But in a world of regret and desperation, an idea I have to try.
Chapter 37
EMMA
“Tom,” Emma says, softer again. “Thank you. I know you don’t owe me any of this. I know you barely know me and you should probably run away fast. But you’re here. And I think you might be… good.”
“I’m very medium,” Tom says. “But I care about Pete. And I care about—” he glances around and lowers his voice “—not letting men like James write the ending.”
“Then we’re aligned.”
We sort the bill. Emma insists on paying, then lets Tom pay anyway. At the door she pauses, eyes flicking to every face in the café like she’s memorizing them for a quiz.
Emma squeezes his arm — quick, human — then launches herself into the street like a decorative missile. She walks away from the café like she’s leaving a theatre after a dress rehearsal: quick, efficient, and with the faint whirl of triumph under her ribs.
She leaves Tom at the window, fingers worrying the rim of his coffee cup, eyes lit with that peculiar mixture of terror and determination she has learned to recognise as promise.
It’s always the same: people who feel useful will do whatever it takes to keep feeling that way. Tom is prime.
She tells herself, aloud and to the thin, damp air of the street, that she’s being pragmatic. That this isn’t manipulation so much as persuasion on an urgent timetable.
But the truth is slipperier.
Emma has always been a connoisseur of leverage: a little honesty here, a well-placed omission there, a theatrical tear at precisely the right dramatic beat. She knows how to bend people toward the shape of her need and make it look like their idea.
Two coffees and a half-hour of breathless anecdotes are all it takes to have him humming with a dangerous goodwill. He wants to be the person who rescues.
She does not tell him everything.
She does not tell him about all the other people she has bent before. She will not whisper about the ways she learned to read the rooms of desperate people until she could lay hands on the panic and pull it open like a suitcase.
That archive of small betrayals is private.
This is different, she tells herself. This is life or death.
She whips out her phone and fires off a message.
Think I have a way in.
She tells herself, again, that she would do anything to get what she needs.
If she has to weaponise kindness, to lace compassion with deception, she will. She will be the unreliable narrator of her own life if it keeps her life from falling apart.
Chapter 38
TOM
I shouldn’t be here.
I know I shouldn’t be here.
But here I am, parked halfway up a quiet suburban road like the world’s most incompetent private investigator. If anyone looks out of their window right now, I look less like a man on a noble mission and more like a divorced uncle waiting to kidnap the family barbecue set.
I try Craig’s number again, because he’s the voice of reason, the human equivalent of a safety instruction leaflet. It rings once, then goes to voicemail. Perfect. My one sensible adult friend, unavailable. Again. Probably off colour-coding case files or telling someone to stop parking on double yellows.
His voicemail tone clicks. “You’ve reached Craig—”
I hang up.
