a brunette back into its file, then step over the pile toward the living room. The brunette looks nothing like Regina. Nothing like me either.
