“I am.” This is maybe half-true. I’m confident as hell in the idea. I’m less confident in my personal abilitiesto pull it off.
“Whyme?” she asks.
What I want to say is,I have no fucking idea.I want to say that this morning has gone in an entirely unexpected direction and that I’m sure I will spend the rest of the day kicking my own ass over it. But now that we’ve come this far, now that we’ve actually talked about it, I canseeher there. Not, obviously, in the dress and heels. But I can see—despite the fainting, which really does seem like a one-off—how she’d be composed and unflappable in such odd circumstances. Hell, I can see how she’d be better at it than I’ll be.
She’s waiting for my answer. She’s hardly moved in that chair, not even a fidget or toss of her hair. “Because you’re here, and because you said you’d do anything to make up for what happened. And because you seem like you’d do wellat deception.”
Somewhere inside, I feel the answering pang at saying this—I said it for no other reason than to hurt her. It’s small, petty, cruel. I want to believe that’s not who I am, but who am I except for the shit that I say and do? I’m surprised, all over again, by how angry I still am and how much I still let it show. If she says no now, I don’t have anyone to blame but myself.
She stands from her chair. This close, the short length of the kitchen separating us, I notice how tall she is. In her heels, she’s only a few inches shorter than me, and the way she holds herself—she owns every bit of that height. I think she’s about to give me the dressing-down of my life, even worse than whatever my mother would say to me about theway I’ve acted.
But instead she says, “Fine. I’ll do it.” I open my mouth to respond, to give her details, but she holds up a hand and stops me. “You need to know that when I leave here, I’m going to call the investigator from my former firm and have him run a background check on you. If that’s a problem, tell me now, and wedon’t do this.”
“It’s not a problem,” I tell her, honestly. She’s thinking of shit I should’ve thought of, if I hadn’t come up with this idea in literallya half second.
“I’ll leave you with my cell phone, address and my email, but I’d prefer we correspond by email for the time being. You can send me details about the camp, including where exactly it is located, and what exact time we’ll be leaving and returning. You’ll need to give me your contact information too, because I’ll be sharing that with—with people who know me.”
“Fine.”
“And you can tell me—you can write to me about who you want me to be for this.”
“Who I want—”
She speaks over me, again, not acknowledging the way I struggle to keep up with her. “Obviously you know this family, and I don’t. If you feel that there are characteristics I should have in their presence, you can tell me about that, and I’ll do my best. I would say, in general, that while I’ve traveled a lot, I’m not much of a camping person, so you may want to bear that in mind. I probably can be charming enough as a fishout of water.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say. “Have you done this before?”
She gives me another one of those looks, one of the ones that could slice me right in half, and says nothing. I turn and open a drawer, pull out a notepad and pen, and extend it to her. I look away when she bends over the table to write; somehow I know it would be colossally stupid for me to see that view. I listen while the pen scratches across the page, and I have a strange thought: I’ve seen her handwriting before. I know she writes theZof her name so that it looks like a number three. I’ve seen her signature on countless documents, all related to my brother’s death.
But then it’s done—she leaves the notepad and pen on the table and turns to look at me, and for a minute we’re quiet, probably the shock of what we’ve agreed to. It’s no conference room. But I have the sense, somehow, that like my parents before me, I’ve just finalized a contract with Zoe Ferris.
* * * *
“It’s fucking insane, is what it is!” Ahmed shouts this from across the table, his mouth half-full of a turkey and cheddar sub, the only order he ever places at Dicky’s, our usual takeout run when we’ve got long enough for breaks. It’s Thursday night, and we’re in the kitchenette of the squad’s living quarters, shoving food in our faces as fast as it will go, knowing that we’ll probably start getting calls any minute—the college crowd tends to get rowdy on Thursday nights—and I have just made my second major mistake of the week, telling Ahmed about Zoe Ferris.
“Quiet, man,” I say back, jerking a thumb over my shoulder toward the next room, where two cots, a worn-out sofa, and a tube TV on stacked milk crates are set up. “Charlie’s sleeping.”
“I don’t fucking care! Charlie!” he shouts, spraying a few breadcrumbs in his haste. “Get in here and hear what this bag of hammers has done.”
I reach a fist out and punch him hard in the shoulder, but he barely flinches. I’m a big guy, but Ahmed is massive, a relic he’s kept from the two years he played semipro as a linebacker.
Charlie—the third member of our crew, the driver—stumbles in, tying her hair back into a ponytail while glaring daggers at Ahmed. “This better be good, asshole. I was having a dream about Lucy Liu.”
“Got you a sub, Charlie,” I say, nodding toward the fridge, and she squeezes my shoulder in appreciation on herway to get it.
“Like a sex dream?” Ahmed says, forgetting about me and my personal crisis for a moment.
Charlie rolls her eyes my way, commiserating. I joined this crew six months ago, right after I’d moved back home—only a few weeks before my parents decamped to Florida, and that was on purpose too, another way for me to hide from the worst of their grief and another way for me to hide my own. I’d been with my last crew in Colorado for almost five years, and we’d had the kind of shorthand forged only through time and the stress of constant emergencies. I’d expected to come here, do a job, keep as much of my focus as possible on my side project with the camp, and entirely avoid emotional interactions of any kind, since all my insides still, over a year after Aaron’s death, felt like shards of glass. But Charlie and Ahmed are hard to ignore, big personalities who seem wholly unconcerned with whatever sharp replies or brushoffs I’ve handed out, and already we’ve worked out a preliminary shorthand of our own, Charlie and me the straight-faced, secretly amused maturity to Ahmed’s mostly-sixteen-year-oldsensibilities.
“No,” Charlie says, settling into her chair and unwrapping her sub. “We were solving crimes together.”
Ahmed stares. “Is that a metaphor?”
“Oh my God. No. What did you wake me up for?”
At this, Ahmed gets his feet back. “Aiden’s asked some woman to be his fake fiancée for this camp thing.”
The fact that Ahmed refers to the biggest project of my adult life asthis camp thingis further evidence of the limits to our bond. If it’d been possible, I wouldn’t have told Charlie or Ahmed about Stanton Valley, but since I’m relying on their help with coverage for the next month and a half, they had to know something, and for now I’ve settled for telling them about the real estate, not my plans for it. Charlie hadn’t been keen to let that lie, either—she grew up on a farm not far from Stanton Valley, knows land out there doesn’t come cheap—and so I’d also fessed up to the bare minimum about the money: my brother had died, and my family had received wrongful death and survival damages from the pharmaceutical company responsible.
