“Margaux.” He’s grasping my shoulders. How did weboth get to the bottom of the stairs? I don’t remember moving. “Did you do it? Did you kill someone?”
The smoke alarm going off in the kitchen. Waylen chasing after me as I frantically started the car.“There are things you don’t know about my wife.”The creak of Erin’s door. Elodie’s voice through the phone saying,“What have you done, Margaux?”And the pages of my journal falling around me like confetti—all my secrets and rage and sorrows like snow.
Did I do it?
Of course not.
Right?
But Bertram doesn’t wait for my answer. He’s shoving me toward the basement door, telling me to move. We scramble into the darkness as the police continue to pound on the door and announce themselves.
“Can we go out through the same window?” Bertram asks.
I shake my head. “We’re surrounded by now,” I say. “They think my brother is hiding me.”
“This is his house?” Bertram says, but now isn’t the time to answer questions. It doesn’t matter. If we’re lucky, the police will figure out eventually that he’s got the world’s best alibi—being in the hospital, surrounded by security cameras and nurses, too weak to Spider-Man his way down the side of the building to come help me.
There’s no escape for me, either. All I can do is hide.
Bertram follows me behind a pile of boxes—just one pile among dozens. A billionaire and a liar, hiding in a musty basement from the police. I want to tell him that he can go. It’ll be better for him if he just comes out and tellsthem the truth: that I lied to get him here, that I called him for help and he thought he was doing the right thing.
But I don’t say anything, for the same reason I told Waylen I’d marry him: I don’t want to be alone. Despite years of convincing myself that I didn’t need anyone, I have never wanted to be alone.
The door breaks open upstairs. They must have used the pry bar, which means they really think I’m here, and they want to take me away. Is Waylen still tracking me somehow? Is he trying to set me up? Is Elodie?
I hear the footsteps thundering upstairs, then the abrupt stop. The police must be looking around in surprise, because from the outside this was a normal house, but inside it’s the most organized technological hoard you’ve ever seen in your life.
This was it, my brother told me. The last mission he ever wants me to do. Neither of us could have known it would end like this, but deep down we knew it had to end somehow.
The officer is calling for his colleagues to come in and take a look at what he’s stumbled upon. Dozens of computers, hundreds of hard drives. All of them are password protected, but it’s doubtful they’re interested in looking at what’s on them. The sheer volume alone is what’s so fascinating. My brother is an obsessive, fastidious record keeper. He has footage from every security camera in every building I’ve ever occupied. Except, of course, in the past twenty-four hours when I’d need them the most.
Did you do it?
I push the question from my mind. Of course not—right? I also push away the image of my state defense attorneyand my therapist testifying in my trial to determine whether I conspired to kill my parents. And I fear that my brother was wrong. There is no redemption. No amount of good deeds to cancel out the bad.
Bertram notices my ragged breathing before I do. He puts an arm around me. I’m not sure why he comforts me instead of turning me in. He should be running up the stairs, shouting, “She’s here!” But instead, we both listen as the footsteps move through my brother’s things. He tugs me farther into the shadows when the glow of the officer’s flashlight sweeps through the basement.
It feels like an eternity before they leave. It’s not illegal to have an ungodly amount of technology, and they have a murderer to catch.
“They’ll see your car,” I whisper.
“It’s parked down the street,” he reminds me. “And it’s not a real license plate.”
I look at the silhouette of his face in the darkness. “Annie,” he says. “She always seems to find me, and I never know when she’ll pop up. So, I arrange for rentals under fake names.”
“Maybe we can prove that she’s stalking you,” I say. “We’re sitting on years of surveillance footage. I bet there’s something.”
“She’s too smart for it,” he says. “And anyway, it’s not like what you see in the movies where someone slinks around in the darkness wearing a trench coat. She has other ways of keeping tabs. Just when I think I’ve adapted, she gets at me again.”
Upstairs, the voices and footsteps trail out the door. I hear someone give the all clear. I’m officially not here.Maybe Annie and I would be friends, we’re both so good at staying invisible.
Even so, we wait until we’re sure the area is clear before we slink out and make our way back to Bertram’s car.
He starts the ignition, but before I can ask him where we’re going, he turns to me. “Tell me this,” he says. He takes a deep breath. After all that’s just happened, this is the first time he’s seemed nervous. “You said you were hired to investigate me. Who hired you?”
I’ve never betrayed a source. Not even as years have gone on and some of those sources are long since dead.
But Bertram is right, I do owe him that much, after everything he’s just done for me. More than that, because he’s the only one offering to believe me. It’s obvious that Waylen has gone to the police and is trying to lure me into our spot at the abandoned mall under the guise of helping me.
