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“Your parents said you had something to tell me,” he said.
She shrugged. “Okay.”
The quickness of her response caught him off guard.
“What?” She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “If my parents say I can trust you, I can trust you.”
“It’s that easy?”
“Have youmetmy parents?”
“Briefly. But I take your point.”
“And believe me,” Ruby said, “I’mdyingfor more people to trust. It’s the only way out of any of this.”
“You are terrifyingly astute.”
“So I’ve been told. But there’s a thing. Which is. I haven’t shown this to anyone else but my parents. And if I show it to you, you have to protect me.”
This was proving to be the easiest game of Win Your Trust he’d played in all his years of operating.
He said, “Okay.”
Ruby shifted to fish out her iPhone and held it up so it captured facial recognition. Pulling up voice mail, she went to a saved message labeled:UNIDENTIFIED CALLER.
She hesitated. A thin line of sweat sparkled at her brow. She blinked a few times rapidly, bracing herself. Then pressedPLAY.
A voice distorted through horror-movie software, all low growling menace and satanic reverberation:“Stop talking about your brother. Stop asking questions about your brother. Or I will come for youlike I came for him. You’ll get your counseling, your medication to try to convince yourself that maybe I forgot, that it’s safe to talk to the cops, that the threat is no longer real. But I am. I always will be. You will never be safe from me.”
It clicked off. Her lips were trembling. She quit out of the screen and shoved the phone back into her pocket, then rolled her lips over her teeth and bit down.
He wondered at the kind of strength it would take for a nineteen-year-old girl to be able to carry a message like that around in her pocket. He wondered if the level of anger elicited in him was sustainable or if it would burn a hole straight through the mission.
“There,” she said. “I told you. Now you have to keep me safe.”
She bounced up and skipped out of her room. Making a mental note to grab a recording of the voice mail later, Evan followed her downstairs to the kitchen.
Mason was slicing heirloom tomatoes at the counter, and Deborah sat on a stool across from him, flipping through a gossip magazine.
“I showed it to him,” Ruby announced.
The words had a visible effect on both parents. Mason gave a somber nod and resumed chopping.
Ruby slung an arm across Evan’s shoulders, though she had to reach up to do so. “I found him,” she said. “So now I get to keep him.”
“What do you mean you found him?” Deborah asked.
“I wiled him here. With my damsel-in-distress wiles.” Draping the back of her hand across her forehead Lichtenstein-style, Ruby feigned a swoon into Evan. He caught her and propped her neatly back on her feet. “And now? He is my sworn liege forever.”
Deborah set down the magazine and strummed the shiny cover once with perfectly manicured nails. “Is that so, Evan No-Last-Name?”
“I meet a lot of characters in my line of work,” Evan said. “Your daughter’s the first one who’s scared me in a while.”
Mason migrated the last few perfect circles of burrata from the cutting board onto matching tomato counterparts and drizzled them with a balsamic reduction. “Forever’s a long time, Ruby,” he said, “so why don’t we start with dinner?”
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