“There’s no school today,” I tell her. “It’s fine. Everything is fine. But I’m taking you to Auntie Ellen’s house.”
Waylen’s sister lives forty-five minutes from us, in the middle of farm country where it’s impossible to get a cell signal, never mind getting your GPS tracking to work. Collette will be safe there. “You’re sick,” I tell her. “You’ve had a stomach bug since last night, okay?”
Collette doesn’t answer me. She arches upward and tries to turn around in her seat to make sure nobody is following us.
Ellen won’t mind. She’s always saying we should visit more anyway. She homeschools her two boys and spends most of her afternoons tending to the horses on her sprawling property. Whenever Collette does visit, Ellen relishes the opportunity to teach her about how to apply makeup and French braid her hair.
“And, Collette,” I begin, but she already knows what I’m about to say.
“Don’t tell Dad.” She takes the tissue I hand her and begins cleaning up the tears. All at once she has composed herself. She’s good at burying whatever she’s feeling. She’s learned how to do that from the best.
“Mom,” she says, with an authoritative tone that no eleven-year-old should have. She’s always been mature for her age, my Collette, and so serious when the situationtakes a sudden turn for it. “I was listening to this podcast about this mom whose husband just got out of prison—”
“Collette, really.”
“Just listen,” she says, still dabbing at her tears, even as she sobers up from her initial fear. “The mom took her kids and moved far away, but she had a code word, so anyone who tried to pick her kids up from school needed to know what it was, and then the kids would know that person was safe.”
“There’s nobody from my past who’s getting out of prison,” I tell her. “You don’t have to worry about anything like that.” And my current case…I doubt Bertram has any reason to suspect me yet, but if I play my cards right, he’ll be behind bars for a long time. That is, if he’s guilty. Even though he appears squeaky clean, he must have slipped up somewhere. Mr. X has never led me down a dead end.
If Bertram is the one following me, it must be because he wants to know as much as he can about me. Because he suspects I’m sniffing him out? No, I didn’t give him any indication that I’d be doing that. Because he wants to learn all he can about me, so he can use me in some way? He’s a billionaire, which means he has the resources to stalk anyone who comes into his life. Maybe he’s paranoid. Maybe he has some way of knowing we copied the contents of his laptop. He is a tech genius—supposedly—after all.
“We can use a code,” she insists. “If we need help, we say—” She looks around the car, contemplating. “Nail polish.” Her eyes have landed on my manicure.
I’m proud of her for coming up with something so clever. I smile at her in the mirror, trying not to let on thatI’m checking for cars behind us. Nobody is there, thankfully.
“I’m so proud of you,” I say. She doesn’t seem to mind that she’s just like me at times.
She understands this small conspiracy between us, and that something is happening beyond what I’m going to explain to her—so she doesn’t press. She is adding up all of the little white lies I’ve asked her to tell her father.
But she doesn’t know about the bigger betrayal. Even though I’m taking Collette to his sister, I’m breaking an agreement we’ve had for years.
During our first mission, when we were still trepidatious around each other, we skirted the parameters of our relationship like spies around security lasers in a mansion with a million-dollar crystal vase. While neither of us would have called it love, there was a lust factor. We were in our early twenties. I was trying to outrun a past that I never spoke about—not even to him. Waylen’s petty fraud was no match for the secrets I keep, but even so, we found a way to connect with each other.
The first night we made love, it wasn’t planned. I could feel Waylen falling in love with me, as though he were succumbing to a poisonous mist that had infiltrated the oxygen in the room. We dozed on his bed, and while I was still half asleep, it started to rain. Thunder shook the walls of his tiny apartment, and lightning flashed.
He got up to close the window. I watched him move, the taut muscles of his naked body catching the shadows of the next bolt of lightning. He wrapped his arms around my chest when he returned to bed.
“When I was a kid, I got caught in a rainstorm like thiswhile my parents were driving us home,” he said. “We saw a tree go up in flames when a power line hit it.”
I’d turned to face him, curious that he was starting to be vulnerable with me. “There was a tornado, a totally freak thing that even the meteorologists hadn’t predicted. The only thing around us was this huge furniture store. It was closed, but my dad smashed in the glass door so we could all get inside. He said the safest place to be in a storm like that was a building with lots of plumbing and electrical wires. That’s why I picked this apartment.”
He lived in a small unit of a massive building, on the fourteenth floor. I’d assumed his reasons were budgetary. But it fascinated me to know how deliberate he was. Not just in the way he spoke, the way he dressed to match the mission, the way he kissed me as though we were the only two people in the world—but even something as mundane as choosing an apartment.
In his arms that night, I felt the safest I had ever been. Like I’d found someone who knew how to keep us safe. Someone who saw the details that even I—with my constant catastrophizing—would miss.
A lot of people think that the safest place to weather a threat is in the trenches, behind a tree or under a porch. But really, it’s a place with large crowds where you can hide, and with towering walls and wires to absorb the electric shock.
Bertram Casimir is not a literal tornado, but he does pose a similar threat. Waylen would hate that I’m taking Collette to his sister out in the country. We agreed that no matter what, when something was wrong, we would meet at the only shopping mall still left after the pandemic shutdown the surrounding businesses. We agreed that we would meet in the parking garage underground, and if we couldn’t call the other for help, we would wait.
I should be doing that, my logical brain is telling me. But something else—something I can’t seem to place my finger on—tells me that Waylen should never hear about this. And that voice, duplicitous as it might be, is loudest.
Nine
After I’ve dropped my daughter off, I call the school to let them know she’ll be out sick today. Then I speed like hell toward Bertram’s apartment.
Elodie calls, predictably right when school is supposed to start, to ask me where I am. “I wanted to tell you what I was able to find online,” she says.
“Collette has a bug,” I say. “Sorry. I was going to call you and check in this afternoon.”
