Gillian Baltimore:Well, I guess I’m ready, if you are.
Durant:Let’s go back a ways, to start. Were you close with your brother, growing up?
[Durant, voice-over:You can’t see it, but that was a shrug, a noncommittal one. I might even describe it as bored, and the truth is, on the surface, Gillian Baltimore seems bored by everything, including me. At this point, I don’t have high hopes for our interview. I wonder if Lynton Baltimore’s sister will prove to be as elusive as he is, even though I’m sitting right next to her.]
Durant:You two are close in age, though, only a year apart. Did you have a lot in common?
Gillian Baltimore:::snorts:: Lyn didn’t have anything in common with anyone. ::pauses:: Or I guess he had everything in common with everyone. It really depended.
Durant:Depended on what?
Gillian Baltimore:Probably on what he thought he could get out of you.
Durant:Mm.
Gillian Baltimore:You have any brothers or sisters?
Durant:I don’t, no.
Gillian Baltimore:I’ll tell you, then. They sure can break your heart. They sure can.
Chapter 3
Jess
It isn’t as though I can go far. It isn’t as though I would.
But I do make it out the back door, across our small, slightly shaggy lawn. I stomp through the fresh-cut grass of three neighbors’ yards, and as I go, I imagine each of them watching. The stay-at-home mom in the split level on the phone with a friend, probably saying, “Oh my God, it’s that rude woman who lives next door to me; sheneverwants to chat.” The older couple in the colonial with all the garden gnomes, wondering if I’m some kind of daytime burglar. Those people on the corner lot who put out a political sign I deeply disagree with last year, probably lamenting the mere sight of a woman in pants walking around unattended.
None of them could have any idea of how it feels inside my head. My heart.
When I emerge from a side yard out onto the sidewalk, I stop, realizing my breath is labored, and I think of bending over, of setting my hands on my knees to recover. But it’s not the walk that’s done this to me. It’s the shock, the fear. The throbbing hole of hurt I felt inside me when Tegan said it out loud.
She was going to leave me anote.
I push my fingers through my hair, clasp them together on top of my head. Surely staying upright is better. Staying upright is what I’ve always done.
I turn back to face the direction of my house, but I stay where I am for the moment. I don’t think she’ll leave now, mostly because I don’t think Salem Durant and the giant—Hawk, she called him, and he watched me like one, brooding and silent andknowing—would take her with them. They might not feel as hurt as I do, but I’m sure they have to regroup. I’m sure they have to think about what it means that they’d been planning to take a teenager out to find Lynton Baltimore.
To find our mother.
I don’t know how long I stand there, letting it wash over me, what’s happened this morning. It isn’t as though I spent the last ten years with Tegan fearing thisspecificthing—Tegan stealing my identity to contact Salem Durant? To plan a road trip with her and her—I don’t know what, bodyguard?—but it isn’t as though I haven’t feared something similar. I’ve always worried someone would find out about the link between our mother and Lynton Baltimore. That if they did, Tegan and I would become the subject of the sort of rampant, reckless attention and speculation that followed so many of the people featured in Durant’s podcast—Baltimore’s family, his network of fellow grifters, and, most of all, his victims. The people he stole from, the people he conned. For months after the final episode aired, there were follow-up stories about them, intrusive and unnecessary, and every single one would make my gut churn with dread.
What if someone realizes, I’d think.What if someone—one of those amateur online sleuths—realizes that your mother is somewhere out there with Lynton Baltimore right now? What if they turn you and Tegan into some piece of cheap entertainment?
And I worried, too, of course, that Tegan herself would realize it. I worried about those five postcards I could never bring myself to throw away, all of them sent to me in the first six months after my mother left Tegan in my care.
But I thought I’d have more time before I’d have to tell her. Or maybe I thought, when it came to this, that I could somehow stop time altogether.
I think of Tegan, eight years old. Sitting on the carpet in the living room of the house we still live in, the braid in her hair loose and sagging, her shoulders pink from the sun. She’d been playing with her favorite Barbie, having missed it all day while I’d taken her to the state fair. She’d practically run right to it when I brought her inside.
And I’d stood in the kitchen, my hands shaking as I opened the envelope our mother left for me.
Same as the one she’d left for my dad, nine years before—the first time she disappeared from my life.
It’s that thought that gets me moving again—back toward the house, but now, I take the long way around. I don’t think about whether any neighbors are watching me. Instead I think about the same thing I’ve thought about ever since I was twenty-one years old, ever since I opened that envelope.
Tegan.
