“I know.”
“He was using me. You warned me.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“I told him things,” she says, no longer playing with her hair. “I just… handed it to him. I thought we were friends.”
“Oh Mara?—”
“I did exactly what you told me not to do. You said stop talking about your business and I said I would, and then I kept having lunch with him and he kept asking and I kept—” She stops and presses her hands against her eyes. “Oh god. Vi, I’m so sorry.”
“Stop.”
“I fed him information about your father’s investigation. I sat across from him and gave him everything he needed to?—”
“Mara. Stop.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are wet and she’s broken with guilt, just like I knew she would be.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” I say.
“How can you say that?”
“You didn’t know, Mara. You had a friend. He was nice to you. He asked questions the way friends ask questions. You answered because that’s who you are. You’re open and trusting. Those aren’t flaws, Mara, those are the reasons people like you.”
She’s crying now, silently, the tears running down her face. She doesn’t wipe them away.
“He’s a professional,” I say. “He hid from everyone in plain sight. The guys didn’t catch him for years. This man fooled hundreds of people, not just you. He fooled us all. You’re not stupid for trusting him. He’s just very good at what he does.”
“But I should have seen it. You saw it. You told me something was off about him,” she says.
“I had suspicions. Vague ones. But I didn’t figure it out either. The guys did with handwriting analysis and two weeks of surveillance. It took three men watching him around the clock to confirm what you felt in your gut the last time you talked to him, remember? You told me it was weird, how he was probing so hard.”
She nods. Barely.
“You caught it, Mara. You felt it. You told me about it.”
She’s shaking her head, not accepting it. The guilt is too big. It’s sitting on her and she can’t breathe around it.
I move across the bed and pull her to me. She resists for a second, stiff, trying to hold herself together. Then she breaks and folds into me, her face against my shoulder, crying hard.
“I’m sorry,” she says into my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Vi.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I do.”
“You don’t. And I need you to hear that. Because what happens next is going to be hard and I need you solid. Okay? I need my best friend solid.”
She pulls back, wipes her face with the back of her hand, and looks at me. “What happens next?”
“We confront him. Tonight. The guys and me. I’m leading the conversation.”
Something changes in Mara’s face. The guilt is still there. But underneath it, something hardens. “I want to be there.”
“Mara—”
“He used me. He sat across from me and pretended to be my friend and used me to spy on you. I want to be in the room when he finds out it didn’t work.”
