“Hey,” he’d said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, so I came back.”
“Oh,” I said, resisting the urge to look around and confirm he wasn’t talking to someone else.
“You didn’t notice I left before, did you?”
“I didn’t notice you at all.” It was true, but it had come out harsher than I’d intended. A bad habit.
But Aidan had only laughed, unfazed. “There’s this thing you do when you’re concentrating—you stick your tongue out a tiny bit,” he said, almost like a question, but not quite.
“What?” I could feel myself flushing. “I do not.”
At least, I hadn’tthoughtI did anymore. I’d trained myself out of it at Haven House.
“Anyway, it’s adorable,” Aidan said. And I’d thought,It’s nice, someone seeing me differently than I see myself.“Wanted you to know.”
I nodded. “Oh … thanks?”
“Let me take you out to dinner?” Aidan had added. “I promise not to mention your tongue again, which I realize now was probably inappropriate.”
By the end of that first dinner, I’d been totally smitten. Aidan wasn’t put off by my wary nature the way so many men were. And he wasn’t afraid to pursue me, and pursue me hard. He was that sure of himself. He was also openly emotional in a way that I could never imagine being myself, probably because of his warm, caring parents and the older brother he was very close to and the beautiful house he’d grown up in. It was disarming. Even my posture had loosened by the time our pastas were delivered.
“I love your laugh,” Aidan commented at one point, a compliment I had never received before. Probably because I didn’t often laugh so loudly, or freely.
Aidan’s family’s money was largely gone by then, thanks to his father’s compulsive spending and some unfortunate late-in-life investments. But the money had never been what made his childhood special, Aidan insisted; it was the love and security, which did indeed sound enviable. In fact, it sounded like exactly what I’d been longing for my entire isolated life.
It wasn’t until we had been dating seriously for a while that I explained how I actually did have money. Thanks to Gladys Greene, who had been old enough to be my grandmother when she’d whisked me away from Haven House at the age of fourteen. Gladys donated money over the years and had been a regular volunteer at the home, but she hadn’t ever been considered a candidate to adopt. And rightly so. Gladys’s age and noticeable dementia clearly made her unqualified. Of course, I’d skipped all of that when I explained my adoption to Aidan, including the reason Gladys’s unfitness had suddenly ceased to matter.
I’d also left out the part about having murdered someone.
Standing in the bathroom of Haven House that night all those years ago in the oversize gray sweatshirt Director Daitch had thrown at me after he’d summoned a staff member to dispose of my bloody top, I had felt absurdly grateful. And so when he told me that leaving with Gladys would keep what had happened a secret and keep me out of jail for murder, I jumped at the chance. I would leave and Daitch would erase me; that was the deal.
It was weeks before the bloodstains beneath my cuticles disappeared completely.
The entire time I lived with her, Gladys thought I was her younger sister, who’d died when she was a girl. And I probably did a lot more caring for her—cooking and cleaning and sometimes bathing—than she ever did for me. Still, those were some of the happiest years of my life. Because even if Gladys’s love for me had really been for her sister, it was still love. She’d died in her sleep shortly after I’d gone to college, so sad to be alone again maybe. The real surprise was that she’d left me a large chunk of her estate, nearly four million dollars. Three and a half million of which I still had. I didn’t want to spend it. I earned a good living, and I preferred knowing we had the safety net. Also, Gladys’s cousins had sued—a lawsuit that stretched on until after I was married, and I was still worried that someone else might show up someday, staking a claim to the money.
When my phone rang, the two students at the table to my right shot me annoyed looks. Aidan telling me he was running even later, no doubt. I accepted the call before it could ring again.
“Hold on one second,” I said quietly as I headed toward thedoor. “Where are you?” I snapped once I was on the sidewalk. I was not in the mood to listen to his excuses.
“Oh, hello there!” boomed a male voice. “Ms. Thompson?”
Karen Thompson: my go-to pseudonym. It was impossible to verify anything about someone with such a common name; all searches led to an avalanche of results. I’d used my Thompson alias in the message I’d left with Advantage Consulting.
“I’m sorry, who’s this?” I asked, playing dumb.
“Brian Carmichael.”
I stayed quiet another beat.
“Advantage Consulting?” He sounded vaguely irked, like he was a celebrity giving a dim-witted person a moment to acknowledge his importance. “Sorry to call so late, but the day got away from me.”
“Oh, yes, of course, Brian. I’m so sorry!” I exclaimed. “Thank you so much for returning my call. I feel so overwhelmed these days, it’s hard to remember whether I’m coming or going.”
“No problem!” he said. “I have two kids of my own. Believe me, I understand how stressful this can be.”
“As I mentioned in my message, it’s about my daughter Sophia,” I began. “We were hoping we could get some help with her transferring. She’s at Columbia right now, and she’s really not happy.”
“Well, first off, congratulations on Columbia. That’s a terrific school. Just wonderful.” I moved the phone away from my ear; his voice was so loud. “Doesn’t mean that it’s the right place for her, of course. And transferring can be complicated, it goes without saying, but the good news is that you’re starting from a strong place.”
