Page 143 of Cruel Lies

I don't trust him.

But Ibelievehim.

Because he's got the same look on his face that I've got, that I saw in the mirror upstairs before I smashed it: the look of someone who has run out of stories to tell themselves.

I feel very tired and very awake at the same time.

"Okay," I say.

Todd frowns. "Okay?"

"Okay, you told me. You can go now."

"Cali—"

"I'm not being cold, Todd. I mean it. You told me the thing you came to tell me, and it was the first genuinely decent thing you've done in about two years. Now, I need you to leave, because I have to think, and I can't do that with you standing on my steps looking like a kicked dog." I soften it, barely, because he did make the right choice for a change. "Thank you. For the head start. I mean that."

He nods and steps back uncertainly. He looks like he wants to say something else. Something about the kids maybe, or perhaps something about being sorry. I can see him decide not to as he comes to understand that there's no version of that sentence I want to hear right now.

"Take care of yourself, Cal," he says instead.

"I always have," I tell him. "That was kind of the whole problem, remember?"

He smiles. Though maybe that's the wrong word, because it's a wrecked, sad little thing. Then he turns and stumbles down the steps. I watch him hurry to the corner and check both ways again before he crosses, and then he's gone, swallowed up into the morning the way everything from my old life seems to disappear the moment I stop looking at it.

I close the door. Lock it.

Then I lean my back against the wall and I slide down it until I'm sitting on the floor of my own hallway. I drop the knife to the hardwood and put my head in my hands.

Think.

Think, Cali. Think.

The way I see it, there are three options.

Option one: I run to the feds first. I find whoever these men are and I walk in with my hands up.I'm the victim, here's everything I know, here's proof I never touched a single dirty dime.I bet the whole house on them believing me.

But...

Cooperating means putting myself inside the file. My name will find a place—formally, on paper—in a federal investigation into a criminal organization. I'm not even totally sure what RICO means, but I know it's the kind of word that gets thrown around in these situations and that it usually results in a lot of years in jail for a lot of people who are even remotely involved in the situation.

Federal agencies don't care much about who's a good person and who isn't. They care who's close. And nobody is closer to Ronan Akov's little data company acquisition than the woman who built it and slept in his bed.

My children's names would be in that file. Hayden. Isabella. Attached to it forever. One wrong move, one prosecutor who decides theparticipantstory is better television than thevictimstory, and I've frog-marched my whole family into the blast radius.

So that leads me to option two: I do nothing.

I don't call anyone. I don't move. I keep my head down and I wait and I let it happen around me. For as long as that lasts, I pray that when the two sides finally collide, I'm small and unimportant enough that nobody bothers to come knocking.

It's kind of ironic: That's Old Cali's whole strategy, really.Make yourself little. Take up no room. Be less, do less. Subtract yourself from the equation.

Except doing nothing isn't safe. It just means I'm letting someone else choose. Either the feds pick me up as a participant, or Ronan's people conscript me into their story to save themselves. I swore I would never do that again. I'm in charge of my life now.

Not Todd.

Not Ronan.

Me.