“Huh,” he said. “So the vote was rigged.”
Peter had never stood a chance.
“Are you in contact with…” I still couldn’t say the word.
“Yes,” he said. “But we’ll have to hide you from them.”
I looked across at him.
“They’ll never believe you were caught and got away again,” he said. “It’s not safe for them to trust you.”
I turned back to the road. It wasn’t safe for anyone to trust me.
Peter. Hiromi. Xavier. Bellamy.
Any double agent could become a triple agent. Except I knew whose side I was on: Sebastian’s. I had no one else.
“Doyoutrust me, cousin?”
He smiled. “I waited for you, didn’t I?”
“And now that I’m here?”
It took him a long time to answer. The horizon was growing lighter, a strip of red below the sea of blackness overhead.
“I could never tell when you were lying, Jess. I’ll just have to believe you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “For telling me you aren’t certain.”
“We promised each other the truth.”
“We did,” I said.
And then I told him about the pills.
We stopped drivingjust after dawn.
Not another safe house—a motel, exactly like the Motorway Inn back at Helshire. The woman at the desk took cash and didn’t ask for IDs.
There, I finally slept. Sebastian sat by the window all day, peering through a slit in the curtains.
We adopted this pattern for the next month, driving by night, resting in the day, one of us keeping watch at all times. Sebastian had conned, pilfered, and pickpocketed a few thousand dollars while I’d been imprisoned, but a few times we slept in empty houses to save money. They were decorated with Christmas trees, the rain gutters strung with lights on timers. Like on that long-ago night in Connecticut, we stayed silent, changing nothing.
No place felt safe enough to stop.
I wasn’t sure that Sebastian would ever feel safe, now that he knew what had changed me—not grief for Peter, nor love for Hiromi. It hadn’t been a car wreck creating a new and better Jessica.
It had been the pills, and they had slipped away. Touching Sebastian, being touched by him, didn’t have the same intensity. But I woke up every morning and chose him, just as I chose not to kill the people who cut in front of me in line.
Like I chose not to tell him about Bellamy.
77
My family was still invisible.
When we reached California in the new year, I stole a phone and searched for them. Peter’s fall was still the first hit, but then Garrett’s name popped up. His gallery was mounting a new show, a retrospective of a promising artist who’d died tragically young.
I recognized most of the pieces. A bust carved by thrown knives, still unfinished. A set of killing, cutting, and rending machines—the “disassembly line” of a robot abattoir. Tombstones with half-remembered quotes from Martin Luther King, including my own contribution from the day of Peter’s funeral. But the centerpiece of the show was a dozen sketches calledThe Lost Girlfriend.
