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“Sure. Of course they do. It’s just…I don’t know. Something feels fishy to me.”
I snorted. “Fishy? Great choice of words.” I shouldn’t be laughing, but sometimes I did have a lot of dark gallows humor inside of me.
I just did.
My therapist said I had to stop being ashamed of the things that made me, me. I was who I was. In a lot of ways, there wasn’t a thing wrong with that.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” she whispered. “I wish I had killed him.”
Not able to sleep after that conversation, I texted Layla at nine the next morning.Do you think someone killed him?
Zeke says it wasn’t Michael or anyone Michael sent. They both wish they had done it.
Darting rain drops, I made my way back to my apartment later after turning in my paper and sent my cousin a text. Michael, my therapist, my cousin from the state department, Zeke, and my sisters were the only ones who knew Amelia was Hope. Otherwise, I had dropped out of the world.Did someone kill him?
He would know who I meant. As he’d been unwilling to help me years ago, I knew there was a limit to how far his help would ever go, but still, it was worth asking.
We have no idea. Looks like he really did just drown.
Well…that was that.
One month later
“Hope.” Michael’s voice sounded strange over the phone. I lifted my eyebrows. He’d been calling me Amelia forever now.
“What’s wrong?” I sat up in bed, the book I had been reading falling to the side. I had a date that night, but if I needed to cancel it, I would. Had I been found? No one took my picture. I was never online. I had no reason to think I had been caught. No one, to my knowledge, had realized who I was. That didn’t mean I hadn’t been found.
“It’s over.” He exhaled. “They’ve called off the hit on you and Bridget.” Layla had always been fine, thanks to Zeke. No one wanted to fuck with him.
“What?” I couldn’t believe it. How was that possible? “You did it?”
“Not me. I can’t really explain it. It’s just over. I wish it had been me. I had things in the pipeline. Meetings coming up. Artyom Lebedev, the leader of the Bratva himself, announced you aren’t to be touched. I can’t…I can’t make sense of it. I’m trying to find out. You are free, Hope. Free to be you if that’s what you want. No one will bother you ever again.”
The room seemed to spin. “How can this be? What does it mean for my father and Justin?”
“Truthfully? I have no fucking idea. But congratulations, you are free.”
I threw myself back on the bed and hung up the phone. I was free. The one person I wanted to call, I couldn’t. Every day it felt like this. It had been months, and Max had done just what I wanted him to do—he’d left me alone. Yet I still wanted to tell him about my day, like we’d done in New York. I wanted to watch TV with him when I was up at night. I wanted him to knowthe mob was gone. Fuck, I wanted him to hold me after we had sex and tell me I was beautiful.
Maybe I was going to be one of those people who never got over their first love.
He probably never thought about me at all.
20
Six months later
“Idon’t know if I can go through with it.” I sighed. “I know it’s time. Fifth date. Jerry is very nice. Patient. Not pressuring me. He’s cute enough. Likes me. But he thinks my name is Amelia, and it feels like a terrible way to cross into this part of our relationship. When he says Amelia, it makes me want to cringe.”
My therapist crossed her legs in her black pantsuit. It was a great look for her. “You could tell him. You are allowed to be Hope now. Why aren’t you?”
That was the million-dollar question, and one she asked me every other week. Why was I still hiding? Why did I still have my hair dyed dark brown? My joke about wanting to look like Snow White hadn’t gone over particularly well. The pale skin. The dark hair. Yeah…she hadn’t been amused. Avoidance… Not as good a word as when she said cathartic.
“I don’t know. Maybe…maybe Hope wasn’t someone that did so well with things.” I shouldn’t talk about myself in the third person. It was still me. “The last time people called me Hope—well, outside of my family, who never stopped—I was destroyed. I’m still destroyed. It’s just easier to not think about him all the time when I’m pretending not to be Hope.”
She nodded. “Go on.”
“All the things I told him about love, about how it was like living without the other person was unbearable? That’s how I feel all the time. I’m ready to fill that hole up somehow. I don’t know that it’s with Jerry, but I need to do something. I’m tired of missing him.”
