“He doesn’t want me. He just wants to win.”
“And you don’t want him,” Granny says. “Youjust want to win.”
“Granny!” I protest, but the platform lights start to flash before I can finish my lie. My train is coming in. “I have to go, Granny.”
“Of course, dear. I’ve already kept you too long.”
“Not long enough,” I say, because I don’t want to end the conversation.
But this call has been bouncing off cell phone towers for over five minutes. I’ve worked too hard to let Wolf catch me now. I can call Granny from Donegal.
“I love you,” I say as the train doors open.
“Love you to the moon and back,a chroí.”
Something cracks inside me as I drop the burner into a dustbin. I barely make it onto the train before the heavy doors close.
I’m four subway stops from National Airport. All I have to do is repeat what I did the day I escaped Wolf—use his credit card to buy a ticket to Dublin.
My train pulls into the Pentagon station. Stops. Leaves, traveling south. I’m three stops from the airport.
I can wait until I’m about to board the plane, then grab the two-thousand-dollar maximum from an ATM. I’ll be in the air before Wolf can stop me.
Pentagon City—two stops left.
I’ll be leaving behind my new laptop, but there’s nothing on that computer worth saving; nothing I can’t reproduce.
Crystal City—one stop left.
Wolf won’t keep Granny forever. He’ll send her back to Baltimore, back to Da. She won’t have Helen Watson to nurse her anymore. She’ll end up in her windowless little room at Three Oaks.
Her cough sounded terrible. She was tired. Sad.
But Granny understands. She wants me to go to Ireland. She knows Donegal will heal all the broken places inside me.
She’s sick. She may be dying.
But she’s my grandmother, the only person in the entire Lynch clan who’s ever understood me. She wants me to be safe. To be whole.
National Airport—the Metro doors open.
I step off the train and into the rest of my life.
53
COLE
I’m startled out of a deep sleep by a loud crash. Sitting up in bed, I reach for the lamp on the nightstand. My shoulders are stiff enough to make me suck a sharp breath between my teeth. Before I can force myself to stretch, the room is flooded with light from one of the large double-hung windows.
“Apologies, sir,” Nilsson says, not sounding at all apologetic as he sets a stainless-steel tumbler on the inlaid table between two armchairs. “I was clumsy,” Nilsson says, bending to retrieve another sealed mug from where it’s rolled to a rest against the dresser. Presumably that’s yesterday’s breakfast, which I ignored.
The tumbler must be the source of the crash that woke me. But that doesn’t begin to explain Nilsson’s lie. The man has never been clumsy a day in his life.
“I took the liberties of alerting your pilot, sir,” Nilsson says as he walks to the closet.
“Alerting him about what?” I ask, cringing from the too-bright window like a vampire trying to escape sunrise.
“Your trip to Delaware, sir,” Nilsson says. He emerges with clean clothes—black pants, black turtleneck, black boxers—that I’m perfectly capable of collecting for myself.
