She doesn’t prod. She waits.
“Do you happen to know where Officer Stephen Foster went?” I ask.
“No,” she says, and her poker face is good enough that I have no idea if that’s true or not. I suspect not. Even meeting Celia right now, I find it hard to believe anything she wanted to know would be outside her grasp. “Why do you ask?”
“There was an altercation between Sawyer and Dalton. Officer Foster has documentation—leverage—that we need.”
“Leverage?” She raises her eyebrows again. “What is it that Dalton has that requires a counterweight?”
“I’d rather not say.” I grimace.
“I bet you would, but that’s not how things work when you come to me. When someone needs my help, they play by my rules.”
“Do you have the information I need?”
“In a way, but information isn’t free.”
“Not even for one of your children?”
“You’renot my child. If Sawyer was sitting across from me, of course I’d help her.”
From everything Sawyer has told me about Celia and from what Tamiko said, I wonder whether she’d have helped Sawyer for a fee too.
“But she didn’t come, did she?” Celia continues.
“She won’t come.”
“No, she won’t. She’s the coleader of her sibling musketeers. She and Nathaniel. Understanding my point of view would besucha betrayal.” Her tone is bitter. She eyes me for a beat. “If I give you the information, I want you to tell her you got it fromme. I want her to know thatIhad what she needed. That the only person who could protect her from her poor choices was me.”
I lean forward and put my elbows on my knees. “That’ll fuck me over.”
“It might,” she says without a hint of remorse. “She can be angry with you, and you can have the information. Or she can love you, and you’ll have nothing. That’s the deal.”
Confessing where I got my new lead or information was a possibility I understood when I resolved to come here, so I can’t let Celia’s demand hold me back now. Maybe what’s coming next—my trade, our breakup—will be easier for both of us if she’s angry with me. I know it’ll be easier for me if Daltoncan’tget to her.
“You’ve got a deal. Tell me how to find Stephen Foster.”
“You don’t need Stephen,” she says, “because I know where he kept all his Tucker family secrets.”
At the police station, I sit outside with my driver, waiting for Sawyer to arrive. My manager has just sent confirmation that my biological grandparents are thrilled that I’m willing to meet. Since I don’t know what will happen with the trade, my flight off the island is tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll have a visit before I fly back here. There and back. Just enough time to assess them in person with no commitment for more from me in any way.
Part of me wants to tell Sawyer, take her with me, but another part of me is scared to get any closer, to let her in even more when the ticking clock counting down our time together is so loud that I can barely think of anything else. I also don’t know how mad she’s going to be at what I’ve done. Maybe the clock stops right now.
Sawyer pulls up next to me in her silver BMW i7, and she climbs out of the driver’s seat with a worried expression on her face.
“Are you okay?” she asks when I get out to greet her. “When you said ‘meet me at the station,’ I was worried you’d been arrested.”
“Not yet,” I say with a slight smile.
“What’s going on?” she asks as I lead the way toward the station.
“I have something to show you.” I hold open the door for her, and the air-conditioning hits us both at the same time, an immediate break from the rising humidity outside. She shivers, and I take her hand.
“Something to show me at a police station?” She lets out a nervous laugh and squeezes my hand. “Seems ominous.”
At the front desk, I hit the bell on the chest-high counter and peer toward the back where officers are milling around.
“Can I help you?” one of them approaches us.
