From inside, he loudly blew his nose, making her jump. Over the next minute or two, she detected sniffing and another nose blow. She stretched up and peeped in the window. He was staring into space, his eyes rimmed with red. Toilet paper was balled up on the floor beside him. She let herself in and, without a word, sat beside him, their backs against the bed.
“I didn’t expect…” he began, wiping his nose. “She sounds so … tormented.”
“The end was rushing up fast. Sorry, I should have warned you. I didn’t think…” Alice laid her hand on his shoulder, waitingfor the rush of raw grief to pass. She struggled to remember Nika before the illness overtook her. She met her a while after her diagnosis and watched her deteriorate day by day, and each day had become the new normal—though even then she’d still sometimes managed to be shocked. As with Kimberly now, in some weeks the slide was so fast you lost your breath just watching it. But for Carter, Nika had lurched straight from strong and vibrant to weak and confused.
“It’s her voice but it’s not her at all.”
“You know, I always gave her credit for being smart and determined—and fierce, when she wanted to be. But I don’t think I’ve yet put together the rest, the Nika you knew. I mean, I now know the stories in the book were hers, but I’m still finding it hard to reconcile the two Nikas.”
“She was all those things. A quiet strength. Her character in the book—it was so recognizably her.”
“And yet, she was living such an ordinary life here, except for the stilettos. She wore them like other people wear sneakers. She’d wear them around the house, when it was just the two of us. I’d be in sweatpants and she’d be in some tailored dress with matching shoes. And lipstick. Do you know, she was the stuff of legend at the Montrose Library for wearing six-inch heels to pick up books for our research?”
Carter laughed, fondly.
“She always dressed like she was on her way to some swanky party,” Alice continued, “and had just popped into the library or the grocery store en route, when actually thatwasthe outing. It gave her an air of intrigue that Montrose was not equipped to handle.”
“You should have seen her when shereallydressed up. She was…” He got that faraway look again.
“She was…?”
“It’s strange to talk to someone else who knew her.”
“You’ve never talked to anyone about her?”
“There wasn’t a day since we arrived in the U.S. that I didn’t think about her, wonder what she was doing, hope she was okay—until your book came out and I discovered she’d died.” His voice cracked slightly. “But there was never anyone I could share that with—wanted to share it with. Like the shoes,” he said fondly. “She was all about the shoes, but I’d forgotten that.”
“It’s gotta be hard to hold onto a memory of someone when you can’t talk about them.”
“Ah, I’d better get back into this. Don’t want to be awake all night.”
He shook himself a little, and Alice took it as a sign to remove her hand from his shoulder. She’d gotten a little more out of him this time, and with every little bit he revealed, she liked him more. And here was another way she’d failed him in the book: Holt would never have cried.
He put the earbuds back in, slid down the rug and stretched out flat, linking his hands behind his head. Hejustfit in the space, lengthwise. As he listened, his gaze fixed on a corner of the ceiling, his pupils flicking around as if whatever Nika was discussing was playing out there. He didn’t make notes but then he was supposed to have this freakish memory.
No wonder Nika had been in love with the guy. Well, Alice had clearly seen howGalinacould be in love withHolt, but he was even more attractive as a proper human. Even the physical descriptions in the book, though immediately recognizable, were lacking. Sure, he was ‘tall,’ but they hadn’t described how his neck seemed fixed at a slight angle, as if he was accustomed to the world’s business taking place below his eye level, and his posture had adjusted accordingly.
His focus flicked to Alice and he grinned when he saw her staring. She hurriedly looked away. Shit, and he already thought she had a crush on him. Well, shedidhave a crush on him, andthe cold, hard truth of the situation wasn’t doing anything to snap her to reality.
She gave in to a yawn so huge that her jaw cracked.
He laughed. “Get some sleep. I’ll be up for a while yet.”
She nodded, still caught in the yawn, and it was all she could do to pull herself up onto the bed. Sometime later he stopped the recording and the click jolted her awake, though she couldn’t remember falling asleep. He rewound and listened again, his frown intensifying. “She’s talking—in Russian—about havingkompromat. About bringing it to the U.S. as insurance.”
Alice cleared her throat. “Komp-what?”
“Kompromat. Compromising material. Dirt on someone, like you’d use for blackmail. Know what that could be?”
She shook her head. “Does she say what form it’s in? Documents? Emails? Photos? Digital?”
“No. She says she brought it with her when she fled Russia. Far as I knew, she left with her new travel documents and some clothes in a bag—and not clothes I’d seen her wear before, so I guessed she’d grabbed them on the way out of town, though they didn’t look new. I don’t think she even went back to her apartment after the burn notice.”
“She often quipped that she’d left Russia with just one small bag. Could the kompromat have been hidden in it—a secret compartment or whatever? What did this bag look like?”
“Dark blue, looked like leather. But the material is unlikely to be anything physical—documents, photos… She wouldn’t have risked taking that out of the country.” He tossed the earbuds aside and stood, shaking his head. “She would occasionally get intel from her sources in digital formats. Flash drives and the like, though I warned her never to be caught with anything.”
“That’s the bag she would take to the hospital. I packed and unpacked it for her half a dozen times. It didn’t even have pockets—I remember finding that annoying. I definitely didn’tfind anything like a flash drive in her possessions. But if she’s talking about having concrete evidence, could it have been well hidden? We originally had a scene in the book where Galina hides a microSD card in a tiny pocket in her bra, and rolls up a photo and sews it in, in place of the underwire. I edited it out because it was a plot thread that went nowhere, but it was Nika’s idea.”
