“Fine,” I say, which is all I ever say when people ask me that. Everyone except my sister leaves it alone.
“I was hoping you didn’t feel unwell from all the driving.”
I’m tugging desperately at that snag.
“I’m fine,” I repeat, but also, I’m obviously not. I’m about to spend the day with a career criminal who has met my mother and the notorious boyfriend she abandoned us for. My sister is standing next to a woman who wants it all on tape.
And here I am, thinking about who Adam Hawkins texts back home.
When I look back at him, I catch his eyes looking lower than they usually are.
I clear my throat—it’s getting to be my signature move—and he snaps his gaze back to my face. His ear-tops are blazing red now. He opens his mouth to speak, but then closes it when Salem’s voice cuts in.
“Are we ready?”
For a second I think she’s genuinely done something helpful for once by interrupting this strained moment, but then I realize she’s wheeled my bag over. Obviously I should say thank you, but really I want to shoutDon’t touch my stuff!and run screaming from this lobby.
It’s possible my face telegraphs the sentiment, because she hands it over.
By the time we’re piling into the van, though, I’m pretty sure that Salem holding my bag for fewer than sixty seconds has, in fact, turned out to be helpful. In a way, it’s oriented me again: I don’t want her touching my stuff literally mostly because she’s trying to touch my stuff metaphorically, and today I need to be focused and unflappable, no matter what this guy says about Lynton Baltimore or my mom. I need to be focused on being there for Tegan.
Who of course remains eager.
We’re not even out of the parking lot before she’s pulled out the Chattanooga postcard.
“Okay, so what we didn’t talk about yesterday,” she says, in a voice that reminds me of all the times over the years she told me about a day at school, or a birthday party she went to, or someone she had a crush on, “was how this postcard has anything to do with . . . wait, what was his name again?”
“MacSherry,” says Salem, who is still on her goddamned phone. “Curtis MacSherry.”
“Right, MacSherry. How do we get from this”—I can see her, in my periphery, waving the postcard back and forth between her and Salem—“to him?”
I swallow, bothered by how completelyIdon’t know the answer—how completely this part of my and Tegan’s past has been blanketed by my own survival instincts over the last decade. I know those postcards well, but it isn’t as though I wanted to investigate them. Mostly I wanted to forget them.
We’ve been having such a wonderful time, that postcard says. It had been so insulting that I hadn’t ever wanted to think about it again.
Now that we’re on this trip, though, I see how uncomfortable it is to be caught flat-footed.
“That’s Hawk’s doing,” Salem says. “Hawk, you tell it.”
I don’t look over at his face. But I see his knuckles whiten again.
“You can.”
Salem’s still typing. She doesn’t bother responding to him.
I think he might quietly sigh. He really doesn’t seem like the sort of man who’d go scorched-earth on social media.
But I’m not meant to be focusing on that.
“There’s a line in the postcard that mentions ‘learning about Miles.’”
I know just what he means.For the first time, my mom had written, I’m really learning about Miles, and it’s been so important for our future.
I don’t see how that reveals anything other than my mother’s selfishness, writing that to her daughter, whose entire future had been upended by her leaving.
“Okaaaay?” says Tegan, the teenaged expression of my doubt.
Adam clears his throat. “In one of his interviews with Salem, Baltimore says that a great confidence man is mostly unknowable. Unless you know other confidence men.”
