My jaw locks and I break his gaze, reminding myself we’re at my goddaughter’s fucking first birthday party. This is not the place to lock horns with Mateo. “I’m not fucking anything up, and you didn’t put me in Ben’s seat; I put myself there.”
“Well, you certainly wouldn’t have it without me,” he states, not even playing at friendliness.
Before this takes an even less pleasant turn, I push back my chair, grab my plate, and tell him, “I’m gonna see you a little later.”
I mean to walk away, but before I can, Mateo says, “Don’t let Virginia leave the party until Adrian gets back.”
I freeze where I stand, plate in hand. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I turn back to my cousin. “Do not even think about going near her, Mateo.”
My cousin is a lot of things, but rarely sympathetic. Instead of being riled or even mildly annoyed by my warning, a faint trace of sympathy crosses his hard features. “You’re too close, aren’t you? You can’t see it.”
“There is nothing to see,” I state immovably.
Mateo shakes his head, looking like he pities me. “Do you know a lot of waitresses with law degrees, Rafe?”
Law degrees? What the hell is he talking about? I try to mask my confusion, and shake my head instead. “Virginia is solid. I had Sin look into her back when I hired her to work at my restaurant. I have him look at everyone I hire.”
“When was that?” Mateo asks simply. Patiently, condescendingly, like a fucking teacher with a chip on his shoulder, waiting for a particularly stupid student to catch up on the lesson. “Right around the time he lost his wife and daughter, right? You think he was doing his best work then?”
Fuck. Yes. Yes, it was.
“Now he considers her a friend,” Mateo adds. “He trusts her. We tend to stop looking at women we trust, and as you’ve witnessed, that can be a very costly mistake.”
“There’s no reason not to trust Virginia. You have bad information. Virginia isn’t a fucking lawyer; she went to school for sociology,” I tell him, hearing my own defensiveness.
Mateo nods once. “Yes. And criminal justice. Then law school. She passed the bar nearly two years ago, and judging from what Adrian has pulled up in a preliminary search, she’s fluent in at least five languages. Does that sound like someone whose life work is waiting tables?”
I feel like he just hit me in the face with a fucking mallet.
Adrian doesn’t like me even as much as Mateo, so it’s when he looks like he feels bad for me that it really hits me. “She has a photographic memory, Rafe. She can casually observe something, and write down all the explicit details about it hours later. I watched Virginia when Skylar opened her presents. She didn’t touch a pen, never once opened her phone to take a picture, just sat there and watched like the rest of us. Half an hour ago, she jotted down a complete list with names and gifts while she ate. I checked the list, and it was accurate. She’s your regular waitress, clearly you guys are close. Have you ever said anything to her about the business side of things? Did she wait on Gio? Does she know why he went missing? Does she know who else is missing? What was it she said to me the other night? She gives your guys rides home from the restaurant when they’re too drunk to drive themselves. She’s pretty cute. Think any of them might ever say anything outsiders shouldn’t hear to try to impress her? Bragged about a job, maybe even just bullshitting with their buddies at dinner and she overhears? No one ever thinks about the waitress.”
“I think about the waitress,” Mateo says dryly.
“Well, you’re fucking paranoid,” Adrian mutters.
“And not in jail,” Mateo says, grabbing his drink and tipping it in Adrian’s direction. “Pays to be diligent.”
Adrian’s gaze shifts back to me. Mateo dropped the bomb, and now Adrian takes over to clean up the mess. “Maybe you’re right,” Adrian offers. “Maybe she racked up somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars in college debt just for shits and giggles, and she really is just a waitress.”
I don’t need Mateo’s face to tell me how fucking ridiculous that sounds, but it does anyway.
“I fucking get it,” I snap at him. “It sounds unlikely. But you don’t… you don’t know her the way I do.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Mateo says simply. “And hopefully this is all for nothing. Just in case it isn’t, I’m sending Adrian to her apartment to have a look around. If she is who she says she is, he won’t find anything damning. If she isn’t… then you have a very big problem.”
When it at all went to Hell with Cassandra, I remember the feeling of disillusionment. Going over every interaction I could bring to mind with a fine tooth comb, looking for all the shit I must have missed. It was hard, because I had to look at her through the lens of my own memory. If there was anything off about her, any insincerity in our tenderest moments, I couldn’t see it, because at the time they happened, I believed they were real.
The memory is always benevolent when it comes to someone you love.
I’m not sure if being aware of a betrayal as it’s happening is a boon or a curse. When I look at Virginia across the yard, she still looks exactly the same. Her laugh seems just as genuine, I can still see earnest love in her eyes as she looks down at Nicholas. Then her gaze catches mine, and the love is still there. She smiles at me fondly, then breaks my gaze and goes back to helping Laurel clean up the food table.
How can that be the face of someone who would betray me? Who is actively betraying me? It can’t be. Adrian is wrong, that’s all there is to it. Maybe he looked at the wrong Virginia Malloy. Maybe somehow he slipped, looked at an academic record for someone else by the same name, or… I don’t know, I’m grasping at straws, but there must be some other explanation.
Virginia is not a rat.
Virginia can’t be a fucking rat.
I want to walk across this yard, grab her by the arm, drag her into the house, and demand answers. I want to know if all that shit Mateo said was true, and if it is, why the fuck she lied to me about