"Whatever this is. I trust you with it."
I stand in the doorway of my brother's office at half past two on a Tuesday afternoon in November, holding a federal folder containing a photograph of a woman I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for three years, and a child I could be the father of. And my brother, who has trusted me with everything he loves, has just told me he trusts me with this.
I don't deserve it. I take it anyway.
"Eight," I say.
And then close the door.
? ? ?
In the parking garage, I sit in the SUV with the engine off and my hands on the wheel.
I’m cataloging which weapons go in the car—except I’m not. It’s really about what I’m going to see when I get there.Her.
She’s going to open the door. She’s going to see me.
And then whatever happens after that will happen. I’ll come face-to-face with whatever she’s been carrying for three years. Whatever she’s been doing alone. Whatever she’s built in the small apartment with the leather bag and the gray suit and the daughter who is almost three years old and holds a stuffed elephant on the way to daycare.
I’m about to walk into the middle of it.
Chapter 2
Maeve
The Upgrade
My laptop has been open to the same case file for forty-seven minutes.
I know because I’ve been watching the clock in the corner of the screen instead of reading the case itself. Watching it the way a normal person watches the news. Engaged. Concerned. And doing nothing about it at all.
The case file is straightforward. A trademark dispute. A regional bakery in Worcester is being sued by a national chain over a logo that uses a vaguely similar font and a vaguely similar wheat motif. I’ve been hired by the bakery to argue that wheat motifs are, in fact, in the public domain. This is the third hour of my third reading. I have nothing left to learn from this document. I’m just stalling.
I’m stalling because I know what’s coming.
Federal protective detail. Replacement. The first one rotated off this morning. There’s been a security upgrade. I don’t know what the upgrade means.
I know what it costs. I know I cannot afford to put Nora in a hotel until the grand jury testimony, and I know I cannot put her in a hotel even if I could afford to, because Nora is almost three, and a hotel is a place where her routine breaks. So whoever iscoming is coming here. To my apartment. To the place where my daughter sleeps and feels safe.
I close the laptop, and then open it again.
Then close it.
It’s been two weeks since the photograph of Nora at daycare arrived in a manila envelope on my doorstep, and I’ve not slept more than four hours straight in any of those weeks. I’m running on coffee and the kind of low-grade adrenaline that makes a person sharp for about forty-eight hours and then makes them stupid. I’m at hour five hundred.
Which means I’m very stupid.
I push back from the table and go to check on Nora.
She’s asleep. She’s always asleep when I check. The checking is mostly for me. I stand in her doorway in the half-dark, and I look at her small body curled around the stuffed elephant. I count her breaths.
Eight. Ten. Twelve.
Brontos, the elephant, is missing an eye, and most of his stuffing is concentrated in his trunk. He’s been with her since she was nine months old. He’s been to two emergency rooms, one ER for an ear infection and one for a fever I could not get below a hundred and three. He’s been in the laundry more times than I can count, and he is, by any reasonable metric, a piece of fabric trash. He’s also the most important object in this apartment.
My phone vibrates on the kitchen counter.
I don’t move toward it.
