“Show me,” Mom ordered, and Bex laid the package on the coffee table in front of the sofa—the very place where I’d eaten supper almost every Sunday night since I’d started at the Gallagher Academy in the seventh grade. It was a table normally reserved for spaghetti and bad burritos, but that day we all sat staring down at the only real clue we had about my past.
“You found it…” Mom started.
“At the cabin,” Liz said, answering the unfinished question. “It was with the rest of Mr. Solomon’s mail. I guess Cam must have mailed it to him or something.”
I felt the couch shift as my aunt sank to take the seat beside me. “That was good, Cam. Smart.”
The CoveOps teacher looked proud; the aunt sounded prouder. I know I should have said thank you, but it felt like cheating to accept a compliment I didn’t remember earning—like taking credit for somebody else’s hard work.
“Cammie,” Zach said, “are you sure it’s your handwriting?”
For a second, the question seemed strange. Zach had been my sorta-boyfriend for a long time, and yet he didn’t know what my handwriting looked like. I guess we weren’t exactly love-notes-in-the-locker people. We were too busy being terrorists-want-to-kidnap-us people. It’s easy to see how one would get in the way of the other.
“Oh,” Bex said with a laugh, “it’s hers. I’d know that crazy-person scrawl anywhere.”
I ran a finger along the words I had absolutely no memory of writing. The postmark was so foreign, so strange. The stamps seemed like works of art.
“It’s a package I sent from Rome,” I said, then laughed softly to myself. “I’ve always wanted to go to Rome.”
How many covert conversations had my roommates and I had in the past three years? How many hours had we spent staring down at some mysterious clue? I couldn’t even begin to count. It felt somehow like they’d all been leading up to that moment—that place. We seemed a long, long way from my first boyfriend’s garbage.
“I guess we should start by X-raying it,” Liz said slowly. “We’ll need to scan it for biohazards, of course, and—”
Abby lunged forward, cutting Liz off. She didn’t hesitate as she grabbed the package and ripped. Scraps of paper and packing material flew everywhere, but no one said a thing as Abby turned the envelope upside down and dumped the contents onto the table.
“Or we could do that,” Liz finished.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it seemed a little anticlimactic, to tell you the truth. There were no bombs, no treasure maps where X marked the spot—just a small pile of bracelets, each with thin wires twisted into the words Bex, Liz, and Macey. I reach for each and handed them to my best friends, who gazed down at the delicate wires that spelled their names.
There were two small brown paper packets, the names Mom and Abby written across them in my familiar scrawl, and I handed them to their new owners, watched them pull out beautiful pendants hung on delicate chains.
The last package was simply labeled Me.
I could barely breathe as I tipped the tiny envelope upside down and immediately felt something cool and metal land on my palm. On the end of a very fine chain, I found a small pewter crest almost like the one from the Gallagher Academy, but different. And still it was close enough that I could see why it would catch my eye and make me choose it for myself.
“Well, Cam, I guess you were wrong that day when you came back,” Bex said slowly. She held the bracelet up. “You got us something after all.”
But I barely heard my best friend’s words. I was pushing through the scraps of paper and packing material, searching, but there was nothing else in the pile.
“It’s not here,” I said.
“What’s that, kiddo?” Mom asked me.
“Dad’s journal. I hoped maybe I’d sent it back, but it’s not here. It’s just…jewelry,” I said. Suddenly, I wanted to hurl the necklace across the room, throw it out the window, do anything but sit there holding proof that I’d been to Rome and had nothing to show for it but some trinkets. For the first time since waking up in Austria, I actually wanted to cry. “It’s just stupid souvenirs. It doesn’t tell us anything!”
I tried to get up, but Bex was already taking the seat on the arm of the couch beside me, the bracelet around her wrist.
“You didn’t just send us souvenirs, Cam,” she said, smiling.
“Yeah,” Liz agreed. “You sent us souvenirs…from Rome.”
I think every Gallagher Girl in history has fantasized about the places her job will take her. In my dreams, Bex was beside me, Liz was somewhere running comms. There was usually a prince, a count, and a rogue arms dealer of some sort. And my dream, believe it or not, had always taken place in Rome.
I was in Rome, I had to think. I racked my brain, looking for memories of the Colosseum. I swallowed hard, searching for the taste of truly authentic pizza. It was the kind of thing I shouldn’t have been able to forget. The irony was almost too much.
Macey slapped her hands together and turned to my mother. “So when do we leave? I can call Dad’s secretary and get a jet here by the end of the day.”
I watched Bex and Liz begin to mentally pack and plan as Macey talked about the advantages of private jet travel. Zach and I were the only ones who saw the look that crossed Aunt Abby’s face.
I’d only seen that look twice before. Once in my mother’s office during Abby’s first few days as Macey’s guard. Another time on a moving train outside of Philadelphia, barreling through the night. It had been almost a year since I’d seen my aunt wear that expression, and I knew it wasn’t anger. There was no rage. It was simply a mixture of guilt and regret so deep that neither word could do it justice.
The only word that came to mind was heartbreak.
“What is it, Abby?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Rome…” Abby said, just as my mother said, “Abby, no—”
“She has the right to know, Rachel,” Abby snapped, but then lowered both her voice and her gaze. “Cam deserves to know that it’s all my fault.”