The knife is next. I knew—personally, viscerally—how much damage could be done with a knife. We’re not finished, I thought vehemently. This isn’t done.
Leaving felt like running away. It felt like admitting failure. It felt the way I had at twelve, each time the police had asked me a question I couldn’t answer.
“Excuse me,” a voice said. “Sloane?”
I turned to see Tory Howard, dressed in her standard uniform of dark jeans and a tank. She seemed hesitant—something she’d never struck me as before. “We didn’t get a chance to meet the other night,” she told Sloane. “I’m Tory.”
The hesitation, the softness in her voice, the fact that she knew Sloane’s name, the fact that she’d lied to the FBI to keep her relationship with Aaron a secret—you love him, too, I realized. You can’t un-love him, no matter what you do.
“You’re leaving?” Tory asked Sloane.
“There is a ninety-eight-point-seven percent chance that statement is accurate.”
“I’m sorry you can’t stay.” Tory hesitated again, and she said, softly, “Aaron really did want to get to know you.”
“Aaron told you about me?” Sloane’s voice wavered slightly.
“I knew he had a half sister he’d never met,” Tory replied. “He wondered about you, you know. When you stepped in front of him that night at the show, and I saw your eyes…” She paused. “I did the math.”
“Strictly speaking, that wasn’t a mathematical calculation.”
“You matter to him,” Tory said. I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that it cost her to say the words, because there was a part of her that couldn’t be sure that she mattered to Aaron. “You mattered to him before he even knew who you were.”
Sloane absorbed that statement. She pressed her lips together and then blurted out, “I have gathered that there is an overwhelmingly large chance that your relationship with Aaron is intimate and/or sexual in nature.”
Tory didn’t flinch. She wasn’t the type to let you see her hurting.
“When I was three…” Sloane trailed off, averting her eyes so that she wasn’t looking straight at Tory. “Grayson Shaw came to my mother’s apartment to meet me.” The words were costing Sloane to say—but they were even harder for Tory to hear. “My mother dressed me up in a white dress and left me in the bedroom and told me that if I was a good girl, my daddy would want us.”
The white dress, I thought, my stomach twisting and my heart aching for Sloane. I knew how this story ended.
“He didn’t want me.” Sloane didn’t go into the particulars of what had happened that afternoon. “And he didn’t want my mother so much after that.”
“Trust me, kid,” Tory replied, steel in her voice, “I’ve learned my lesson about getting in bed with Shaws.”
“No,” Sloane said fiercely. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not good at this. I’m not good at talking to people, but…” She sucked in a breath of air. “Aaron brought the FBI evidence that Beau acted in self-defense—evidence they never would have seen otherwise. I’m told there’s a very high probability he did that for you. I thought that Aaron was like his father. I thought…”
She’d thought Tory was like her mother. Like her.
“Aaron fights for you,” Sloane said fiercely. “You say I matter to him, but you matter, too.”
“Beau was cleared of all charges this morning,” Tory said finally, her voice rough. “That was Aaron?”
Sloane nodded.
Before Tory could reply, my phone rang in my bag. I considered ignoring it or declining the call again, but what was the point? Now that we’d been pulled off the case, there was nothing left to distract me. Nowhere else to run.
“Hello.” I turned away from the group as I answered.
“Cassie.”
My father had a way of saying my name, like it was a word in a foreign language, one he could get by in, but would never fluently speak.
“They got the test results back.” I said it so that he wouldn’t have to. “The blood they found. It’s hers, isn’t it?” He didn’t reply. “The body they found,” I pressed on. “It’s her.”
On the other end of the phone line, I heard a sharp intake of breath. I heard him jaggedly let it out.
While I waited for my father to find his voice and tell me what I already knew, I walked toward the exit. I stepped out into the sunshine and a light January chill. There was a fountain out front—massive and the color of onyx. I came to stand at the edge of it and looked down. My reflection flickered over the surface, dark and shadowed.
“It’s her.”
I realized, when my father said the words, that he was crying. For a woman you barely knew? I wondered. Or for the daughter you don’t know any better?
“Nonna wants you to come home,” my father said. “I can get an extended leave. We’ll take care of the funeral, bury her here—”
“No,” I said. I heard the pitter-patter of small feet as a child ran up to the fountain next to me. A little girl—the same one I’d seen that day at the candy shop. Today she was wearing a purple dress and had a white origami flower tucked behind one ear.
“No,” I said again, the word ripping its way out of my throat. “I’ll take care of it. She’s my mother.”