No.
Come to BKLYN?
NO.
Please, Cleo, I really need to talk. I get why you might not want to come home. And that’s okay. But can you please come anyway? I won’t be annoying, I promise.
Definitely a lie. Cleo being merely annoyed was the best-case scenario.
I don’t believe u.
How about cold, hard cash, then? I’m assuming you take Venmo.
A joke and not a joke.
Lemme look at my schedule and get back 2 u.
Okay! Great! Love you!
I was hoping that she’d write something warm in return. I knew better of course. And it didn’t matter. My job was to love Cleo no matter what. Cleo didn’t have any job except to be herself.
My phone buzzed in my hand again.
If you want me to go away, you’re going to have to pay. In more ways than one.
I stared down at the new message from my anonymous friend, debating. Situations like this required a delicate calibration. It generally wasn’t a great idea to completely ignore a person once he’d made a concrete demand for money. That demandwasbribery, which meant that person had already committed one actual crime. Ignoring them often led to further escalation.
Who is this?
Someone who knows what you did, bitch.
Silas used to call all women and girls bitches, didn’t he? It was hard to remember. He said and did a lot of things. But, of course, I’d thought of him first. He’d been working that night. He was one of Daitch’s right-hand men. It was Silas sending the messages. It had to be. I squared my shoulders before typing my reply.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
What would your law firm think? Or the police? You stabbed someone that night and Haven House helped you cover it up. I know all about it.
It was much later than I’d planned when I got to the office. Mark had even checked in again to confirm I was on my way. He was understanding when I’d cited “family issues,” but he was still wound up. I’d tried to reach Jules to see if she had any sense of what might be going on. But my call had rolled straight to her voice mail. Not a surprise, given that it was bedtime for her daughter. But as I was listening to her outgoing message, I remembered our strange call from two nights ago. She’d never called me back. Come to think of it, she hadn’t been in touch all day.
I’d spent much of the trip uptown wondering if I should reach out to Haven House, see if I could track Silas down. I did know how to make threats of my own. And in my experience, threats were most effective when their location and timing took people by surprise. But I didn’t want to risk intentionally putting myself on Haven House’s radar after all these years. I wasn’t easy to find. I’d been careful to scour the internet over the years for any references to my maiden name—Columbia Law School was a particularly bad serial offender. But it was surprisingly easy to get things taken down when you were sufficiently tenacious.
From the doorway of Mark’s office, I could see him at hisdesk, reading something on his massive monitor—the one he said helped him pretend he didn’t need more powerful reading glasses. At least it went with his massive corner office, the biggest one on the floor. When I knocked, he turned to eye me over the top of his wire-framed glasses. His face softened immediately.
“Oh, Kat, so glad you’re here,” he said.
“Did you see Jules today?” I turned my head toward the assistants’ cluster of desks, which sat between Mark’s office and mine, though they were all empty at that hour.
“I think she may have been out,” Mark said. “Is something wrong?”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said quickly.
“Well, unfortunately, we’ve got something of a priority situation on our hands.”
Mark stood, which made him look tiny behind his large desk. Notably distinguished but also very short, Mark had been quite the catch in his prime, I suspected. At sixty-five, he was still very charismatic and youthful, jamming upstate with his college bandmates and running daily in the park. His beautiful, kind wife was a poetry professor at Princeton and was struggling with stage IV breast cancer. Now that their three children were grown, the two of them lived alone in a gorgeous Upper West Side brownstone filled with incredible art and beautiful antiques. And love—so much love. It was the kind of life I’d imagined Aidan and I might one day have, back when I still believed what we had was happiness.
Mark motioned toward his pair of Barcelona chairs.
“I’m sorry I’ve been hard to reach,” I said as I sank into the soft leather seat. “I’ve been dealing with a bit of a situation with Cleo.”
