“It would be years before I saw her again,” he confesses. “We tried to rekindle—we even got engaged, but I wasn’t the same person as when we first met. Neither was she. The fire had gone out.”
“But then why was she so angry?” I ask. “Why is she doing all of this to you?”
“Like I said, she just isn’t the same.” He steels his voice. Whatever emotion he’s feeling, he doesn’t want me to see it. “All those years of trying to please her parents, and realizing it was all for nothing. She thought our engagement would undo all the time she wasted, but it didn’t. I couldn’t fix it for her. I wasn’t the man she fell in love with back in college. She hates me for that.”
“Sir, I think we’ve lost the other car,” Bertram’s driver interrupts us. We’ve veered into a parking garage affixed to an office building. Nobody else is here, and I let myself breathe a sigh of relief, but Bertram doesn’t seem at all soothed.
He’s staring at me, and I see some lingering trace of that desire he showed me earlier. But it’s crowded now by something else, something resembling anger and fear. “Margaux, if Annie sent you, you must tell me.”
He pulls me once again under his spell, and even as Ifeel it happening, I struggle to resist. If he was right, if Annie were somehow still alive and she had been the one to put me up to this, in this moment I would tell him.
“She didn’t,” I say softly. “I thought she was dead.”
“Why would you think—”
The car lurches forward with a roar of the engine. The car is behind us again. It makes no attempt to be subtle, honking and flashing its lights as it chases us. But there’s nowhere for us to go.
Something occurs to me.
I go through my purse as Bertram’s driver exhausts the last of the possible turns, narrowly missing the parked cars as he rounds the corners. Bertram seems well and truly terrified, but a resigned calm washes over me, mixed though it is with a new sort of dread.
“Don’t you have bodyguards?” I ask him as I paw through my zippered compartments.
“I’m not Elon Musk,” he snaps back. “People might try to hack into my bank accounts, but why would they assassinate me?”
“You seem to think your ex-girlfriend wants to kill you.”
“Not me,” he says. “She wants me alive so she can hurt me.”
“Sir, we’re at a dead end.” The driver sounds only marginally less panicked.
Frustrated, I dump the entire purse onto the seat, flustering Bertram. I shake the empty bag vigorously, sure I hear something clattering inside.
“What are you doing?” Bertram asks.
I pull at the lining until I find it—a tear so minuscule that even I hadn’t noticed it. The fact that it’s cleanly slitwith no loose threads tells me that it must be new. I root my finger around inside until I feel the smooth, curved edge of something roughly the size of a quarter. I already know what it is before I’ve extracted it.
An AirTag.
It can’t be. It truly fucking can’t be.
I open the door, and Bertram lunges to close it, but I’m too fast for him. I ignore his shouts for me to get back inside the car. When he realizes I can’t be stopped, he gets out after me, demanding I stop as I pound on the tinted window of the car behind us.
Suddenly in a less murderous mood, the driver of the vehicle throws it into reverse, and I lunge for the hood, clinging to the windshield wipers. I know who’s in that car, and it’s not Annie Clarke. I won’t let him get away. If he wants to speed away, he’s taking me with him.
But Bertram has other ideas. He pries me from the hood. “Damn it, woman, have you lost your mind?” he says. His muscles lock. He’s too strong for me, and in one fluid motion he’s propelled me behind him. He guards me with arms held out at either side.
Finally, the car door opens. I recognize the suede Aldwin lace shoes, the wedding ring on the hand that grips the frame of the car door as he gets out. Waylen, the sneaky son of a bitch.
Days earlier, when he and I argued—not for the first time—about me quitting my vigilantism, he got out of bed in the middle of the night. I heard him rummaging through the kitchen to make himself some coffee, and I went back to bed.
In the morning, my purse had fallen from its hook by the door. I’d assumed Collette had gone through it looking for gum.
It’s been more than a decade since Waylen and I worked together, but our whole marriage has been a mission unto itself. And tracking people down was a specialty of his. He’s been so soft for so long that I forgot he had it in him.
But Bertram has never met Waylen, except on paper when he was stalking my personal data. He has no idea that the man standing before us now is the very same one who catches spiders under a glass and uses a bit of cardboard to release them into the yard, who sat patiently as our daughter snapped barrettes into his hair and used my old makeup brushes to pretend that she was his agent and he was America’s Next Top Model.
There’s a loud click. Bertram’s driver has a cocked gun trained on Waylen, who holds his palms up and utters a soft, “Whoa, whoa.” The same tone he uses on the rare occasion that one of our arguments leads to me yelling.
