“Or we could be done for the night.” Tegan’s tone is gentle now. Concerned.
Probably Adam gave her a look to get her to change her approach. My cheeks heat. I don’t want him bodyguarding me with my own sister.
I shouldn’t want him bodyguarding me about anything.
“No, I’m—I’m good. A break to eat sounds good.”
I start to stand, but Salem stops me.
“I think Tegan’s right. She and I can go. You and Hawk deserve some quiet time, after all the work you’ve done today. We’ll bring back whatever you want.”
When I look up at her, I expect to see what I always see in her: something shrewd or calculating or smug. I expect her to raise an eyebrow, anI’ll bet you want somequiet timewith himexpression.
Instead, though—maybe for the first time since I’ve met her—there’s something compassionate in her expression.
Something almost . . . maternal.
I swallow back a terrifying swell of emotion. Embarrassment or annoyance or maybe longing.
“That’s fine,” I say quickly. “Tegan, pick something for me. I’ll have whatever.”
“Sure, same for me,” says Adam. “Whatever you pick is fine.”
In a distant part of my brain, I register that I no longer have the impulse to telegraph a warning as they go. Salem’s getting her purse and Tegan’s taken to looking at her own phone as she waits by the door, but I don’t say anything like,Be carefulorDon’t talk to her about the story while you’re gone.
I just sit on this little sofa in a very nice hotel suite, the kind of tired I try not to be. I feel as blurry and indistinct as the words on that postcard. My mind shuffles restlessly through the information I shared today: the boyfriends Mom was with before Lynton Baltimore, the few part-time jobs she’d held, the two or three casual friends that she never seemed all that invested in, the passing of both her parents—her only close family—well before I was old enough to remember them.
None of it really explains how she could so easily become someone else, or how she could become convincing enough to run a simple but still sophisticated con on Dennis Kirtenour, or why she and Lynton Baltimore would have gone to Olympia afterward.
As soon as the door snicks closed behind Salem and my sister, Adam stands from his chair.
He shoves that slab-of-wood coffee table aside as if it’s as light as a piece of lint on his clothes.
Then he drops to his knees on the terra-cotta tile floor in front of me. He sets his big, warm hands on my thighs and I feel less blurry.
He looks at me until I meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says roughly.
“What for?” I ask, and I mean it. He didn’t do anything I didn’t agree to. And he was so careful the whole time. It was like watching a giant tiptoe his way through walled and narrow streets, wincing every time he accidentally flattens a car. “You were doing your job.”
His face goes stern and his fingers curl into my muscles gently. Briefly.
Do that again, I want to say, but I don’t. I don’t know how to explain to him that his rough touch brings me back into focus. That it reminds me that I’m not just the lens we’ve spent the day trying to see my mother through.
“I didn’t—” He sighs, bows his head and shakes it back and forth once. “This isn’t how I wanted to learn things about you.”
“Mostly you didn’t. You learned things about my mom.”
He raises his eyes to mine again, opens his mouth and then closes it, as if he’s thought better of whatever he planned to say.
I set my hands on top of his, curl my fingers around his wrists and tug gently.
“Come up here. That floor can’t be good for your knees.”
He makes a self-deprecating noise, and I’m relieved that it breaks some of the heavy tension between us, reminds us both of the ways we know each other outside of anything I said today. When he sits next to me, he takes up so much space that we’d be touching even if we didn’t choose to.
But right away, we choose to.
