The room is still dark, heavy curtains blocking out whatever gray Maine morning lurks outside. Somewhere to my left, Atticus is breathing with the slow, even rhythm of the deeply unconscious. The bed is warm, and my body feels like it’s filled with sand, and if I just close my eyes for five more minutes…
The phone buzzes again.
I don’t even look at it this time. Just reach over and reject the call with my eyes still closed.
Go away, Victoria. Some of us almost died yesterday.
Atticus makes a sound—something between a groan and a mumble that might be words in some language I don’t speak. The mattress shifts as he rolls over.
“Tell whoever that is to fuck off,” he mutters into his pillow.
“Working on it.”
Silence descends again. Blessed, beautiful silence.
Then the distinct ping of Find My iPhone echoes through the room.
My eyes snap open.
She wouldn’t.
Another ping. Then another. The sound that means someone is actively tracking your location, watching the little dot that represents your phone move across their screen in real time.
Victoria absolutely would. Victoria has done this before, when I was nineteen and tried to take a weekend in Vegas without telling her, when I was twenty-two and she thought I was at a yoga retreat but I was actually at an Airbnb with a beta model I’d met at a party. Victoria treats my location data like her personal reality show.
I grab the phone and answer her video call before she can ping me again.
“What.”
“Phoenix Renata Riviera.” My mother’s voice could cut diamonds. “Do you want to explain to me how my daughter couldalmost die in a plane crashand I don’t even receive a phone call?”
Sleep evaporates from my brain like morning dew. “Mom?—”
“I had to find out fromTwitter. Twitter, Phoenix! Some teenager in Portland posted about emergency vehicles at aprivate airfield, and by the time I connected the dots, you were already checked into some—” her voice drips with disdain “—bed and breakfastin a town I’ve never heard of.”
“It wasn’t a crash?—“
“The enginefailed. At thirty thousand feet. Over theocean.” Her voice climbs with each word. “Do you have any idea what could have happened? Do you have any concept of?—”
“Mom, I’m fine?—“
“You’re fine? You’refine?” A sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob. “I’ve been calling for hours. Hours, Phoenix. Your phone was off. I thought—I didn’t know what to think?—“
The genuine fear in her voice catches me off guard. Victoria Riviera is many things—manipulative, calculating, relentlessly focused on her own agenda—but right now she sounds like an actual mother who thought she might have lost her child.
It doesn’t last.
“And then I couldn’t reach Stephanie either, and I had to call the airline directly, and now I find out she’s in the hospital!”
“She just has a concussion?—”
“Justa concussion. My God, Phoenix. What if that had been you? What if something had happened to your face?”
And there it is. The real fear. Not that her daughter might have died, but that her daughter’s moneymaking face might have been damaged.
“My face is fine, Mom.”
“You should have called me the second you landed. Thesecond, Phoenix. Instead I’m up all night, sick with worry, imagining the worst?—“
