Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
She packed one bag. The landlord tells me this in the lobby, a small man with kind eyes who doesn’t know who I am and doesn’t care. One bag, that morning, before dawn. She paid through the month. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.
I call everyone. I call contacts and associates and security teams and people who owe me favours and people who owe my brothers favours and I burn through every resource I have and none of them can find a girl from Idaho who left Monaco with one bag before the sun came up.
Blythe finds me.
I don’t know how she gets my number. I don’t know how she knows to call. She calls at midday, hours after I sat on Daisy’s bed with my hands shaking, and her voice on the phone is hard and cold and carries the specific contempt of a woman who has seen a powerful man ruin something innocent and isn’t impressed.
“She went home. Idaho.”
I close my eyes.
“And if you have any decency left,” Blythe tells me, “you won’t follow her.”
The line goes dead.
I don’t follow her.
THREE DAYS.
I sit in the penthouse with the curtains drawn. I don’t eat. I don’t shower. I drink, but even the drinking loses its purpose by the second night because the whisky doesn’t reach the place where she was and nothing does.
On the second day, Andrei comes.
He doesn’t knock. He has a key, or the concierge lets him in, or he walks through walls. I don’t know. I don’t care. He walks into the dark penthouse and he finds me on the couch where I’ve been for hours and he sits down.
He doesn’t speak.
Andrei doesn’t speak when words are useless. He sits on the other end of the couch with the scar on his face catching what little light leaks through the curtain edge, and he is the twin who was built for violence and who wields it only in protection, and he protects me now by sitting in my darkness and asking nothing.
We sit for hours. He gets up once, brings water, sets it in front of me. I drink it. He sits back down. The harbour turns from afternoon to evening outside the curtains. The city hums. Monaco doesn’t stop because one man is sitting in the dark learning what it costs to be wrong about the one person who mattered.
At midnight, he stands. He puts his hand on my shoulder. One squeeze. He leaves.
I am alone.
And somewhere in Idaho, so is she.
DAISY
The bus station in Nice smells like diesel and coffee and the particular loneliness of people who are leaving places they didn’t choose to leave.
I have one bag. The bag holds three changes of clothes, my toothbrush, the mystery novel I was halfway through, and my passport. I left everything else. The apartment, the navy dress, the green dress, the espresso cups, the filing system I built at Keyes. I left it all because none of it was mine. None of it was ever mine.
The bus to the airport leaves soon. From Nice, I fly to Paris. From Paris, I fly to Boise. From Boise, my mother will pick me up in the truck with the bad heater and the radio that only gets two stations, and she will ask me about Monaco and I will tell her it was beautiful and I didn’t stay and I won’t tell her why.
I sit on the metal bench with my bag between my feet and my hands in my lap and I am very tired. The kind of tired that lives behind your eyes and in your bones and under your skin and has nothing to do with sleep.
My hand goes to my stomach.
I don’t know why. There is no reason for it. I’m not hungry. I haven’t been hungry in days. I’m not sick. The nausea from Blythe’s coffee shop has passed. My hand simply moves, of its own accord, and rests against my abdomen, and I hold it there and it feels like holding something I can’t name yet. Something that hasn’t announced itself yet.
The bus pulls in. Diesel and dust. I pick up my bag. I board.
Idaho.
TWO MONTHS LATER.
The grocery store parking lot in Cork is hot. August in Idaho is scorching and dry and the asphalt radiates heat through the soles of my shoes and I am carrying two bags of groceries and a gallon of milk and the sun is in my eyes and the world tilts.
It tilts slowly. Then all at once. The asphalt rises. The milk falls. The bags split and oranges roll under a pickup truck and the sky goes white and my knees go soft and the last thing I hear before the ground meets me is a woman’s voice, distant and concerned, saying honey, honey, are you okay, and I am not okay, and the pavement is warm against my cheek, and my hand is on my stomach.