“She didn’t ever wear clothes like this,” Jess says.
It looks like money, what she’s wearing. A cream blazer with a silky shirt beneath it that’s the exact same shade. A slim, yellow gold necklace, dotted with what I’d bet are diamonds. Matching earrings. Her left hand rests on the tablecloth, and while it’s hard to see much detail, I can tell she’s wearing a wedding band.
“And she didn’t drink wine,” Jess adds, referring to the glass of red that rests by the wedding-banded hand. “It made her face turn splotchy.”
The woman in the photo doesn’t look splotchy. She looks perfectly in control. She’s running the show at that restaurant table.
Beneath the one we’re sitting at now, I set my hand on Jess’s thigh, squeeze gently.
“Hey.”
Finally, she blinks up at me, as though she’s waking up after a long sleep, and I feel an inconvenient tug of longing. I haven’t woken up with her yet. And if I was waking up with her, I’d want her to look softer, safer than this. I wouldn’t want to see something haunted in her face, wouldn’t want her to look surprised to find me there.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I—”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s a lot to take in.”
Charlotte Caulfield, running a con. Or at least we think so, according to the information Ashley Maxwell provided us about her uncle’s greatest personal and professional embarrassment. According to Ashley, Dennis met the woman who sold him what turned out to be a nonexistent necklace when she came to the institute to find a potential solution for her brother, recently diagnosed with lung cancer. She was an antiques dealer, she’d said. She’d only recently returned from Europe, and only because she wanted to care for her brother. She was elegant, sophisticated. Dennis apparently thought she was the most brilliant and refined woman in the world.
“Ashley said she had an accent,” Jess says. “Did you hear her say that? My mom definitely didn’t have an accent. Just a Midwestern one, same as mine and—”
“We don’t have to talk about this right now.”
She blinks and then nods, her eyes going down to the photo again. “Right, right. We should wait for Salem.”
I clench my back teeth together, unaccountably frustrated. First of all, I’m fucking mad at Salem. And more than that, I’m even less comfortable with Jess talking now than I was when she first offered to do it last night, fresh off our conversation about Cope. I want to take my phone from the table and throw it across this bar. I want to haul Jess into my lap and make her look at me, make her talk to me about how she feels.
Not like she’s my interview subject, but like she’s my . . .
I don’t know what.Girlfriendseems too insignificant for what she is to me already.
Across the bar, I see Tegan emerge from the bathroom, and she pauses to give me a meaningful look, aShould I come back yet?look. It’s such an automatic, easy gesture of trust and closeness.
I try to think of a word for what she is to me now.Sourceis too small;friendseems too simple.
Family, I think, automatically.
I shake my head at her, unsure at first if she can see the small movement from where she is. But she nods and points to a lounge chair in our sight line, and then plops down to scroll her phone.
I turn back to Jess.
“I don’t know if talking to Salem right now is a good idea,” Isay.
Now, I’ve got her attention.
“Why not?” she asks, but before I can even answer, she goes on. “I told you before, I can do this. I’m fine doing this.”
I gently squeeze her thigh again, desperate to slow her down. The truth is, I don’t think what she told me before—in that hotel room where we’d been so intimate—can be counted on. It’s too soon since our relationship changed, too soon since I told her about Cope, too soon since the shock of meeting Dennis Kirtenour and seeing the photo Ashley Maxwell found buried deep in a camera roll from an old, long-forgotten phone, shoved in the back of one of her dresser drawers.
But I have the feeling she won’t take well to being told she’s not ready.
So I try a different tactic. It’s not really a lie, even though it’s not the full truth.
“I don’t think Salem’s ready.”
Jess’s eyes widen a fraction.
“You see how she’s been since we got here. You saw what she did with Kirtenour today. She’s not herself.”
