“The structure is that she chose this.”
“The structure is that she was coerced into a situation and made choices within it that hurt you,” Margaret says, carefully. “Those are not the same thing, but they’re also not mutually exclusive.”
I breathe.
I’ve been running the Amber calculation for weeks. The locked box version, the version where I keep the grief and the fury in separate compartments and deal with neither directly. Sitting in this rose-lit office being given the actual facts of it is different from the calculation.
The actual fact of it is that Amber was in a corner forthree years and she didn’t tell me.
Shedidn’ttell me.
I would have done something. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. Fifteen years of being each other’s people and she carried it alone for three years and then she walked me into a bank.
I put the tea down. “Daniel,” I say. “Is he looking for me?”
Margaret opens a different section of the journal. “This is where it gets less clear. My honest assessment? Probably not actively. You were a means to an end and the end has been achieved. The bank job is done, the money is where he put it, and you running keeps the investigation focused on you rather than him.”
I look at her. “It’s still not safe for me to stop running, though, is it?”
“Yes and no,” Margaret says. “I don’t think anyone knows you’re here yet. But it also benefits Daniel if you disappear completely.”
I frown. “Why?”
“Because if you disappear, the case goes cold and Daniel is safe. But if you’re visible, if you’re in a live investigation, there’s pressure on the case. There’s ongoing scrutiny. And they might come up with the same theory that you did.”
I sit with this. The whole shape of it, laid out in Margaret’s precise handwriting across the pages of a fresh green journal. Daniel Marsh, forty-four, no fixed address by choice. Three years of Amber in his debt.The bank job as opportunity rather than vendetta. Me as convenient rather than targeted.
Convenient.
Three states, three weeks of running, a partial bond I didn’t agree to and a town I didn’t plan to stop in. All of it because I wasconvenient.
“What do I do with this?” I ask.
Margaret peers at me over her spectacles. “You give it to your lawyer. The name, the pattern, the three prior operations. They’ll know what to do with it.” She closes the journal. “And my advice is to stay where you are.”
“In Sweetwater Valley?”
“In Sweetwater Valley. Running will eventually get you caught. Building a defense is the thing Daniel doesn’t want.” She picks up her tea. “You asked me a day ago what’s worth staying for. I told you that you already knew.” She looks at me. “Has that changed?”
I think about the pack house. The couch. The blanket. Archer’s wildflowers on the windowsill. Jack in the maze. Tristan’s honey jar. Ryan wanting me to stay for the lanterns.
“No,” I reply.
“Then stay,” she says. Simply. Finally.
The reality of that is not so simple or final.
“Your fee. I need to pay you.”
“Forty dollars,” she says. “Plus twelve dollars in phone calls to the city and the cost of a very good bottle of wine I sent to a contact who owed me a favor and has now repaid it.”
“What did the wine cost?”
“Forty-five dollars. She has excellent taste.”
“Ninety-seven dollars.”
“I can write an itemized receipt,” she offers.
