“You didn’t want to try to find him again? Once you knew?”
“Once I knew, I was focused on my mom. Grieving for her, and doing right by her. She was right about putting that money away. Invested it, in fact. So when she passed on, she left me a good amount of money, and her shop. She always wanted me to have my own studio, so that’s what I did.”
Not even an hour ago, I was thinking of Luís as my opposite, but when he says this, I think he and I might share something fundamental in common. I knew how to focus, too. When Mom left, everything was for Tegan. If I’d never heard the name Lynton Baltimore again, it would have been fine by me. A cheap price I would have paid for keeping Tegan safe from this story, this mess.
“So do you still have the original fifty thousand?” Salem says, which strikes me as the crassest possible question. Not the shell I would’ve picked up, if I were the type to go gathering.
Luís opens his mouth, pauses, and then closes it again, looking—for the first time—a little uncertain.
Adam reaches a hand to the middle of the table and stops the recording.
He’s good at this, I think, but I’m not sure exactly whatthisis. Building a podcast episode, or protecting people from them?
Luís looks at him gratefully.
“I don’t know how much I should talk about the money. If that money’s from something bad, I don’t want trouble. I have a wife, two little ones at home.”
“Of course,” says Adam, before Salem can object.
“I always figured, after my mother passed—I’ve done what she would’ve done. I’ve kept that painting in case he ever came back for it, in case anyone asked what that money was for. But mostly I figured, maybe he came here that time because he got a conscience about child support, or something. Maybe he was just paying a debt, and the painting was his way of doing it.”
“That might—” Salem begins, but she’s interrupted by a shrill ring from the phone she’s had facedown on the table since Luís passed it back to her. She grabs for it quickly, muttering an apology. “I thought I had it on ‘Do Not—’” she looks down at the screen, then stands. “I’ll just be a moment.”
When she rushes out of the studio, Adam looks after her, obviously concerned. Of all the people in this room who might’ve interrupted this interview, I’m sure he would never have guessed Salem.
Luís seems relieved for the break, though, something in his posture loosening. He looks between Tegan and me, and then at the portrait.
“You could take it, you know. I’d be okay with that. I think Libby—uh, your mom, I mean—would be okay with it.”
Once he’s said it, I can tell he rethinks it almost immediately, worried he overstepped. I didn’t say, after all, where our mom is now. I said we didn’t know about the painting, but I didn’t say all the other things we do or don’t know.
“Oh!” Tegan says, sounding excited. Sounding hopeful. “Did she talk about us, then?”
Luís’s face falls, and my stomach turns over. Tegan’s eyes dim in disappointment by slow, painful degrees.
I hate myself for not tugging on my ear a dozen times before now. For not pinching Adam Hawkins’s leg until it bruised.
But before Luís can give her the officialnowe all know is coming, Salem runs back into the room, her face pale.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I’m going to have to fly back to Boston.”
Chapter 12
Adam
We don’t take the painting.
Probably we wouldn’t have, even if we hadn’t had to leave Luís Acosta’s studio so suddenly, Salem half-frantic, half-frustrated. It’d been her husband calling, and not about snack packs or the drop-off area.
He’d been calling because their daughter had been in an accident on her way home from today’s recital.
She’s okay, thank God, or at least as okay as a talented teenaged dancer could be with two broken ribs and a fractured tibia. But Salem had been as rattled as I’d ever seen her—obviously desperate to get to her kid, and also obviously ready to tear Patrick’s face off for letting their daughter ride home from herrecital with two of the older girls from her troupe, the driver only having recently gotten her license.
That had not, apparently, been the plan.
Even Jess, I think, felt sorry for her. She offered to help pack up some of the recording equipment. She said, “I hope your daughter is okay,” just before Salem drove away for the airport in the extra rental we only just picked up this morning.
Tegan, though, had been surprisingly more reserved. In the parking lot, watching Salem’s car get smaller and smaller in the distance, Luís asked whether we wanted to come back in, have another look at the portrait, talk more. Jess looked at me, her eyes uncertain, but it was Tegan who spoke up.
