“No,” he says firmly. “You’ll always know. She’ll always ask.”
“And with Tegan, too. She always needs to ask her first. That’s one of my conditions.”
“Got it.”
“I also don’t want Salem speaking to her alone. If she’s doing an interview, if she’s getting recorded, I need to be there.”
He doesn’t immediately respond to that one. He takes a sip of his water, then follows my lead and sets his glass next to mine. It’s not as if I can complain about water stains on the itinerary I’m not letting him AirDrop to me.
“Salem’s spoken to her one-on-one quite a bit already,” he says, by way of answer.
“No, she hasn’t. She’s spoken to a pretty poor imitation ofme.”
I pressed Tegan for details during one of our talks—fights, thinly veiled battles, whatever—yesterday. Whathadshe told Salem Durant, when she was pretending to be me? But Tegan had only said she’d stuck to the facts as much as possible: that at twenty-one, she’d come home from an outing with her younger half sister to find a letter of goodbye from their mother. That she’d been raising her half sister since. That their mother, in the months prior to her leaving, had been seeing a man named Miles Daniels. That she knew, in hindsight, that Miles Daniels was Lynton Baltimore.
The truth is, if Salem Durant had been pressing me, I probably wouldn’t have said much different, so maybe Tegan’s imitation was spot-on. But it still hurt, somehow, to hear her tell it. For ten years, I’ve told myself I’d do anything for Tegan; I’d let her have anything that was mine.
But I guess the truth is, her having my story—her telling my story to someone I never would have trusted with it—is a boundary between us I didn’t know existed.
Adam—that’s what I’ve decided I’ll call him in my head, though I’ll keep it formal to his face—presses his lips together.
Then he says, “There may be things she wouldn’t want to say in front of you. About her own experience with your mom. The time before your mom left.”
The time when I was hardly around, I think guiltily.The time I lived with my dad.But Adam doesn’t need to know that. I want to say something clear, sharp, forceful. Something like,Tegan and I don’t have secrets from each other. But of course, what Adam already knows is that this is a lie.
“Tegan and I already talked about this condition. She agreed to it, as long as she can be present for any information I might provide.”
I’m making this agreement sound a lot less fraught than it was. In reality, it might as well have been a hostage-taking between us, both of us holding something at gunpoint.
Something changes in his expression, those green eyes going sharper.
“Does that mean you plan to speak to us about your own memories of—”
“I saidmight. No guarantees.”
No chance, I’m thinking.
He nods, but I think I notice those broad shoulders lower the smallest amount.
“What else?” he says.
“We give you three weeks, and that’s it. Tegan starts college at the end of this summer. Three weeks is all we can give you.”
“It’s only the beginning of July. She goes to school at the end of this month?”
This time, I cock my head at him, fix him with what I hope is a scolding gaze.
“I also have ajob,” I say, though no one at the salon will really push back, so long as I do all the necessary rescheduling. I’ve barely ever taken a sick day.
“The only itinerary you need to concern yourself with is”—I gesture at the coffee table—“that one. I said three weeks. After that, it’s none of your business what my sister and I do.”
“I’ll talk to our team,” he says, and I shrug my shoulders. I don’t care what their “team” says. I’m not spending the last month I have at home with Tegan doing a fuckingpodcast. Probably now I’ll spend the last month I have at home with her cleaning up whatever mess this podcast causes.
I take a deep breath through my nose, steeling myself for this last one. I’ve tried to do it subtly, but I think Adam notices. He abandons whatever care he had for the couch and sets his binder beside him, then rests his elbows on his thighs, clasping his hands loosely in the space between them. It’s a leaned-forward, listening posture.
“Ifwe find her,” I say, glad that my voice sounds the same as it did for all my other conditions, “whether she’s with Lynton Baltimore or not, Tegan and I talk to her first. No recording. Alone.”
He looks at me for a long time, and I don’t want to be the one to break first. That means I’m stuck looking back, and there’s a strange, small riot happening in the center of me. It isn’t that I don’t regularly find handsome men attractive; it’s just that, for the last ten years, I’ve only found them so when they lived, for example, on my television screen, or maybe inside the pages of a book that has particularly vivid descriptions.
