It was true. She barely came up to my shoulder and I realized I was practically dragging the woman. I didn’t even want to imagine what kind of headline that would create, so I slowed down.
I even managed to wave at Mrs. Vogler as if this were all normal, all part of the plan, but she wasn’t buying it—she watched, slack-jawed.
I punched open the door to the pool and led her into the giant cavern. As soon as the door shut I dropped her arm, still walking toward the side door onto the alley. Trying to control my suddenly rampaging anger.
“This place really is in bad shape,” she said, staring into the empty tiled hole that used to be a pool. “You sure it’s going to cost less to rebuild? That seems counterintuitive.”
I turned back and looked at her, the pregnant pixie who might have just created the worst scandal to hit this administration, and she was gazing into the deep end.
She must have caught a whiff of my fury because she straightened and managed to look like a very contrite pregnant pixie. Her hands fiddled with the edges of her coat. “I’m sorry,” she said, waving her hand behind her. “About all that.”
“Why the hell did you lie?” I asked. “Do you even know what you’ve done?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Try to explain it,” I breathed, barely keeping it together.
“Let’s go outside,” she said, stepping by me. She gave me a wide, nervous berth, but I still smelled ginger and sugar. Sweet and spicy.
I hit the doors under the unlit and cracked exit sign and led her into the bright warmth of midday. I yanked at my tie.
“Is this a medical situation?” I asked. “Are you off your medication, or escaped from the psych ward?”
The woman was silent, scanning the alley as if searching for someone.
“Do I need to call the cops?” I asked, and that got her attention.
“No,” she said quickly. “No cops. I was told—” She blinked big green eyes, and then shut up.
“Told what? By who?” I asked, my voice hard.
“Whom,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry?”
“By…ah…whom? It’s an object-subject…” She blinked again, the pretty green eyes like pine trees in sunlight. “I’ll shut up.”
I stepped up to her and looked down at her glossy black hair. “Unless you give me one reasonable answer right now, there will be cops and you will be in more trouble than you can possibly handle.”
“A woman gave me a thousand dollars to get you out here alone,” she blurted.
I blinked, speechless.
“But I don’t know where she is.” Pixie looked around again.
“What woman?” I finally asked.
“I don’t know her name,” she said. “She was blond. Pretty.”
I stepped back. No, I thought. This can’t be happening.
Amanda came barreling out the door we’d just come through.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked.
“Take her,” I said, gesturing toward the pregnant woman. I didn’t even know her name, which was crazy considering the story she’d just started. “Put her in my car and don’t let her leave.”
“You can’t do that,” she said, her little face all screwed up with outrage.
I leaned in, close enough to see the freckles across her nose, the thickness of her black eyelashes. “You can wait for me in my car or you can wait for the cops in my car, it’s your call.”
She took her full bottom lip between her teeth, biting until the pink went white. “Fine,” she said, and whirled, her pretty coat sweeping out behind her.
“Who is she?” Amanda asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “But don’t let her leave.”
Amanda followed the woman through the gray doors, and I was left alone in the alleyway.
I stared up at the clouds stretched thin across the slice of blue sky between the buildings. All I ever wanted was to do the right thing. Something good. And somehow it always got screwed up.
“Hello, Carter,” a voice behind me said. A voice so familiar, despite its ten-year absence from my life, it made something small and forgotten inside me twist in fear and love. I didn’t even have to turn to see her, the perfect blond hair, the thin body no doubt impeccably dressed, the cold, ice pick eyes.
Of course, I thought, she would show up now.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
2
ZOE
I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. Big ones, small ones, forest-fire-size ones that have burned my life to the ground.
If there were an authority on mistakes, I was it.
And I knew—from the backseat of Carter O’Neill’s expensive car, with its leather seats and fake wood—I knew that what I’d just done, the lie and the drama of it all, was not a mistake. Or maybe just not a big one. Maybe… maybe it was a tiny one. Barely a mistake. A shadow of a mistake.
Carter O’Neill was going to be fine. A guy like that was born fine. He was simply too good-looking, too cool and calm, to not be fine. Privilege surrounded that guy like a life preserver. He was James Bond or something. Though, I thought with a smile, James Bond had gotten batted around like a cat toy by wily Tootie Vogler.