Page 40 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“My family’s name got dragged through a century of mud for a crime that was never proven,” I say, feeling a bit of emotion wobble out of my shaky voice.

The provenance letters have been missing since the 1950s, but what these ladies don’t know yet is that I’ve spent the past six years searching, and I’m close to uncovering the truth.

Nobody says anything for a second. Rue sets down the Takis bag entirely, which might be the most sincere gesture of solidarity she’s capable of. Ginger’s jaw ticks. Even Ivy just looks at me like she’s recalculating something.

“Okay,” Tanya says quietly. “Now I actually want to hurt somebody, and I don’t even know their name yet.”

“You will,” I say. “Give it a few days.”

I tap the board one last time. A formal announcement for the Stars and Stripes Gala. All red, white, and blue with gold leaf accents.

“On July eighteenth, the necklace leaves the museum for the first time since it’s been at the B-Mah. In celebration for the nation’s two hundred fiftieth anniversary, the Friendship Jewel will be on display under armed guards."

I let the silence hold a moment.

“That night, we’re taking it back.”

For one full second, nobody moves.

Then every hand in the room shoots up at once, and the questions come so quick and so loud and so completely on top of each other that I genuinely cannot tell whose voice is whose anymore. Zoe and I try to address all the questions one by one, but we also have a lot more details to cover.

At one point, I announce, “Those of you staying in the loft, roll out your sleeping bags, because tomorrow, we start pulling off one of the biggest jewelry heists ever.”

Rue slides off the counter, Takis bag held aloft like a torch. “Okay, I just need to say. This is going to be legendary. To the Armitage Seven, woop!”

“To the Armitage Seven,” the other women echo, and my heart is completely full for the first time in a lot of years.

We spend the rest of the night going over logistics and what roles everyone will play, and somewhere in there another wine bottle empties and a fourth or fifth one opens, and somebody produces a box of chocolate-covered pretzels from a cabinet nobody remembers stocking. Tanya grimaces at the crude shoebox model of the ballroom and offers to make a true scale model of the entire hotel.

Zoe pulls up the gala’s preliminary guest list just to see how bad the security is.

“They’re running last year’s credentialing software,” she reports, delighted, like she found twenty dollars in an old coat pocket. “This is going to be embarrassingly easy.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Ginger says, now laying on the floor, belly full of wine and junk food.

By two in the morning the warehouse has fully surrendered to sleepover conditions. I’m rinsing wine glasses in the world’s smallest sink when Zoe corners me, voice low enough it doesn’t carry past the fridge.

“So,” she says. “Did you land the invite to the gala yet?”

“Not yet. These things take finesse. I’ve got it handled.”

She gives me the look.

“Erica. We are running out of time, girl.”

“I know how a calendar works, Zoe.”

“Do you, though? Gala’s in eighteen days. Last I heard, you had zero invite, zero hockey hunks asking you to be his plus-one, and a whole lot of I got this.”

She’s not wrong. She’s never wrong. It’s honestly her worst quality.

“I suppose,” she says, drawing it out the way she does right before I’m not going to like whatever comes next. “We need to bring out the big guns.”

I stop rinsing. “The big guns.”

“The big guns.” There’s a glint in her eye I absolutely do not trust.

“I have a plan,” Zoe says.