But once we got to the airport—once we saw Salem—it was pretty clear that nothing was going to go to plan.
She blew in with a laser focus in her eyes and a big chip on her shoulder. She said her daughter was “fine” and left it at that. She looked at the three of us as if we were sitting in her classroom, as if we’d been left for days in the care of a substitute teacher, and now she needed to pull us all back from the bad habits we developed in her absence.
She looked at Adam and me as if sheknew.
She made it seem as though the only plan that mattered was her own.
And, admittedly, her plan did seem more pressing than ours, because she’d taken that one piece of non-information about Lynton Baltimore from my dad’s doctor friend and made a meal out of it. By the time we piled in to our new rental—a cramped, compact SUV, this time—Salem had told us about her research, her contacts, her calls. Her belief that Lynton and Charlotte came here, to this for-profit “healing institute,” newsworthy for the apparently overstated claims it’s made over the years about its success rate at curing notoriously hard-to-treat cancers. She’d already secured a meeting with the CEO.
She hasn’t told us why.
“Oh my God,” Tegan had said, “do you think Lynton Baltimore gotconned?”
Salem had merely shrugged, and started giving us our instructions.
“Do we all remember who we’re supposed to be in there?” she says now, obviously only willing to “take a minute” if it means going over the plan.
“I’m the intern,” Tegan says, and that figures. She’s always been a solid student, a fact that usually makes me hugely proud.
Salem looks to me and raises an eyebrow, waiting for me to confirm my role.
“Research assistant,” I say grudgingly, lifting the binder I’ve been given to help make me look more authentic.
“Hawk?” Salem says.
He sighs. “I’m just being myself, Salem. I don’t need a reminder.”
“Hmm,” she says, as though he does, in fact, need exactly that.
Then she turns and keeps walking. Ready to sandblast her way into this new place.
I drag my feet, taking in my surroundings as I go. The place looks weirdly identical to the pictures on the website, which I figured must’ve been enhanced, or at least only showed the pretty parts of the campus. But everywhere I look is a vista; every building is clean and new-looking. If there are sick people, or people worried about sick people, I don’t see them anywhere.
I feel strange. Torn between curiosity and trepidation. I want to find out what Salem seems to have figured out already, and I also want it to be two days ago, when she was out of the picture for a while.
My body already misses Adam’s.
He catches my eyes as he holds open the door for us all to pass through, and the only comfort is that I can tell he’s torn, too.
Inside, we’re guided up an L-shaped stairway that overlooks a bright, be-cactused atrium and ushered into a sleek conference room. On one wall there’s a gigantic flat-screen television that’s cycling through some of the same pictures as on the website, the occasional staged-looking photo of someone in a white coat talking earnestly to someone who looks perfectly healthy. We’re all so quiet together as we take our seats that it’s as if we’ve come here to talk to someone in a white coat about something very bad.
It’s unusual, but I’m the one to break the silence while we wait, prompted by a thought I’m surprised no one has had sooner.
“Hold on, aren’t we forgetting something?” I gesture at my face. “If someone recognizes—”
“Then that gets us where we need to be sooner,” Salem cuts me off impatiently. As though I was the ringleader behind any while-the-substitute-was-in-charge shenanigans.
Adam’s hands still on the recording equipment he’s setting up. He sends Salem a cool look before sliding his eyes to mine.
I shake my head the smallest amount, warning him off. Salem’s disappointed-teacher mode is extremely effective. If she’d been this way the whole time, I might’ve thought about talking way sooner.
A second later, the door to the conference room opens and a short, fit, bald man who’s maybe in his fifties walks in. He has tanned skin and the brightest white teeth I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt, no tie. He looks momentarily caught off guard by the fact that there’s more than one person in the room, and I brace myself.
But as his eyes scan over each of us, he doesn’t stop for even one extra second on me.
Maybe Salem’s instincts on this are off.
Maybe my mom and Lynton weren’t here after all.
