I stare at the reminder, glaring at it like that might make it go away.Don’t call Ophelia.It sits on my lock screen all day, obscuring her warm brown eyes in the photo I took in the back of the Land Rover on Christmas Eve.
It was the first text I got from my lawyer and investigator the day it all went south. Don’t call Ophelia. Cease all contact. Don’t incriminate your family further. Don’t give Green a reason to sue you for defamation, to suspect that it was you who helped her put that article together. Don’t be seen together, not until all threads of Bancroft’s life have been buried.
Fifteen infuriating letters that have made all of this so fucking lonely.
My first call of the day is with Mack and Brendan: the two private detectives I hired to assist the FBI in their search for my father. My dad has a lot of connections there, so I need two people who are definitely on my side. They’ve worked with me before tofind the leak of various medical records belonging to my mother over the years.
Brendan appears on my laptop screen, a hoodie covering his messy hair. Through his half-an-inch-thick glasses, he’s frowning at his screen, telling me I only have half his attention. With a background in cybersecurity and an IQ the rest of us mortals can only dream of, he handles anything that can be done behind a desk.
I don’t think Mack could sit behind a desk even with a gun to his head.
“Morning, Brendan.”
He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Morning. We have an update for you. I’ll wait for Mack to get online.”
No problem, I’ll just have an internal meltdown until then.“Great.”
Mack takes forever to arrive, finally joining on his phone with his AirPods in. “Guess where I am.”
“Do you actually want me to guess? Because I have another call at nine thirty.”
He rolls his eyes at my mood, panning the camera round an empty airport.
My breath hitches, fingers freezing as they type an email on the other half of my screen. The last time I was at Inverness Airport, the walls of my universe were crumbling around me.
The last time I was there, I told Harwood I genuinely couldn’t survive the day, that I couldn’t do it anymore.
The last time I was there, Ophelia was there, and I turned away.
I thought distance from her would make it easier. Easier on me if I chose to live, easier on her if I chose to die. Easier managing my time between my sisters and work. It hasn’t made anything easier.
Mack’s voice drags me back to the here and now. “You’re not our chattiest of clients.”
“What are you doing there?” I sit up straighter in my chair, realization suddenly dawning on me. The idea that my father might be in Scotland, anywhere near Ophelia, makes my hands curl into tight fists atop my desk. “Is he there?”
“Well,” begins Mack, like he has all the time in the world, and not twenty minutes, to deliver this story. “I just left Sorrowsong this morning.”
My stomach drops, landing with a splat on the ground floor sixty-two stories down. “Is she okay?”
“She got a text in the airport the day you left.”
I flinch at the last two words. I don’t need a reminder. “You asked me to stay away from her,” I spit out, teeth gritted.
“And I stand by that, given you don’t want a murder on your record. Or hers, for that matter.”
“No one will give a shit that Bancroft’s gone.”
“Please don’t text Ophelia, Alex. Don’t risk incriminating yourself.”
“Rocco’s men have scrubbed the site clean. All pieces of Bancroft—digitalorphysical—have been wiped.”
“Ah. About that.” My phone pings. It’s an email from Brendan.Delete it once you’ve opened it. I’ll erase all trace from my end.
I unlock my phone and open the photo attached. It’s blurry, taken with some kind of cheap night vision camera. When I realize what it is, the rest of my internal organs join my stomach seven hundred feet below me. “Fuck.” I rake my hands through my hair, imagining what this could mean for the eight women that own every cell of my heart.
For Ophelia, it’s jail time. It’s the end of all the dreams she deserves so much to achieve, the dreams I crave for her. This would be the end of my mother, the final straw. “Fuck,” I repeat, zooming in on Bancroft’s dying form in front of Ophelia and me.
I drop the phone back on the desk. “Fuck.”
